One myth that sticks around like a bad smell is that women ought to train differently to men.
Quite why this line of thinking has not gone the way of the Dodo, I am not certain.
However, I suspect there are a few factors at play.
Probably the most important of those was aptly yet unwittingly articulated by George Dubya Bush in a 2006 address to the NAACP:
===
I remember going to a ninth grade class when I was the governor. It was in a neighborhood that’s — a low-income neighborhood there in Houston. And I asked the ninth grade teacher, I said, how’s it going? The man looked me in the eye and said, my students cannot read. That’s wrong to hear a ninth grade teacher say, my students cannot read.
I decided to do something about it when I was the governor, and I decided to do something about that when I became the President. See, we must challenge a system that simply shuffles children through grade to grade, without determining whether they can read, write, and add and subtract. It’s a system — see, I like to call it this: We need to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations. If you have low expectations, you’re going to get lousy results.”
===
If you didn’t catch it, I am talking about “the soft bigotry of low expectations”. The vile practice expecting and accepting lower standards from certain groups, therefore implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) dissuading them from pursuing their potential.
It’s why women are still being steered towards nonsense like “body pump” classes and very light weight, very high rep machine and dumbbell based routines, as if their delicate little forms might collapse at the mere sight of a barbell and their puny minds are incapable of juggling the moving parts of a proper weightlifting regime.
What’s worse is the manifest harm caused by this garbage that coaches, personal trainers, and dimfluencers (often women themselves) are still shilling.
To wit, one study I found (commissioned by health and life insurer, Vitality) revealed less than one in four women are managing the recommended 150 minutes of exercise per week, and this applies across ALL age groups (20% of women aged 20-39, 27% aged 40-59, and 23% aged 60-79).
Can you blame them?
I can’t.
After all, why would you bother investing many hours per week, every week getting hot and sweaty for little or, more likely, no return because the type of exercise you have been told you “should” do for no other reason than you have two X chromosomes is utterly ineffective?
You wouldn’t.
And so we arrive at the point which is, there is absolutely no difference in the way women and men ought to train.
Yes, periods. And yes, pregnancy.
But neither of these have any bearing on the fundamental principles (which is all I traffic in), only the finer details of how those principles are applied.
Anyway.
If you are a woman who is fed up with being treated like an idiot and you would like to learn how to craft, execute, and adapt training programmes that will actually make you fitter, stronger, and leaner (provided you are patient enough to keep plugging away even if results are slow in coming), you’d do well to check out:
“Silver Era Secrets”
It’s a three month, private (i.e. one to one) course wherein the two of us will work together on the above.
I can’t guarantee you’ll get the results you want (or any results for that matter), and definitely not by the end of the three months (because that’s nowhere near enough time to make big changes without resorting to extreme methods).
But I’d be shocked if you weren’t well on your way.
If you’re interested, here’s what you’ll be getting:
https://philtyreman.co.uk/programme/
Thank you,
Phil Tyreman