Linda - women’s opinions?

[caleb_m]

@lawforchrist

…but females had a larger effect for relative upper-body strength. …it is possible that untrained females display a higher capacity to increase upper-body strength than males.

Doesn’t seem like it. It supports what I mentioned: CrossFitters are routinely less strength developed and women tend to be more so because a lack of resistance training that occurs. Women can handle both greater volume at relatively high loads and tend to recover quicker.

 

[lawforchrist]

@caleb_m No... you blamed women for avoiding bench press. And now you're just repeating the point I made. What was the purpose of saying "try again" if you're just going to turn around and agree with me

 

[caleb_m]

@lawforchrist Hang out during open gym and do a straw poll of how many women are strength training.

Walk into any big box gym and do a straw poll of how many women are doing cardio vs. resistance training.

I literally just blamed society for manifesting this issue by routinely holding women to different standards. Did you do the Presidential Fitness Test in grade school? Flexed arm hang vs. Pull Up.

Go to other societies where this doesn’t exist (Nordic countries) and you don’t see the disparity.

EDIT: you read my observation as blame. And that wasn’t the intent. But it’s what the data supports.

 

[mixpanema]

@caleb_m I do remember that test in grade school. Girls had the option to do pull-ups. I sucked at ball sports; I was a figure skater and a gymnast. I trained LOTS of pull-ups in childhood - my guess is way more than the boys who played soccer and practiced on a field. Those boys still did just as many pull-ups as me in that test, despite their lack of specifically training the movement. I don’t think those 10 year old boys were simply better exposed to the movement - I was!

As for a “higher capacity to achieve increase and strength” that’s exactly the point - when you start farther back, you have more runway to grow…almost the definition of “newbie gains”.

 

[caleb_m]

@mixpanema It has nothing to do with starting from behind. Trained women, those who have been training for several years, demonstrate the same ability.

 

[lawforchrist]

@caleb_m Yes, I'll absolutely agree that it is our society, but lesser standards for women isn't the cause of women lacking upper body strength - it's a symptom of decades of messaging saying that being slim is ideal, while for men the ideal has always been strong and capable. Up until somewhat recently, weight training in any form was only widely accessible to men. The cruel irony is that women who strength train are much more easily able to achieve the look they desire. Or even take a step further to realize that looks are far secondary to performance and longevity.

Please be careful in the future in your messaging about why women lack strength. We have been fed lies for generations about what we are capable of and what we should want to look like. Some of us struggle our whole lives with those ideas, so some grace would be appreciated.

 

[mixpanema]

@caleb_m Yeah, I have 0 certs or degrees in exercise. But anecdotally, I would wager that you could stand on the sidewalk and ask every man passing by to do ONE full, real push-up - and you’d probably have a pretty high success rate, regardless of age and fitness. But ask every woman, and…no.

I’d bet the same with something like a pull-up - I think the success rate for men of a random sampling of the general population would be leaps and bounds higher than that for women. I watch women train for years to get that first pull-up, but my husband (normal BW but hasn’t stepped foot in a gym in many years) could easily knock out at least a several.

There’s definitely an innate physiological difference there. Obviously, with training, women can achieve all kinds of things, but men just come in at a different starting point.

 

[caleb_m]

@mixpanema From the same article that @lawforchrist referenced…

There is also a possibility that male subjects could be more familiar with upper-body movements (e.g., bench press)…

You’re supporting what my point was. Men are typically more familiar with training upper body regardless of training status. This is seen in many other domains. You can simply look at various LEO and military physical standards. Women are routinely faced with less vigorous assessments of upper body strength. While I agree that women will typically show up weaker with upper body movements, it’s not a physiological differences issue because those markers favor women.

A quick look at 2018, where the weights weren’t relative, and you’ll find that women finished workout 2 in similar times than the men.

 

[forgivenkali]

@lawforchrist

Also I don't think it has anything to do with women not wanting to bench.

Hard disagree. Go to the generic fitness subs, plenty of women don't even acknowledge their upper body exists.

 

[mushroom]

@mixpanema I've never done Linda, and I never intend to. In general though, I don't like the idea of having Rx be based on bodyweight because it seems like more math than anyone wants to do at the gym.

Also, we don't bench nearly as often as we clean, so my max clean is much more than my max bench. I'd do better with bodyweight cleans and .75bw bench.

 

[ajhnh]

@mixpanema I can’t bench that much so I did the intermediate weights and that was plenty for me this morning.

 

[chantelle1989g]

@mixpanema I like bodyweight based workouts as a rest - even though I won’t excel with them, as I’m still not that strong pound for pound. We did it at my gym and the only people who Rx’d it spent a lot of time in the gym in high school, working on their bench.

I don’t think most crossfitter type people have a bench at 1xbw for 55 reps. We just don’t train it much, historically because of equipment requirements. It’s a pain to do this workout because you really should have a spotter and everyone’s got their own bar. Maybe a .5 strict press might fit our training better. However, for guys who were gym rats before CrossFit, or trained American football or Florida weightlifting, it’s probably not much of a stretch.

The cleans are a cakewalk I suspect for most people who Rx CrossFit.

• Deadlift - challenging but do-able. Probably each round unbroken.
• bench - I’ll be at singles in the 10s
• cleans - light enough that I’d aim to go unbroken from 5-1.

 

[bloodinthewater]

@mixpanema Yeah, I can rx plenty of workouts but not Linda First off my squat clean 1RM is +20 kg higher than my bench press 1RM (even my snatch 1RM is higher than my bench press 1RM…). It’s been years since I last did this benchmark but then I think I did deadlifts and cleans rx but used the same weight for bench I had for cleans (bench was, not surprisingly, still the hardest part).

 

[feargodnotthem]

@mixpanema Don’t get hung up on RX. A lot of the big workouts are super arbitrary. I estimate the likes of Linda can only be Rd’d by about 5% of men too. It’s a nonsense workout as far as I’m concerned.

 

[mantius]

@mixpanema Dude here, unless your gym is programming volume bench press leading up to it, 55 reps at bodyweight would be daunting for most athletes. I weigh about 215 and max around 315 and don't think I could get 215 up 10 times without training for it.

 

[disability]

@mixpanema My gym programmed a 95# bench, 155 deadlift and 95# squat cleans for women’s weight for Linda because fuck Linda lol my bench max is 155, I’m a 175# woman and can’t even do 1 rep at body weight

 

[intellectual]

@mixpanema I have never done it, but would be interested to try sometime. My gym will never program it though and I don't have three barbells at home, so maybe at an open gym sometime.

Weight is around 135 (it's probably more like 137, but let's round down). That makes 135 for bench (my max is 175, but haven't done that much in a while... so it's probably more like 165), about 205 for deadlift (max 310, so that's no problem) and 100 for clean (max 190, so no problem).

I think this would actually be pretty doable for me, though bench would be challenging, and would definitely not be unbroken sets for the higher numbers. I did the age group quarterfinals last week and the 25 bench at 125 was surprisingly hard, but I got through it ok.

 

[iancase]

@mixpanema I couldn’t do one rep of any of that.

 

[leemills]

@mixpanema Female here. Completing Linda RX has been a goal of mine for a couple years, which basically means improving my bench capacity. I can do BW but not 55 times (yet!).

 

[imnewtothis]

@mixpanema Lots of talk about bench being the hardest but i find the deadlift extremely challenging on the grip and it makes the cleans feel like they explode up.

I did this yesterday at 205# BW.

DL: 275# (scaled as if i was 185#) 68% 1RM
BP: 205# (68% 1rm)
CLEAN: 135# (scaled as tho i weight 185#) - i dont know my 1RM

Took about 30 min, very taxing on cardio with the cleans and DL