I really enjoy training women for a variety of reasons. One, it’s great doing strength training with the so-called “weaker gender” and then watching them get stronger than your average man. There’s kind of a thrill in that. Second, women usually do what I tell them to do since they don’t have all their gym-going buddies giving them competing advice. Although it is sometimes hard to argue against the “get a six pack in a week” segment of the industry.
However, it isn’t all roses and there are a few issues to deal with when training women.
First is the lack of body control usually due to women being hyper-flexible and hyper-mobile. Women aren’t as tight as men so they sometimes have a hard time controlling what their bodies are doing in space. This is a big issue for a personal trainer to deal with because this kind of control is crucial to exercise results but takes time to learn — a big detriment when people expect results NOW. Having any kind of exercise background would help but that isn’t present in many cases. Without it, we have to start from scratch with something that was best learned as a child or teen.
Second is the inability to generate muscle tension. I’ve trained some women that found it practically impossible to generate muscle tension, especially in the upper body. In training for pullups, for example, I would give them assisted pullups in which they still had to squeeze the muscles to get their chin over the bar but the feet were on the floor for assistance. But some of these women seemingly couldn’t generate tension with the upper body to pull themselves up. They didn’t struggle or strain to get above the bar — they either could do the movement or not. Feeling their muscles revealed no tension being used.
Third, despite the popularity of Pilates in women’s fitness, some women really struggle with squeezing/activating the core. This is a combination of one and two above, but becomes a real problem when a trainer specifically address the core and the need to activate it for safety reasons when lifting weights. Again, teaching this takes some time and is necessary to proper progression and once it’s learned, the need to do extra abs work diminishes and the total workout time goes down as the weight lifted goes up. I would have thought that the experience of giving birth might increase the ability to control the core since women have to push in labor. But perhaps more women are opting for C-Sections these days? Splitting the abs muscle does change a woman’s lower abs forever.
Fourth is the quad dominance found in women that leads to the knee collapsing in during squats, etc. (knee valgus for the fitness nerds). Quad dominance leads to a lack of posterior chain strength in the glutes and hamstrings, which in turn leads to the knee bowing in during squats. Combine this problem with hyper-mobility and a trainer can have a real problem on their hands. Men who don’t have glutes usually don’t have knees that bow in because they aren’t hyper-mobile. Men’s natural lack of flexibility leads to other issues but the knee moving in isn’t usually one of them. Again, this is correctable but takes precious workout time to fix and most people didn’t come to have their movements corrected.
Taken separately, none of these issues is insurmountable for a good trainer. But combine some or even all of them together into one person that is looking to fit into a bikini next month or who has some other short-term goal, and even the best trainer has their work cut out for them.