I know the title of this post can sound a bit misleading, as if I don’t enjoy training men. That isn’t the case.
I spent eight years at Cressey Sports Performance training mostly baseball players. They were great, just a little overzealous with the Axe Body Spray at times.
These days, about half of my current clients at CORE are men, but I suspect the gender balance skews a bit more toward women if I ran the numbers. I’ve always enjoyed training both men and women, but I’ve consistently found more satisfaction in coaching women.
Back in 2002, my first corporate fitness job didn’t take long to recruit a few women and introduce them to strength training. The guys already had some barbell experience—they’d been exposed to lifting at an early age, partly because of the image they got from action movies. For the women, though, the story was different. Many hadn’t been encouraged to lift weights, and when they were, it was often framed as machine work or “girl exercises”—mostly cardio.
A quick aside I’m tempted to share: a female colleague once told me about a local Massachusetts high school. She offered to help in the summer with a strength program for the girls, but the athletic director—also a woman—said it wouldn’t do much good because the girls weren’t interested in weight training and preferred cardio, and there weren’t any “female friendly” machines available. Behind her were ten or more empty power racks. The irony was hard to miss. It helps explain why so many young girls grow up thinking lifting isn’t for them, and why that mindset can carry into adulthood. Thanks for nothing to that kind of thinking.
Anyway, in 2002 I started working with more women and began to deprogram them from common fitness myths: that lifting would make you big and bulky; that certain activities like yoga or Pilates would magically lengthen and tone muscles; and that simply staring at a barbell would somehow transform you overnight. The last point is a ridiculous stereotype, and while some might mock a look that’s not conventional for women, the bigger idea is that a few sets of deadlifts won’t turn someone into a different gendered ideal.
Watching those women gain real strength and confidence was incredibly rewarding. They moved from worrying about aesthetics to pursuing performance-based goals.
Fast forward to my time at Cressey Sports Performance. I worked with many women, started a women’s-only beginners group, and helped create an environment where training was training—no matter the gender. Women trained the same as the men, and we didn’t make it a big deal. They became as capable, and often more determined, than the guys.
Today I run my own studio in the Boston area (Brookline). I still live by the same idea: outside a few special cases, women don’t need to train differently from men. I’ve built a reputation that helps women know what to expect when they reach out for coaching.
Deadlifts, EDM, and plenty of Star Wars references are part of the vibe here.
But I won’t pretend that aren’t challenges. I recently read an article in a waiting room that claimed foam rolling makes muscles longer and somehow produces a leaner look. It felt like the same old misinformation—that it’s calories in versus calories out that actually matters, not a tool that has little to do with real fat loss. It was frustrating, and it reinforced why I prefer working with women: I want to counter the garbage that often shows up in mainstream media. It’s awful, but I’ve found that many women are highly coachable and don’t see it as a blow to their ego when I tell them to take some weight off the bar.
