A lot of folks work out in order to improve their appearance. Women especially want to "tone up" "firm up" or "sculpt," but they are afraid that working out, especially with free weights will make them bulk up and look like a body builder freak. Mark Rippetoe, "Rip," of CrossFit Wichita Falls addresses this concern in the May CrossFit Journal with his usual acerbic wit.
Women respond to exercise differently because their hormone response to exercize is different. Specifically, their testosterone is lower. Unless they take steroids or have unusually high natural levels of testosterone, women do not bulk up in response to weight training.
What is most pleasing in the human form, female as well as male, is an athletic body. But athletes don't train for appearance. They don't train to "look better naked." Athletes train for performance. But form follows function, and the result of training for performance is much more effective in achieving a pleasing appearance. The famous CrossFit "Nasty Girls" video certainly confirms this.
As Rip says:
"The fact is that aesthetics are best obtained from training for performance. In both architecture and human beauty, form follows function. Always and everywhere, the human body has a certain appearance when it performs at a high level, and depending on the nature of that high-level performance, this appearance is usually regarded as aesthetically pleasing, for reasons that are DNA-level deep. The training through which high-level performance is obtained is the only reliable way to obtain these aesthetics, and the only exceptions to this method of obtaining them are the occasional genetically-gifted freaks-people who look like they train when they were just born lucky. As a general rule, if you want to look like a lean athlete-the standard that most active people strive to emulate-you have to train like an athlete, and most people lack the "sand" for that."
If you are privileged to observe elite athletes working out, you will find them doing a wide array of exercises not found and often not even pemitted in the typical "Globo Gym." The Olympic lifts in particular, along with squats, deadlifts, pullups, and hard interval training are the staple of elite performance training. The Georgia Tech Athletic training facility has lots of Olympic lifting platforms and the athletes train extensively in these lifts. But the regular student cannot workout there. Meanwhile, across the campus, the student fitness center has not a single Olympic lifting platform or bumper plate. What is wrong with current popular conception of fitness that leads to situations like this?
Comments