Originally Posted by
Elle
Thanks, I really appreciate this article.
One thing that often feels looked down on by the SS community is the desire to "enjoy" your workouts. Or "feel good" during a lift. And I get that for a lot of people, myself included, that kind of voluntary hardship actually does feel good in its own way. But for some people it just... Doesn't.
And if you don't enjoy it, it's just a chore. A really difficult chore at that.
My husband is like this. Put him on grueling 5 hour bike ride (my version of hell) and he's happy the whole time. But a lifting session? He is angry and miserable from beginning to end. He genuinely loathes it. There is no happy sense of accomplishment at the end. Just relief that it's over. He only endures because it helps his bike hobby and because it appeals to his base male instincts to be stronger than his wife.
Right now, my NLP means that I'm giving up social time with my friends, and that's been hard. They love going to group exercise classes together but would emphatically not be down for gathering around a barbell to watch each other bench like teenage boys. Maybe I need better friends, who knows, but there is a real element of social isolation that goes into becoming a woman with strength aspirations.
Hopefully, as we convert more women to the Way of the Barbell that changes. But I also think it might fundamentally be one of those hobbies that just does not appeal to the same percentage of the female population as it does the male population. Sure, some of that is messed programming about "toning" and "abs" that needs to be undone. But some of it is that women just don't seem to be as genetically predisposed to get off on lifting heavy things.