Embracing Strength as a Woman: Mind, Body, Community

By: Heather Gunn Rivera

With cardio classes saturating the fitness industry, it’s time for STRENGTH, and strength in a whole new way.

Strength has been defined by men for far too long, and it’s time for women to reclaim what it means to be strong. What strength looks and feels like as a woman, in all shapes and sizes.

Currently when the average woman thinks of a strength class they envision strength from a male perspective. If you lift you weights, you gain muscle. If you gain muscle, you get bulky. So, muscle equates to “looking like a man”. This constant conditioning of a warped value has encouraged women to move away from strength, forcing them to do everything they can to, “get skinny”.

Skinny is one body type that not every women should try to achieve. When our goal is to get skinny, we as women do everything we can to accomplish this twisted status.

We join cardio classes every day (sometimes twice a day), to sweat out and pedal our way to an atrophied body. A body that is more fat then muscle, a body that is starved for calories and will take nutrients from any place in the body it can, mainly the bones and muscles.

A body that has a messed up metabolism and a body that is ultimately weak. 

As we age, we lose muscle, muscle that is designed to burn fat while we are doing nothing. When we lose muscle, we become weak and frail, and fragility is one of the major modulators of a person’s health pathway in late adulthood.  Yet still, with all the medical facts in the world to encourage strength, we as women “steer clear”.

Until now!

Women are ready and our strength classes at Grassroots Fitness Project over the past few years have proven that not only are women ready, they actually end up craving something they never thought they would like.

Strength means so much to a woman. It means independence, it means confidence, it means connecting to their body in a way that empowers them because they feel capable and proud of their achievements. It means putting the disclaimers aside, doing something that was once thought of as impossible, and walking away with accomplishments and a sense of pride and joy.

Our women’s strength class is more than a class about “lifting weights”. It’s about exploring and embracing all forms of strength. Strength of the mind, strength of the body and strength of community.

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