Strong is the new skinny. It’s a motto that’s heard throughout the fitness community, and it’s changing women’s approach to fitness and providing a boost to women’s confidence and body image.
Trends in fitness are nothing new. In earlier times people were told, “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet,” promoting cigarette smoking, or to eat a grapefruit with every meal or drink a daily dose of cabbage soup. Then technology introduced devices like the sweat suit and saunas, designed to make users sweat to help people lose weight fast. In the ’80s cardio was all the rage and classes in Jazzercise and aerobics were big. The cardio revolution persisted until more recent times as women, prompted by images of super-skinny models, endured hours and hours of cardio to get that desired look.
Now female fitness enthusiasts are embracing a different body type, and that’s changing the way women exercise.
“I think it’s getting to the point where women are believing that having some shape is OK. There’s also a trend with just being comfortable with what you have,” said Heather Rose Rylant, a group fitness manager at Western Village Health Club in Santa Maria.
Strong over skinny
Wearing a short black workout skirt, her blond locks pulled into a messy pile on her head, Rylant is pretty and feminine, but her lean legs and muscular calves are testament to the fact that strong is in.
She admits that not every woman will get a body worthy of a fitness magazine cover because not every woman is built that way. Some bodies will always carry a little more fat, build a little more muscle, or just overall be a little bigger than others, but more women are realizing this and accepting it. In teaching her kickboxing and BodyPump classes, she said she is increasingly seeing women embrace their body type as long as they feel strong and athletic.
Other fitness professionals are seeing the same trend in women’s health. It seems that there’s a bigger move by women to embrace their body type while recognizing they can be strong and fit, rather than thin and waif-like.
In a corner of Anytime Fitness in Orcutt a coed group gathers for an Industrial Strength class. The warm-up isn’t much different than any ordinary class. But instead of getting into a cardio fat-blasting session, the participants embark on a circuit that combines conditioning with muscle-building. They lift weights and kettlebells, and whip ropes and jump rope. To finish off their grueling circuit, they perform a round of what amounts to 90 burpees. The participants wear heart-rate monitors and throughout the workout those monitors project their heart rate onto a TV screen for all to see. The screen shows the number of calories burned and reveals whether the wearer of the fitness tracker is in the zone in terms of heart rate. When the participant hits the desired heart rate, their section of the screen turns red. For many parts of the class on a recent week, much of the screen stayed in the red zone.
While the class is made up of participants of all ages, a surprising number are old enough to remember several fitness trends through the years.
Anytime Fitness owner Gina Hill said there is a reason for that: After a certain age cardio isn’t as effective as strength training, especially after the age of 40.
“A lot of them were not getting the results when they were doing cardio, and lifting weights gives you results,” Hill said.
Participant Regina Lopez said she was overweight when she was young, and when she was in her early 20s she decided to do something to feel good. Looking good happened to be an additional benefit of that. When she reached her 30s, her goal was to look better than she did in her 20s. Now, at 32, she feels like she’s reached that goal in more ways than one.
“I started lifting weights more this last year, and I just feel stronger. I don’t even really do cardio anymore,” Lopez said.
Susan Cagle, of Rocklin, was on vacation and dropped in on Hill’s Industrial Strength class recently. At 54 years old she wants to be the fittest she can be.
“Healthy is huge. If you feel healthy, then your mind is healthy and your body’s healthy and you’re a more healthy person,” she said. She added that for her it’s all about the strength.
Both she and Lopez had injuries that strength training helped rehabilitate them from.
For Lopez, it was a fall that derailed her workouts. “But when I came back I was like, ‘I’m lifting heavier, I’m going stronger.’ And I feel better than I did before my injury,” she said.
More importantly, strength training gives them a boost of confidence.
Maribeth Durazo got her second wind during the burpees portion of the Industrial Strength workout and she proudly raised her hand and said aloud, “I remember when I couldn’t do one burpee.”
Afterward she wiped the sweat from her forehead and fought back tears as she told the Sun why she got involved in strength training.
“Two years ago I emailed Gina [Hill] and said ‘I’m fat, and almost 50,’ and she had a bootcamp and I told her I didn’t want to slow people down. And she said I wouldn’t be slowing anybody down,” Durazo said.
“I couldn’t do a sit-up I couldn’t do a pushup. I’ve been doing it for two years. I’ve gotten mentally stronger, physically stronger, and I just enjoy being strong. For me it’s strength. I am so much stronger. I have more endurance, I can physically participate in things with my husband and kids. I’m really pleased,” Durazo said.
Hill said a movement has begun in which women are eschewing diets and extreme cardio. They are picking up dumbbells and eating more to fuel their muscle gains. What’s more is that strength is giving them confidence that is spilling over into everyday life. Though body confidence is also part of the benefit.
“Look at the selfies people take. They take pictures of their backs and their arms and stuff. You never had that before,” Hill said.
The competitor
Lompoc resident Megan Dunlevy has a magazine ad for MAC makeup a friend gave her. The ad features a beautiful woman, presumably wearing MAC cosmetics, and draped in a black strapless evening gown. She’s flexing her biceps and displaying muscles that a lot of men would envy.
Dunlevy cites the ad as an example of how women with muscles are now more commonly being viewed as strong and beautiful. And she’s right. A quick look on social media will reveal any number of inspirational quotes prompting women to embrace their bodies for all that they are: strong, beautiful, and female. With this new movement women are starting to accept that strong is beautiful and so are others. Still, beauty isn’t always where the search for strength begins.
Dunlevy initially got into weight training because of her Vandenberg Air Force Base job. She is among the few women in a maintenance career field. She said she wanted to be known for her work and not for being “the girl.”
“We have to lift 50-pound-toolkits and raise them up and down an 80-foot-hole. So if you’re always that girl that goes ‘I can’t do this’—I didn’t want to be that person. So I started going to the gym.”
She admitted that there can be a downside to the pursuit of strength.
Though she’s always been athletic and into fitness, when she first met her boyfriend she taught Zumba and would run and hike with him. It was a lifestyle they shared. Then she started lifting weights and competing.
“I kind of lost track of why I started working out. It was to build confidence. And I lost sight of that. And I kept wanting to get bigger and bigger and bigger, and he was not happy with that,” Dunlevy said. “So if I was to compete again I would go to the category below. Which is bikini.”
The figure competitions focus more on muscle size and definition, yet it’s still a far different look than women’s bodybuilding. Many people still have in their minds the stereotype of the large women with bulging muscles whenever they hear of a female lifter, Dunlevy admitted, but that’s not always the case.
The industry has actually moved away from the larger muscled look for women, with competition categories that include fitness and bikini in addition to bodybuilding, figure, and physique. The former categories emphasize leanness and muscles while keeping a softer silhouette. For 2016 the International Federation of Bodybuilding and Fitness (IFBB) even introduced a Fit Model category for women and for men. In both the men’s and women’s categories, “less attention is paid to body parts and muscles detail in favor of overall lines and shape of the physique, elegance of moving on the stage, style, and attractiveness of presentation” according to a blog post on the IFBB website.
Dunlevy said that when she is in competition mode she works out six days a week with one day of rest along with cardio thrown in the mix with heavy weightlifting. When she’s not competing, in order to stay at a maintenance level she works out three times a week weight training for an hour to an hour and a half with little to no cardio.
“It’s a huge commitment not for just yourself but for the people you’re around and the people that live in your household,” she said of prepping for a competition.
While the workouts may take up time and require discipline, there is one big benefit: Weight training requires a lot of eating.
“People don’t realize we eat six times a day, and it’s not just yogurt and salad. You have to feed your muscles,” Dunlevy said.
To build competition-level muscles requires a lot of calories, and in particular a lot of protein, carbs, and fat—in the right proportions of course, and from the right foods. Dunlevy said that many of her friends tell her they couldn’t possibly eat that much. Others think they couldn’t possibly put that much effort into a workout.
“We get asked that question a lot. Like, ‘What do you do, what do you do,’ and I think that everybody looks for like, ‘Oh you have a special pill or magic potion or something.’ After you tell them everything involved they’re like, ‘Oh, well that’s a lot of work.’ And yeah it is,” Dunlevy said.
Whether it’s for competition or just to reach personal goals doesn’t matter. The path is tough but reachable. Dunlevy and other fitness enthusiasts believe a strong and fit body—which leads to a strong and fit mind—is something that is attainable for all women, no matter what age, fitness level, or body type they possess.
Editor Shelly Cone can be reached at scone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 28 – Feb 4, 2016.