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This is a follow up of last week’s What if Your Partner Doesn’t Want You to Do Strength Training? You posted so many good replies, I decided to answer you in a post rather than in individual comments. Here it goes.
Strength Training Is What I Am. There’s this thing with strength training. I don’t know what it is, but it wakes up something. It makes you feel better, makes you feel alive, makes you feel like a man.
Wazzup:
Strength training IS what I am. Not being able to workout would mean I would be suffering as much (I’d say more, but hee) as she would when I would deny her hobbies.
Working out makes me happy.
Strength training is what I am. So much I turned this passion into my job. I can’t imagine a life without it. You make me choose between strength training & anything else, you lose. I need strength training.
What if They Don’t Understand? Some don’t want to understand that strength training is what you are and that you need it to be happy & normal.
David A:
It’s only the low self-esteem, needy women who cannot tolerate a man who takes a portion of his day or week to refine his body. The women who need all the attention and cannot share you with anyone or anything. In the past I might have tried to act different for the sake of a woman’s attention…screw that. Too old for that now! It’s my way or the highway, woman!
Some will call you selfish. I say it’s your selfishness against their selfishness. Don’t let anyone prevent you to do what you need to do to be happy. Especially if it doesn’t inflict the right of others & improves your health. Walk away.
Quote from Pook years ago: “You don’t build a relationship, you buy one.” Don’t lose time trying to change people. Plenty of fish in the sea. They can’t accept who you are: walk away. Makes both your lives easier.
Why Women Are Attracted to Muscles. 8 out of 10 women don’t like muscles. Makes them insecure, don’t like seeing veins & muscles, etc. However they will be attracted for you for different reasons.
David A:
In my experience, a good quality woman may not love your routine or physical self-absorption, but she will come to accept it as part of you and in fact maybe actually admire and value you for your discipline and devotion to an activity that doesn’t involved spending money or drinking LOL.
People love throwing the idea that you should conform, but they want what is scarce. Strength training builds character. Living healthy & having a passion differentiates you from other men. Those things are attractive. Don’t change.
When to Workout? Men need time for themselves, their friends & their women. So when do you workout when you’re in a relationship?
Get up earlier then everyone else, workout (only takes about an hour), get home before anyone wakes up. They don’t even have to know that I went to the gym.
Wazzup:
Some workout 5 x 1.5 hour (plus traveling time to the gym) and you have a friend who’s never around. Just to sleep, eat & have sex. I work out at lunch at work and on Sunday morning, so there’s hardly any interference with our quality time.
Waking up earlier on Sunday always worked for me too. Have breakfast, workout, take shower. By the time you’re done, she’s awake. You worked out, you’re happy. She had her sleep, she’s happy.
I like doing a Mo/We/Fr routine like StrongLifts 5×5. Tuesday for girl, Thursday friends, Friday evening girl, Saturday friends and/or girl, Sunday girl. Familiarity breeds contempt. Take time to miss each other.
Working Out With Your Partner. I’ve done rock climbing, badminton, running, etc with women before, but never weight lifting.
Mike P:
I encourage you guys to sweet talk your women into going to the gym with you. It may not be your ideal situation, but at least you can stick with strength training and grow in your relationship.
Gubernatrix (woman):
Men, you need to encourage your women to go to the gym and lift weights. Not all of them will be interested, but some might be! They probably think it is an intimidating blokey thing, so make an effort to ‘debunk’ some of the common myths around strength training and show them how much fun it is!
Women love sports from my experience. Especially when it helps them improve their physique. I wouldn’t hold back. Women are tougher than you might think & can be competitive. And they love it when you teach them something new.
The Other Side of The Story. Okay, so I was speaking from my experience as a man. What if you’re a woman? Some reactions of women:
ClickerTrainer
How about the HUSBAND (now ex-husband) who complains that his wife spends too much time working out. He wants dinner on the table “at a reasonable hour”.
Works two ways here, boys. I bet she won’t mind you working out for an hour or two every evening if you come home and do some housework for an hour. Without asking what to do or how to do it. Give it a try……just some advice from the other side.
My pet peeve: men who say they don’t like muscular women. Translation: “I don’t like you because you can outlift me”.
Gubernatrix.
If you were down the gym 5 nights a week for a couple of hours (incl travel time, changing etc) and then arrived home tired and a bit sleepy, I could understand a partner feeling a little left out.
Men who say they don’t want women to lift weight, don’t know what physique women can build from doing strength training naturally. I don’t like women who look like men, but I like sporty women.
And it does work two ways. Time for you, time for your friends, time for your woman. And when it’s time for your woman, it is time for your woman. Women need attention, you can’t give it to them, don’t get involved with them.
Girls that say they don’t like muscles have either never been with a guy with muscles before or they are trying to make their not so muscley man feel better. It goes against evolutionary theory and natural selection for women not to find a muscular physique attractive. Whether there is truth to it or not - it shows you can protect her (and yourself) if required.
There are also two additional factors at play:
1. The “man test”
Women have an innate ability to try to mold you into something (at least that’s the rationalization they’ll give). I mostly see this as just nagging you with a potshot to try to test what your limits are. If you bend over backwards all the time, they’ll get bored with you and move on. This isn’t 100% cut and dry though you have to use your intuition to sense if they have a legitimate complaint or if they’re just testing you.
2. The “why do you work out?”
There are some people who actually believe that once you get an athletic body you don’t have to maintain it all the time. This is silly, it’s like a marathon runner breaking a 4 minute mile, calling it quits, and believing he can still run fast by sitting on his butt all day long. With a mentality like this, no wonder why most people who try to lose weight fail.
These days I just stomp complaints from the start by saying “I work out for long-term health reasons, like a cheap way of preventative medicine. Increased strength and a better body are just positive side-effects.” If they still somehow manage to ask me again I’ll avalanche them with a bunch of research about sedentary individuals vs active ones and the health benefits of weight training until they feel stupid for asking again.
“She had her sleep, she’s happy.”
Actually I read yesterday that exactly that is supposed to make a woman happy… a good night rest (51%). After that came a good meal (18%) and sex (14%)
NQ: That’s crap. A great number of the women I’ve known do not like muscles. They don’t like men who look frail either but muscles tend to be very low on the list of things that women like.
I think the bottom line here is that if you get into a relationship it should be with a person who accepts you for who you are. I would never stay with someone who started to try to dissuade me from participating in activities that I enjoy; weightlifting or otherwise. My big love is volleyball and strength training is something I do to help with my performance in that sport. If I’m going to get into a long term relationship with a woman she has to understand that I’m not going to be giving up volleyball completely. However, I am willing to compromise and miss a tournament here or there to accommodate things that she wants to do.
@NQ & Krets.
I do agree that some women just don’t like muscles. However once they are with you for a long time enough, they will adapt & start to like it. And I’ve got the line “I feel protrected by you” before, so it might be something instinctive, don’t know.
@Pete
Totall agree on the “man” test. There’s that saying “They want you to change, but once you’ve changed the way they wanted to, they leave you. As long as they complain you’re good.”
Mehdi: I agree they will adapt but I think it has to do more with how they feel about you as a person. If a woman loves you as a person she’ll accept a lot of stuff about you she might not necessarily like. From muscles to beer guts, women tend to be less visual creatures than men so they’ll overlook minor physical “imperfections” if they love who you are as a person.
When I say muscles I’m not talking about a 300lb bodybuilder. What I mean is a muscular physique. We have 10s of thousands of years of instincts built into us which means we are preprogrammed to find certain physical traits attractive - For men… well I don’t really need to say what men find physically attractive in a women do I? - But they are signs of fertility. Same with women - instincivly they are most attracted (physically I mean) to someone who looks strong because as far as their instincts are concerned they look verile and like someone who can catch food and protect their family. Any woman who prefers weak looking or chubby guys to someone muscular must either have some wires crossed or be infertile because it spits in the face of everything logical about evolution and reproduction - and to clarify only talking physical attraction.
NQ — what about the fact that what’s been considered “attractive” has changed over time? In the middle ages, fat was attractive. Being fat meant you were rich enough to sit on your ass while other people did your work for you. In the Renaissance, shapely ankles (whatever that means) were a big turn-on. Now, fat is not widely considered attractive (though there are some for whom it does the trick) and ankles are just the things that keep your feet from falling off your legs. The “evolution” theory of attraction sounds good, but there are tons of social factors that have a larger impact on determining who is considered “attractive” than the “can he kill a deer” consideration.
That’s why I emphasised PHYSICALLY several times. PHYSICALLY. Not who is a nice person with a great sense of humour who you grow to love - but look at and find physically attractive. Being fat wasn’t (and still isn’t) physically attractive - money was. (and still is.) This kind of social evolution is very recent on our time line of existence. If you take two people, or a group of people and have to pick which one you find most attractive, whether male or female, you will naturally pick the one who offers the best genetic traits i.e. physically attractive. Studies that have been carried out accross a huge variety of cultures (and even on children from remote tribes who have had no influence from “cultural evolution”) all come to the same conclusion - that women are naturally, at least sub conciously if not conciously attracted to traits that convey higher testosterone levels like a strong physique with broad shoulders, thin waist, and a strong jaw and brow. Also height but that’s not effected by testosterone as far as I know.
@NQ
Men with extremely low testosterone levels are a lot taller than the average man, testosterone supresses growth (height).
I support your opinion, however I do not think that fat% should matter all that much, as long as one is not overly fat.
There are of course a lot of social factors (fashion and etc.) but I believe certain traits are still mostly evolutionary. (muscled men, women with big breasts/hips,…)
IMO if your partner really has a problem with your training, its probably not going to work as a long term relationship. Strength training is long term, I think most people who trains seriously know it will take years to reach goals. So if the relationship won’t work out long term, thats not so bad short term ones are more fun in my experience anyway.
Obviously it goes without saying never consider actually giving in to what he or she is saying about changing the training plan.