At lunchtime on a Tuesday in July, a group of women enter the Pulse Fitness Centre. They spend an hour working out together: resistance training, refining their technique, lifting progressively heavier weights as they cheer each other on. They are encouraging and supportive. They are working hard. They are getting stronger all the time.
They are brand new to this.
Welcome to StrongHER, a new program at McMaster that’s making strength training more approachable for women in midlife.
Lee-Anne Wilson in the Pulse Fitness Centre.
It’s a demographic that can benefit hugely from strength training, but might also face barriers to entry when it comes to starting and maintaining a workout routine, said Lee-Anne Wilson, manager of fitness & well-being.
“Being a woman in midlife myself, I look at my peers, my colleagues, and I recognize how hard it is to fit everything in at this stage of your life, and how daunting it is you’ve never trained like that,” Wilson said.
Keeping it simple and accessible
The StrongHER program grew from an initiative between Athletics & Recreation and McMaster’s central Human Resources department, which offered a single gym session specifically aimed at introductory strength training for women in midlife. It drew 34 participants and even more expressed interest.
“I realized there was such an appetite amongst women-identifying faculty and staff to get more information,” Wilson said. “There is so much out there about the benefits of strength training. There’s a lot of great experts and research that’s happening here at McMaster. I think people are sold on the message, but they don’t know how to do it.”
Wilson and her team created the StrongHER program to meet that need, running a pilot of the program in May. Comprising eight sessions over four weeks, the program was offered to McMaster faculty and staff and aimed at building their skills, knowledge and confidence in strength training. It was such a success that they ran it again in June, and then in July; they’re planning more sessions for the fall.
Wilson knows that there’s a plethora of information out there about fitness and training available, online and elsewhere. “My algorithm is full of this information,” she said.
It can seem excessively complicated. So they keep it simple: with a small group and a high ratio of staff to participants, with a focus on the fundamentals. Participants learn gym orientation, equipment use, injury prevention, gym etiquette, and foundational movement patterns like squatting, hinging, pushing, pulling and core stability.
The goal wasn’t just to complete a series of fitness workouts, but for participants to leave feeling confident to continue training safely and effectively on their own. “This was a way of breaking down some of the barriers of accessing training for this specific demographic,” Wilson said.
They learn how to use different machines in a gym, and they also learn how to exercise the same muscles using free weights. They’re also not overly concerned about trying to make the biggest lifts happen: Wilson references research by McMaster kinesiology PhD student Derrick Van Every, which shows that benefits of strength training for women are the same whether they lift a larger weight a few times, or a smaller weight more times.
“If your answer going forward is, I’ve learned the fundamentals, and I’m going to get a basic setup of free weights in your basement or whatever, that’s a very valid way to continue with your strength training,” Wilson said.
Building a routine
The response they’ve received to the program so far has been amazing, Wilson said. It’s incredible to watch how quickly the participants learn and build their confidence. “Going from being like, ‘I can’t go on that machine,’ to, ‘I got this, I know what I’m doing’ within a couple days.”
Andrea Wilson, a financial coordinator at McMaster who took part in the program, described the staff and student instructors as extremely helpful, enthusiastic and very patient: “Explaining each exercise, demonstrating proper technique, and providing modifications when needed to ensure everyone could participate safely and confidently.”
And so far, past participants have continued to apply their new skills. Seven joined a follow-up session and continued to work out together. One week, at the third iteration of StrongHER, current participants bumped into a participant from the first session, who’s now been working out independently for weeks following the StrongHER program.
For Holly Gibson, a manager of communications in Facility Services, participating in the StrongHER program became the highlight of her week.
“Being supported by the trainers, and also my new friends, to lift heavy, fix my stance and try scary things has finally broken my fear of strength training,” Gibson said.
“With everything I learned in the program, I feel confident to correctly lift weights on my own – but now I have a community of women who will meet me at the gym and do it with me.”
Now is better than never
Running the program also been deeply fulfilling for Wilson. “My passion absolutely is that physical activity makes life easier.”
In your 20s and 30s, Wilson said, you can maybe get away with not doing strength training. But by the time you’re in your 60s, without physical activity, you’re going to be frail. “You’re going to feel insecure about doing a step up. Or pulling your body up. The difference between people who are active and who are really inactive is quite stark.”
The good news? It’s never too late, even if you’ve never trained before.
“The body wants to be strong,” Wilson said. “The body wants to be moving.”
And though it’s hard to take on something new, it’s easier with a supportive group, who are all going out of their comfort zone to break a sweat.
“Specifically working with women my age and watching them be able to take this on and be successful has been incredibly rewarding.”
Registration for the fall session of StrongHER will open in late August. Learn more or register at: https://active.mcmaster.ca/