Does this photo make your eye twitch?
The sneaker industry has a saying: “pink it and shrink it.” It’s what designers do to turn a base-model sneaker—aka a male or men’s one—into a female or women’s one. They pink it and shrink it.
Yeah, that’s sneakers, you might think. Not strength and conditioning or personal training. But that same concept—that same tendency to take something and make it “female-” or “women- friendly” by making it cute, small, and stereotypically girlie exists in virtually every gym, weight room, workout, and relationship between trainers and their female trainees.
It’s not intended to be malicious or purposefully sexist. Just like with those sneaker companies, our “pink it and shrink it” tendencies are intended to make things more approachable and comfortable to women. We don’t want women to shy away from heavy lifting because they are afraid of being bulky or mannish. We don’t want them to feel defeated if they aren’t able to bang out reps of military push-ups. No, we want them to feel strong, capable, and empowered.
So what do we do? We pink and shrink. Fortunately, not in ways as overt as handing our clients little pink dumbbells. But we still do it, and oftentimes with our words. Through small, subtle, yet powerful terms—female- and woman-friendly ones that we think will do good. But they don’t.
When we program heavy lifts into women’s training cycles, we assure them they won’t get bulky. They’ll get toned. They don’t have enough testosterone to get bulky, we might say. Never mind the fact that some women do want to build size, they very well can, and any fitness goal is valid.
When working with clients who don’t have the requisite strength to military-style push-ups, we tell them girl push-ups are ok to do instead. (Maybe, if we’ve already started to think about how sexist that really is, we call them modified push-ups.)
But the message is the still the same: There’s a standard, male or men’s version of fitness, and it doesn’t apply to you because you’re a female or woman. But the standard shouldn’t be contingent on sex or gender, and by pinking and shrinking it to make it female- or women-friendly, we hold back out trainees from their full mental and physical potential.
So what if we erased these words from our vocabulary and replaced them with unpink, bigger words. What if we said what we actually wanted to say?
When we heard our trainees talk about getting toned, what if we explained what tone really is—continuous, passive contraction of a muscle… controlled subconsciously by the nervous system. What if we explained hypertrophy, how it works, and how it affects body size, composition, and health.
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What if instead of calling it a girl or modified push-up, we called it a knee push-up? Because that’s what it is—and a knee push-up is no better or worse than a push-up performed any other way.
We could apply the same logic to whatever “female-friendly” terms your trainees or even you say.
And here’s what would happen: We would not just level the psychological playing field for our female trainees, we would educate. Our trainees would better understand their bodies, what they are capable of, and how to reach their potential. They would thrive.
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I originally wrote the above speech to deliver at the Women’s Committee Solution session at the National Strength and Conditioning Association‘s 2018 national conference. It is an open letter to all fitness professionals, as well as an invitation for female and women trainees to ask and expect more from the from fitness industry.