Starting Strength for Women | Ray Gillenwater
Reply With QuoteThis is an overall fantastic article and I will be directing some of my female clients to read it, it nicely synthesizes a lot of important information around women and the barbell.
However I have a couple of gripes and since this is the internet I'll expend most of my energy on these criticisms.
My issues with the article are mostly from the 'Young Women' sub-headed section. I think we need to be a little bit more thoughtful and, more importantly, specific, when we're talking about aesthetics and health and strength in one breath.
Firstly, I don't think it's right to say that popular culture does now or indeed ever has perpetuated a 'skeletal aesthetic'. At one time and perhaps today for all I know, catwalk fashion maybe has, but that's not mainstream popular culture, it's not the front cover of women's magazines and it's not what we see when we look at female celebrities in music, film and television. I can appreciate that the intention of the article might be to simply promote strength and an acceptance of the slightly higher but still healthy level of body fat that one can expect to live with as they get and maintain strength, but the effect of the wording is, in my view, to conflate what most people would call 'slim' with 'skeletal' using words like 'emaciated'. I know a lot of naturally slim women, who don't starve themselves, are very healthy, and frankly most of them are damned tired of being told by their (often dangerously overweight) female colleagues and friends 'oh you should gain some weight you're all skin and bones'. BMI is horse shit, but the way to clean up horse shit is not to shovel more horse shit on top of it. If you want to discuss dangerously low body fat, you're going to want to do so in very specific terms, not broad subjective epithets.
Strength has real physiological benefits that we don't need to overstate, we can simply state them, and let people make up their minds about what they want. When I advocate that a prospective client get strong as a proximate goal on the way to whatever they thought they wanted when they came to me, which I almost always do and which is usually well taken, I don't lie to them about the physiological changes that will occur, I don't suggest that strength training is a physique specific or physique optimized training protocol, in the long term, because it is not. Strength training makes you strong, by definition as that is the only metric we use to gauge its success. Strength training can spit out a variety of different physique changes, clustered around some common trends but the point is that this is incidental, it is never the purpose of the protocol, at best it is a step on the road to hypertrophy specific training if gaining maximum volumes of lean muscle tissue is a person's goal. Strength training is no more bodybuilding than it is basketball, it just happens to be the case that being strong makes you better at both. But it is not a replacement for basketball coaching or for HST, if basketball performance or lean mass gains respectively are your ultimate goal.
Slim, lean, skinny, skeletal, emaciated. These are not useful words, most people want to be lean or slim, nobody wants to be skeletal or emaciated, so we're just using these words to describe varying degrees of body fat according to personal opinion. When it comes to aesthetics, it's not your or my or anybody else's job to tell people what their preferred one should be. It's called 'aesthetics' for a reason, it's not objectively determinable. There is no such thing as a 'false' aesthetic. If somebody has a physique goal, even if I think it's sub-optimally healthy - though I've never encountered a non anorexic person with a physique goal more inherently unhealthy than say drinking 10 units of alcohol a week - I would never dare suggest they give it up if they are engaging in it while aware of the risks.
We need to stop confusing the physique adaptions associated with strength training, with presenting strength training as a physique adaptive protocol. It is not that. If you get stronger and you're gaining weight, you're getting stronger. If you get stronger and your weight is maintained, you're getting stronger. If you get stronger as your body fat % falls....etcetera.
This leads on to my final moan, something specific that I keep seeing crop up. The glute development benefits of heavy squatting. Stop it. It's pretty darn rich for an article to take the time to point out the uselessness of spin, running and other aerobic protocols sold as 'make you slim' training, while simultaneously perpetuating the idea that you can substantially grow your glutes with strength training. Glute anatomy is almost entirely a function of gross hip anatomy and your body's preference in where and how it stores fat. Yes, there are absolutely high responders who will get a noticeably rounder butt from squatting and other hip extension movements, but no, these movements performed using strength training protocols are by definition not optimized towards that goal in the long term. If you're not one of the lucky ones with natural hip anatomy that produces an aesthetic you like, and you don't respond really well, you're going to need to work damned hard specifically on glute hypetrophy. SQ 3 x 5 and DL 1 x 5 is just not that, any more than Pressing is practice for shooting hoops.
I don't see anybody telling people in any other sport 'get strong with SS and don't even bother with your sports specific training'. Except in bodybuilding, especially when we're dealing with someone ignorant of the fact that they are, because of their stated goals, an amateur bodybuilder by definition which they really need to be made to understand.
Turned into a bit of a rant, but the article contains these broader mischaracterizations and I've been wanting to address them somewhere, so here seemed fine.
To reiterate, it's a great article overall.
Originally Posted by Jake Norman
