"I don't want to bulk up."

But if you did bulk up, would that really be a bad thing? 

What follows is an unstructured rant, because to be perfectly honest, I've had enough. 

I've heard "I don't want to bulk up" a thousand times from women gym members and personal training clients. Generally it comes from women who are already overweight or underweight. Susan was 153cm tall and 127kg a year after lap band surgery. I knew of no tactful way to say to her, "Having too much muscle is not your problem." Jennifer was 178cm tall and 52kg, looking hunched over, sickly and tired, she needed more muscle and more fat both. Medium-sized women don't seem to be as fussed about getting bigger, it's just the overweight and underweight ones. 

Many trainers will go into some spiel about testosterone and how women have so little of it that putting on muscle is more difficult for them than men. That's true but also irrelevant. Most women, like the scrawny teenaged boys doing their bench and curls, simply won't eat enough good food to gain a lot of muscular mass. Hormones influence what your body does with the food you eat, but if you don't eat enough the hormones have nothing to influence. You can deadlift 200kg but if you go home and eat only a stick of celery or a soggy McD's cheeseburger, you are not going to get any bigger however much testosterone you have. 

The simple truth is that each of us has a certain natural size and build. My training partner Aron is the same height as me, I'm usually around 81kg and him around 95kg. If Aron were 81kg he'd be a scrawny rake, if I were 95kg I'd be either a bodybuilder or my belly would stop me being able to see my penis. Aron's just got a bigger frame. Put us shoulder-to-shoulder and his are broader, put our wrists next to each-other and it's like a sapling next to a grown oak. When he's had time off training it takes him about three weeks to get to the lifts I struggled to over six months. He's just naturally bigger. 

This natural size and build gives us natural talents and weaknesses. There are not many 1.95m tall Olympic-style weightlifters, nor are there many 1.52m tall basketballers. Having a big broad frame is a big help on the rugby field, it's not so great if you want to do ballet. There's nothing we can do about this. You can't turn an oak into a willow, or a willow into an oak. When it comes to sports, certain heights and frames will have great advantages. Most of us accept this and just find the sport that suits our build and nature. That's part of being an adult, realise your talents and build on them, and the stuff you're simply hopeless at forget about. Everyone understands this except for people auditioning for Australian Idol. 

When it comes to looks we forget all that and all want to be someone else. In the case of women, they want to be someone tiny. No, smaller. "I don't want to bulk up." Would that be so bad? You're 127kg Susan, would it be bad for you to have some more muscle to heave that around? You're 52kg Jennifer, would it be bad to be the size of an adult woman? 

This is why I'm not that comfortable with the other trainer response to "I don't want to bulk up," which is, "oh but lifting heavy weights can actually make you smaller! Just look at so-and-so." It's true, but do we really want to encourage women to all get smaller? Let's take that sacred cow to the slaughterhouse. Why can't you get bigger? Didn't you women invent this thing called "feminism" once? I vaguely recall something about you getting the vote, but maybe I'm wrong.  Emmeline Pankhurst didn't go to prison just so you could go on a lemon detox diet. Aren't you allowed to occupy physical space?

I think there's a backlash against feminism, and it comes from women. As women have grown to occupy more social and financial space, they've apologised for it by occupying less physical space. 

"Yes honey I earn more than you, but look, I no longer have an arse!" 

"I have been made CEO at this time of crisis in the company so that when it goes bankrupt a woman can take the blame, however my arms are as thin as my stylish pen and you can see my ribs just below my collarbones, so it's alright."

You are allowed to occupy physical space. You are allowed into the power rack. That's where you belong. 

When people get into progressive resistance training (most resistance training is not progressive, people don't increase the weights over time), the increase in confidence is quick and obvious. I'll often find some woman doing a stack of pushups from the knees, and I say, "You know, if you can do 15 or more good pushups from the knees, you can almost certainly do a few from the toes."

A look of frightened wonder comes into her eyes. "Really? I've never tried, I mean -"

"Give it a go."

"But I can't."

"I think you can. Try it."

She tries, and she knocks out two shaky pushups from the toes, a little shallow but okay. "Well done," I say, "now rest a bit and try again." And she tries again, and this time does two really good ones, steady and deep. "Did those two feel stronger than the first two?"

"Yes!"

"So you're already stronger than you were two minutes ago."

Now the frightened wonder fades, and a nervous surprised pride appears. The woman now feels confident and competent. She feels awesome. Not bad for a few pushups. All she needed was someone's permission to be awesome. Maybe when she grows up she won't ask for permission. 

The same thing happens when they first do a barbell squat or deadlift, especially the deadlift. Cardiovascular fitness is very important to general health and sports, and joint mobility probably more so, but they don't seem to do as much for people's souls as strength does. Strength brings confidence in a way cardio and mobility don't. Hardly anyone remembers the first time they ran 5km in under 30'00" or touched their toes, everyone remembers the first time they pulled 60kg from the floor or did a chinup. 

A client Stacey once said, "Kyle, I came to you because I wanted a smaller bum, but when I put 40kg overhead, at that moment I don't care about the size of my bum." And the fact is that when she put 40kg overhead, at that moment she was beautiful. Competence is attractive. Beauty is about more than the size of your bum. Anyway beauty is not all that matters. Recently Germaine Greer decided to take a giant steaming shit on her feminist icon history by commenting that the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard did not dress in a way that flatters her figure. Honestly,  Germaine, nobody gives a fuck. We do not elect members of parliament based on how much we'd like to shag them, we're not voting on Big Brother. 

Yes, if you are 127kg Susan then you need to lose weight. There are not many 75 year olds your size, and you don't need a knee replacement, you just need to stop carrying all that extra weight.. If you can't or won't drop some weight, then you should at least get stronger to make it easier to schlep around. But Jennifer, women your size get sick all the time, get weak bones, then one day fall and break their pelvis and about a quarter of them never leave hospital. Both Susan and Jennifer need to get strong as fuck, their lives will just be better, and they'll be more confident and better able to deal with the shit life throws at them. 

An adult male should be over 80kg, an adult female should be over 60kg. We should not all look the same, some of us should be bigger, some smaller, some good at this, some at that. We didn't defeat communism just so we could all become the same. Life gets better when you stop weighing yourself and start weighing your deadlift. If you did bulk up, would that really be a bad thing?