I Spent Two Weeks Working Out Like a Man

A quick summary of my fitness regime: I run outdoors and, when it gets too cold to do that, I run on the treadmill. While I wouldn’t say I practice yoga, I do do yoga. I speak fluent Pilates, thanks to my time as a teenager in Southern California. And when I’m feeling antsy, I try a Soul Cycle session (though I find the “squeeze your ass or no one’s going to squeeze it for you” ethos annoying). Basically, I am living in a fitness girl ghetto.

“Women tend to avoid weights entirely, for fear of building muscle, or stick to very light weights and cardio,” says Shari Dworkin, PhD, a sociologist at the University of California, San Francisco. She coined the idea of a “glass ceiling” at the gym in her 2001 paper Holding Back: Negotiating A Glass Ceiling On Women’s Muscular Strength. “I’m an athlete and I travel a lot, so I’m in gyms across the country, and the most amazing thing is how common this segregation — men in the weight room, women on the cardio machines — still is across the board.”

And with gyms launching new programs that mimic military training, focus on "functional movement," or even prepare you for obstacle courses with names like Tough Mudder, it also feels like group fitness classes (once the domain of aerobics and step-obsessed women) have also become segregated. To test this hunch, I decided to “work out like a man” for two weeks. Would I get stronger, or just bulkier? Would it tire me out more than my regular routine? Would it be awkward? Would I start grunting?

My first step is to determine what makes a workout “manly.” This leads to the obvious question: Do lots of men do this workout? (That, in turn, leads to some fairly desperate-sounding emails: “Hi, what class have you been to that is packed with guys?”)

After that, I followed my gut feeling. But when it comes to exercise, our gut feelings are already sexist: In a 2003 study on the gender-typing of sports, grade school children who were asked whether “David” or “Jane” would play a particular sport could easily come to a consensus on which sports were for Jane (aerobics and gymnastics) and which were for David (football and wrestling). “Bodily contact” or “use of bodily force against a heavy object” are two qualities that push a sport in the David direction, while “light resistance” and the act of “projecting the body into space in an aesthetically pleasing pattern” make it a more Jane-friendly pursuit.

So, I ditched Jane and her Lululemon-clad cardio queens, and started working out with David. Here’s how it went.

Day 1: Warp Speed at Chelsea Piers
I am the only girl in the class at this speed training track workout, which is supposed to be so intense that it’s been used to get in shape for the FBI fitness test. I expect to be coming in behind the guys, and they don’t seem particularly threatened by any of my times. For one thrilling 100-meter stretch I actually pass someone. My lead doesn’t last long, but the feeling is addictive, and I haven’t put one foot in front of the other with this kind of energy since high school. I get even more ambitious when the coach tells me that I could beat Usain Bolt in a marathon, which I realize later is just a roundabout way of saying that I’m slow.

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