The Health Bulletin

I am a personal trainer in the United States. 90% of my clients are women. I would say that 100% of the women who come to me looking for help with physical goals are unhappy with their bodies. The vast majority of movies, magazines, and television in this country do not encourage women to be strong. We have not communicated that anything is more desirable than zero bodyfat and big pouty lips. We value physical appearance more than confidence and female strength.

It’s a bad situation. I recently had an example of this that broke my heart. There is a lovely young woman who started coming to our gym three weeks ago. When I asked her what she wanted to work on, she talked to me about how frustrated she is that she “can’t lose enough fat.” Part of my job is to perform physical assessments on my clients. I can tell you with certainty that she had no more than 7% body fat. That is magazine quality and then some.

But I couldn’t convince her of it. “But you can’t see my stomach,” she said, nearly in tears. I have seen this same pattern play itself out with my sisters, my mother, and my wife, all of whom are very attractive women. But they cannot see it, they cannot believe it, because they are bombarded every day with evidence that says they are not attractive enough. They do not look like the women in the movies, but who could, without the makeup set, the expensive personal trainers, the chef who prepared a customized diet, and so on?

When I tell women in my gym that the best thing they could do to gain confidence is to gain ten pounds of muscle, they look at me like I’ve lost my mind. But it’s true. People of quality are attracted to strength and self esteem, not to weak, emaciated-looking people with protruding clavicles.

If I were a woman, I would probably feel the same way my clients do. I would probably wonder how I could ever measure up. But I also hope that I would have the sense to realize that I don’t need to measure up to society’s physical standards to be of worth. The expectations are unreasonable and impossible for the vast majority of the female population. But the problem persists.

So I will just restate: every time I have a female client who becomes enthusiastic about strength training, it changes her. When a woman starts to realize that strength is a valuable addition to any person’s life, the transformation in the following weeks can only be described as a light going on. It’s something I never get tired of seeing, and something that does not happen often enough.