Push up! Your body next to mine…
Is it hard to imagine a place less feminised, several years ago, than the community gym. Pictures of muscle tees and bulging veins dominated advertising. The only females were lycra-clad, equally bulging muscle women, a portrayal of the 80s ‘power woman’ perhaps equally repulsive to men and women.
This is no doubt what spawned the avalanche of ‘female gyms’ franchised from the USA, with patronising names such as ‘Curves’, ‘Contours’ or oddly in NZ, ‘Configure’. These gyms gave women the chance to work out away from ogling eyes and in a ‘safe’ space with other (presumably non-judging women). An exercise utopia.
Today as I wander into my (co-ed) gym, it has been remarkably feminised. Fitness First has a purple feature wall. Men and women run on treadmills side by side. There are more men on the service desk than there are women, and while there are still more male trainers than females, I would hazard a guess that there are more female members than males.
The upstairs ‘boys club’, where the heavy weights, pin-loaded and otherwise, reign supreme seems equally divided between the real muscle men, skinny guys gaining tone, and many women with biceps to rival Vin Diesel’s. This is likely a situation unique to my area – Newtown – but it is not only lesbians appropriating this once profoundly male space. Each trainer I have asked (male and female) has encouraged me to do more weights. In the long run, weights are apparently more effective at weight loss than pure cardio, as they force muscles to work for longer and continue to burn calories for hours after the actual movement has stopped.
Not that the battles have been won – stripping off in an all-female changeroom full of women in various states of undress and various body types is more intimidating, for me at least, than doing push-ups or squats with a bunch of men watching. (Note: I tend to find male gym-goers much more entranced with their own reflection than the females working out beside them in front of the mirror.)
The group classes are still dominated by women, and when our male trainer was recently replaced by a two-weeks-after-pregnancy female instructor, a fellow class-goer confided that she preferred male trainers – they push harder, she said, and drop the emotional crap. I disagree – this particular instructor, post-baby, is trying to get back to her fighting form, and is upping her weights each week and encouraging us to do the same. She’s more about process than results, and concentrates on building the strength required in order to lift more weight.
I still can’t decide which way the gendering of gyms is going, was going, should be going. But there’s something about sweating it out together that reduces everyone to the same level – lets face it, no one looks good on the cross-trainer.
