Skip to main content

Functional... and mighty

The other day I was at the gym where I work, and one of my co workers made an interesting comment about my hands.

It was something like "oh wow, you have great hands, can I see them?" Which is probably a bit odd to most people, but we are like that.

The thing is, I've never really thought I had great hands. I have massive hands. When I was about 18 my boyfriend at the time told me he found it intimidating that my hands were bigger than his. I have long fingers, but also pretty solid palms. I also have massive feet, I'm a UK 7, but I'm not generally very big, I'm just under 5'4". I have always been self conscious about my "massive flappy hands and feet".

So it was a bit of a revelation to have someone make positive comments about my hands when the best anyone had previously managed was "you'd make a good pianist" (and they are right, I can play Shumann and that dude cut his finger webs to achieve his span).

My co worker is currently dealing with carpal tunnel, because of lifting dumbells with big rubberised grips that really aren't ergonomic for daintier hands. But my hands aren't dainty. I can grip those dumbells no problem. My hands are mighty!

I'm not sure what the benefit of having small hands was supposed to be for women. Unless you are trying to get something that fell down the back of the fridge, or if you are a farmer and your sheep is having trouble lambing.

Most of the time I'm pretty sure it's aesthetic, but why? Because we are supposed to be so substantially smaller than men? Because we are supposed to take up less space? Who says? Who gets to decide what shape and size my body is? How on earth did it ever get to be anyone but me?

I've said it before and I'm not going to stop: I am kind of fed up with this idea that femininity comes in a particular shape. I'm fed up with women being told they shouldn't train however they want in the gym because they might get "bulky" or "manly".

Many of us just don't have the genetics to be small and delicate. My mum is tiny and petite, but apparently I didn't get my share of that. I have always been heavy for my size (I think my bones might actually be solid iron, there's no other explanation for this much mass in this little space). But I am naturally strong, even without training, my relatively small 18 year old self was changing beer kegs in my evening job and carrying a 20kg bag of horsefeed under each arm in my day job. I'm a solid kind of girl. So why shouldn't I train to optimise that? Pack on the muscle, build up my functional strength, be super badass!

So I found myself looking in the mirror the other day, contemplating this issue. I thought to myself:

"I'm not petite, 
I'm not delicate, 
I'm not dainty,
I'm not willowy, 
I'm not ethereal. 
But I am functional as f**k"

And I'm pretty cool with that.

So much so that I am currently writing a programme just for women (or men, I'm inclusive) like me, who are no longer willing to work to take up less space, and just want to get stronger and more physically effective. I'll let you know how that goes, so keep an eye out. You can sign up to my mailing list or follow me on Facebook for updates.

FLASH UPDATE: Functional as F**k - the training programme is now LIVE! Check it out over here where you can see a little preview and purchase the programme in one of 3 formats.

Also, I made a shirt....


I'm being really inspired at the moment by the work Girls Gone Strong are doing, it's a great resource and community. Also check out Unapoligetically Powerful and The Bigness Project for some really cool programming for women who want to lift heavy stuff or build big muscles. The ladies behind these are completely awesome.

No one would ever tell her to lay off the pouncing...


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Managing Fibromyalgia flares

I've written before about living with EDS and Fibromyalgia ,  much of my personal fitness and health practices are geared around managing those conditions and keeping me as well as I can be. When managing a chronic health condition, particularly one that involves fatigue and potential flare ups, pacing, good nutrition, good sleep and generally taking care of yourself is always the first priority. Ideally we want to have as few flares as possible. But sometimes they still happen, and when they do, it's good to have a strategy in place. And I'm going to be talking in fairly general terms, because while EDS and Fibro are my personal experience, there is so little understanding of the mechanisms behind these conditions, that most strategies are going to be applicable to a number of conditions where crashes of exhaustion and pain are a feature. So what is a flare? A flare is a period where someone with chronic illness suffers increased symptoms for a short while. The

My top apps for supporting a healthy lifestyle.

The hardest part of making healthy choices and lifestyle changes is making it a habit. It's easy to make a decision to "eat better", "exercise more" or whatever your current plan is. It's a lot harder to stick to it on the rough days, for long enough that it becomes a habit and part of your life that you can't imagine being without. I love a bit of tech. I am a super geeky science nerd and finding ways to use technology to support my health and fitness makes me very happy. So with this in mind I thought I'd give a quick run down of my favourite smartphone apps for developing and maintaining healthy habits. Habitica I'm starting with this one because it's mad and I love it. Habitica is basically a to-do list app, but it's specially for the gamers among us. If you are familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, and all the games that grew out of that system and fantasy world, you will recognise Habitica. The app allows you to create 3 t

4 reasons why you should eat

I feel ridiculous writing this post. It should be excruciatingly obvious. But it's not. Everywhere I look I am seeing messages about not-eating. "don't eat these things" "don't eat very much" "don't eat at this time" And frankly, it's not very healthy. Physically or mentally. So what I'm going to talk about today is why it is important to focus on eating, rather than not-eating, when working towards your health-improving goals. And yes, even, no, especially, when one of those goals is fat loss. Fuel for your activities So food is fuel for your body. It provides the energy you need to function. Your body uses carbohydrates and fat as fuel. It can use protein, but only when under quite a lot of pressure. Your brain can only fuel itself on glucose (carbohydrate) and you can only metabolise fat in the presence of carbohydrate ("fat burns in a carbohydrate flame"). When your body runs low

Becoming a powerlifter - the aftermath.

The main event! It's been a couple of weeks now! So a bit of a delayed update because I have been up to all sorts of things. The news on powerlifting is that I did get to my meet! I made weight (hoorah!) by cutting a couple of kilos, then I did the competition, and because I knew that I would likely not be able to update my blog straight away, I made a little video to summarise how the competition went. [TLDW, I totalled 230kg, which is less than my gym PR, but I'm pretty happy considering. There were hiccups...] Here's a couple of quick videos (kindly recorded by Ryan from Kernow Gym ). My second squat, with extra angry lockout, and my third deadlift. The one that didn't get away. This is my second squat @ 72.5 after my first @ 70 was disqualified. I was pretty annoyed at that, which probably accounts for the fast lockout 😂😂 A post shared by Claire Salem (@firelotusfitness) on Oct 16, 2017 at 11:04am PDT I like deadlifts, de

Protein. Are you eating enough? Are you eating too much? Do you need a supplement?

Let's tackle a meaty topic. Meaty. Protein. Get it? Everyone seems to be going on about protein. Everyone in the gym is chugging shakes. People on the internet are claiming its the secret to weight loss and everything else. Other people on the internet are saying the first people's kidneys are going to fail. Someone else says there's really no need to worry as we don't actually need much protein after all. Some people have numbers, but those numbers are all different. Everyone is confused. Who is correct? Well, everyone is a little. Save that they are all only telling a very small part of a bigger story. So shall we break it down? WITH SCIENCE! The RDA OK, so a figure you will often see bounced around is 0.8g of protein per 1kg of bodyweight. This is the Recommended Daily Allowance. This figure is based on the idea of a "normal" person who is not particularly active, or growing and consuming an adequate amount of calories per