As we slowly move past the days of scaring women away from resistance training on the pretext of them accidentally turning into “bulky” bodybuilders, more and more women are reaping the tremendous health benefits of strength and resistance exercises. A decade ago, the average women’s fitness regime comprised of long bouts of cardiovascular exercise and perhaps some “toning” with very, very light resistance. While remnants of this trend still persist today, it is clear that fitness culture has begun to debunk the “bulky” trope and to actively encourage women to train with heavy weights. Apart from the rewarding benefits of better functional strength, stronger bones and muscles, improved mental health and quality of life, perhaps the strongest appeal of weight training has been its aesthetic effectiveness. Contrary to what was believed, weight training has proven a potent tool for women to get closer to their envisioned aesthetic goals, rather than getting them huge and “bulky”. Despite all these positive developments, new trends make one wonder whether we we truly moving towards de-gendering the barbell or if the same old sexism is simply rephrasing and upgrading itself.
Simple observations at the gym, combined with a glance through YouTube’s recommendations, are enough to provide the saddening answer. While society may have de-stigmatized women building and flaunting muscle, it continues to dictate where this muscle needs to be to make an “impressive” physique, and what kinds of exercises women ought to do. Some of the most popular women-targeted workout videos on YouTube, apart from the endless ab-focused circuit training ones, have disappointing titles such as “Grow Your Glutes Without Growing Your Legs”, “Exercises that target only the glutes and not the legs”, “Target your glutes not your quads”, “How to lose muscle in your legs”, “How I slimmed down my thighs”, to name just a few of the less-clickbaity ones.
These titles demonstrate a sad trend, not only of a culture encouraging women to obsessively target just their glutes and ignore every other body part, but that in the process, warning them to make sure not to grow their quadriceps to maintain “slim thighs”. It is well-known that the squat is one of the fundamental compound moves that targets one’s lower body. While squatting was initially popularized among women for its glute-building capacity, it seems like a lot of women are now being pushed away from this amazing exercise because, god forbid, it may also develop other muscles in the legs “a bit too much”.
This new-age glute obsession has also given rise to a vast number of businesses selling “glute bands” for women to use, lest they get bored of all the hip thrusts and cable kickbacks, and maybe the occasional squat. The laughable absurdity of sexism and objectification creeping into every pursuit and activity on this planet is perfectly demonstrated by these changing fitness “standards”. While building muscle is a challenging process that requires hard, structured training and disciplined nutrition, women are being told to avoid at all costs growing muscle in the wrong areas, and to even undo this achievement by losing some of their existing muscle, in order to look “slimmer”. Workout programs and videos are careful to use the terms “grow” or “build” exclusively when the glutes are involved, and the much milder terms “tone” or “shape” when the workout targets the thighs or upper body.
While body part-specific training focus is common among men’s fitness culture as well, with a far higher focus on the upper body and often not nearly enough on the lower (or also, for that matter, on cardio), it seems rather certain that the degree of this skew is much higher among fitness discourse for women. Moreover, I am yet to come across anyone telling men how to spot-reduce muscle in a targeted area, or any man interested to know that. It seems like the age-old and extremely damaging rhetoric of “bigger is better” still holds for men, while “smaller is better” still holds for women, with the exception of one or two body parts.
Not only does this trend sexualize women’s health and fitness and send all the wrong messages about the reasons to exercise, it damages the opportunity for women to reap the benefits of a well-balanced weight training program by scaring them into doing a limited set of exercises from the fear of growing all the “wrong” muscles. This strongly downplays among women the benefits, both aesthetic and non-aesthetic, of having a strong and muscular upper body, of being able to bench press and shoulder press heavy, do pushups, pullups, and so on. Simultaneously, it creates the perception of glute-training being an almost exclusively female domain, perpetuates stereotypes, and drives men away from this area of lower-body training, which they already tend to neglect.
Does this mean that it is inherently shallow or stupid to want to build your glute muscles? Of course not, it is just as valid as any other fitness pursuit, and in fact, a worthy goal for every gender. The problem, however, if it becomes the only thing one strives towards, while potentially harboring an aversion to working out the rest of the body equally well. The inherent bias and active cultural push towards the perception of some muscles as aesthetic and others as not, and the pathologizing of a certain kind of look, are what lead to unproductive, damaging, even obsessive behaviors and an overly common sense of bodily dissatisfaction, in individuals. Building strength, cardiovascular endurance, and muscle are in general amazing pursuits, and everyone is going to have different goals with respect to them. Fitness culture should not be pushing only certain classes of goals as valid and beautiful, and the others as abnormal or unworthy.
In conclusion, the endless, shameless glorification and promotion of glute-focused workouts, and the negligence and even resentment towards building and strengthening the other muscles, is a sad, sexist and shallow trend in the women’s fitness space. Who is responsible for the nurturing of this culture? It’s not just men, or just women, or just businesses trying to sell products and services. Like sexism in general, it is a complex interplay between each of these playing their parts for their own different reasons, living out some form of their pre-defined societal roles. And like sexism in general, we may overcome its power with time and sensibility. My sincere hope is that we as a society are soon able to de-gender weight training, and exercise in general, so that we may come to appreciate its true potential in improving our health and lives.