Today, I feel very proud to be part of the CrossFit community.
This came about after I stumbled across a September 2024 article in Sex Roles: A Journal of Research.
- OK, before you fall asleep because I’m about to review an academic article, I promise that’s just part of the story and I’ll keep the jargon to a minimum.
The article — “Beyond the Barbell: Women in Strength-Based Sports and the Reshaping of Gender Norms” — included 21 participants, all of whom are women in weightlifting, powerlifting, CrossFit, and strongman. It dug into topics like body image and societal expectations, as well as how these women feel about interactions with men.
My biggest takeaway was that CrossFit is way ahead of many other sports when it comes to women embracing being strong and empowered while still feeling feminine and sexy.
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A Quick Personal Story
Growing up, I was a gymnast. More specifically, I was the giant gymnast among a flurry of tiny teammates.
- I never believed being tall was beautiful — never mind being big and strong.
I got into basketball in high school and eventually played in college. At that time, there were no Caitlin Clarks to look up to.
- Our team won the Canadian national championships in my first year at the University of British Columbia. Still, the only time anyone other than our parents was in the stands was during the fourth quarter when people began filing into the beer garden for the men’s game.
Women basketball players were never considered the sexy ones; that designation was for the long-legged volleyball girls, with whom we shared a locker room. I was just happy I had my baggy basketball shorts to hide my way-too-muscular legs.
I soon took on rowing in college. This time, it was the 125-pound rowers, not the heavyweights like me, who were the sexy ones (or at least that’s the tape that played in my head).
CrossFit came into my life soon after college, and for the first time, I felt confident about my body and was actually celebrated for being strong.
I even started to notice the men at my gym perceived me as an attractive, feminine woman.
CrossFit changed my world in so many ways — maybe I could be both strong and sexy after all.
Back to the Article
The women in the article shared stories that sound similar to my experience as a strong, athletic woman in sports.
- “Growing up, I was a very competitive swimmer, and so growing up as a swimmer, you tend to develop very broad shoulders. My mom would always comment on how broad I was… and I used to be embarrassed by that,” one of the participants said.
- Another offered: “[Men] don’t think you’re sexy. Sometimes, they think you’re automatically violent. Yeah, you have more muscle mass. And so, you know, people will be like, oh, like you could probably beat me up. Just because you’re a strong woman doesn’t mean you’re a man-hater and want to beat up all the men.”
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Like me, finding CrossFit helped a lot of these women change the narrative they told themselves. Many of the participants were weightlifters or powerlifters, but the article noted that a number of them found their way to powerlifting or weightlifting through CrossFit.
- “I played [other sports], but weightlifting was never an option, really,” one participant said. “But then I found CrossFit, and I watched [The CrossFit Games] on ESPN, and I thought, ‘I could lift that shit.’ And then, lo and behold, a place opened up across the street just a couple of months later. So, it’s kind of destiny.”
- Another said: “I had a really poor relationship with my body image and food before weightlifting. And now I would say I don’t at all in the slightest. So, when I’m now educating others, I find we’re all having to unlearn what athleticism looks like…and we’ve put too much emphasis on body image in the first place.”
Worth Noting: A handful of athletes who discovered weightlifting through CrossFit have eventually made it to the Olympic Games, including seven-time CrossFit Games champion Tia-Clair Toomey-Orr; Maude Charron, who now has gold and silver Olympic medals to her name; and American Olympian Wes Kitts, who was introduced to weightlifting through CrossFit when he was a college football player.
CrossFit and Equality
The article also discussed equality in sports, arguing that although strides have been made, women “still face significant inequality, especially in sports and coaching in strength-based sports.”
However, when it comes to CrossFit, I would argue that women have been given equal opportunities to men since day one.
- The article noted this, saying: “Women are competing in Olympic weightlifting, powerlifting, CrossFit, and strongwoman, which are traditionally male-dominated, apart from CrossFit (which made a concerted effort on gender equity since its inception).”
Case in point: Prize money at CrossFit competitions has always been equal between women and men, as has media attention.
As a result, women in CrossFit have arguably equal fanfare, sponsorships, and overall notoriety as their male counterparts.
- When we look at the 2024 Games athletes in terms of their Instagram followers, the top four athletes who competed this summer are women: Tia-Clair Toomey-Orr, Brooke Wells, Dani Speegle, and Danielle Brandon. They have 2 million, 1.8 million, 1.7 million, and 791,000 followers, respectively.
- Meanwhile, the top three men who competed at the Games this summer are Pat Vellner, Brent Fiskowski, and Gui Malheiros, with 650,000, 639,000, and 632,000 followers, respectively.
As much as we focus on social media’s negative effects, it does help strong women become more visible and provide role models for the next generation.
Speegle spoke to this in a recent post: “Listen to me. Strong women are beautiful. Strong women are feminine. Strong women are amazing.”
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One of the participants in the article made a similar point: “You know, there are more voices out there that are like, strong is beautiful, strong is important, strong is healthy… it allows us, I think as females, to really, like, feel we can take up space, that we can get stronger, that we can get bigger and … that doesn’t diminish our value that, like, creates more strength, both physically and mentally, emotionally, and psychologically.”
Women Coaching Men
Another area where CrossFit is ahead of its time is coaching. Specifically when it comes to women coaching men.
- Coaches like Michele Letendre and Caroline Lambray have led the charge as the long-time head coaches for five-time Games medalist Pat Vellner and 2023 Games champion Jeff Adler.
In many (arguably most) other sports, women coaching men is still rare. While that’s changing slowly in traditionally male-dominated sports, there is still not a single woman head coach in the NFL, NBA, or NHL (although there are a number of women who are assistant coaches).
The Big Picture
There is a lot I can criticize CrossFit for, but there’s more I can praise it for, and reading this article reminded me of that.
- When it comes to celebrating strong women, providing equal opportunities, and making it acceptable, even sexy, to be able to lift with (and even outlift) the boys, thank you, CrossFit.
At the age of 40, I find myself looking back to 13-year-old Emily.
To the day in the cafeteria when I arm-wrestled the entire eighth-grade boys’ football team and took them down one by one. For a short moment, I was proud. But then I quickly realized that this took me out of the running for gaining a boyfriend. Instead, I would forever be seen as one of the boys.
Today, thanks to athletes like Dani Speegle, Haley Adams, Emma Lawson, and Brooke Wells, maybe the eighth-grader who beats all the boys at arm wrestling will have a different story than I did.
Maybe she will feel confident and empowered.
And maybe, just maybe, she’ll even recognize that one of those boys has a crush on her.
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Featured image: Carlos Fleury
