Image: Victor Freitas // pexels.com
By: Sarah Hofstedt, CSUN Public Health Intern
Most US adults do not meet the current recommendations for resistance training, or weight lifting. The benefits of lifting weights and building muscle include improved bone density, increased strength of tendons and ligaments, and lower body fat. Despite this, only about 20% of women engage in resistance training. So what’s stopping them?
A study from the Journal of American College Health examined the most common reasons college-age women do not lift weights as part of their exercise routine. They found that the top three barriers to weight lifting for women were the following:
- feeling uncomfortable training alone
- feeling uncomfortable in a crowded gym
- being too tired to lift weights after work or school.
Other reasons included feeling uncomfortable around men in the gym, fear of looking weak, and not knowing how to lift.
This reveals two things: college-age women are concerned about how others in the gym will perceive them, and most are too tired to lift anyway in the face of those concerns. Being alone in the gym can make someone feel like people are judging them. Having a gym buddy or workout group not only provides strength in numbers, but is proven to help prevent falling off of an exercise routine and make exercise more enjoyable; without a partner in the gym, weight lifting can feel tedious, difficult, and vulnerable. In a crowded gym these feelings are even worse because there are so many potentially judgmental pairs of eyes. Being tired after work or school makes weight training seem incredibly draining, and trying to share machines with strangers can feel like a social maze. On top of all this, many men see the gym as a great place to meet potential dates, making some women feel like resistance training is not worth the possibility that they’ll have to reject a hopeful suitor or two.
Addressing these barriers is not a simple task. There may be promise in workout partner apps and measures for how crowded the gym is. Women may benefit from different approaches to weight lifting: perhaps the future of resistance training for women is in home workout routines or woman-focused fitness centers. Some may just need to try resistance training to figure out whether it is or is not for them. Whatever the case is, weight lifting has always been a great addition to any workout routine, and it is up t us to figure out how we can fit it into our daily lives.