The Barriers Survey

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The Inspiration

Lifting weights will make me bulky. I just do a lot of cardio. Women shouldn’t lift heavy. You only need to strength train if you want to get jacked. You’d need a personal trainer and they’re way too expensive.

We’ve all heard—and many of us have even said—something like this; something that identifies strength training as unnecessary, exclusive, unattainable, or elitist. 

It’s no mystery where the mindset comes from.

For most of its history, the weightlifting world hasn’t really done a lot to counteract these concepts, and, sometimes, it even encourages them. In theory, gyms look scary and inaccessible, full of 45-lb plates and incredibly muscular dudes doing one rep for power before letting their heavy barbell bang to the mat. We figure the women steer clear of anything beyond the 15-lb dumbbells, and the ones who are amongst the plates and racks are amazingly ripped, with corded muscle visible everywhere their sports bra doesn’t cover and rock-hard thighs.

This isn’t the reality everywhere.

But it’s definitely what we were seeing an awful lot of until a small group of trainers and influencers started sharing their more attainable stories or services. Sure, many of them are jacked, but they’re preaching inclusivity—strength for all and the importance of building muscle beyond bodybuilding competitions. Now, it’s almost as easy to find positive, functionally focused fitness inspo on social media as it is to find fad diets and mirror muscle models, but you have to know where to look. The fact of it is, a lot of us don’t.

And how could we?

Until I started studying fitness, I had no idea how much I didn’t know. Even working for years as an editor for a health and wellness site, I had internalized so much of the misinformation or just never bothered to follow up on what I’d hear. Now, I’ve grasped about 1/1000th of what there is to know, but it’s gotten so much easier to separate the chaff from the quality content. I’ve figured out which questions to ask and how to identify the real info (usually).

But not everyone wants to become a fitness professional, and that shouldn’t be a requirement for knowing the basics. The more I think about it, the more it boggles my mind that we didn’t learn this stuff in school. There are tons of memes about the things we didn’t learn in class that could have helped us in everyday life (this is one of my favourites), but I didn’t think about physical fitness in this way until recently—mostly because I hated gym class.

Strength training keeps our muscles strong and our bones from breaking down too quickly. How did they not tell us that? How is it not beneficial to the health care system, long-term disability services, and retirement funds to make sure that as many people as possible stay fit enough to stave off broken hips and chronic back pain?

All this—the lack of teaching, the struggle to find good intel, the general vitalness of building or maintaining muscle mass as we age—prompted me to start looking at where the largest gaps in our fitness knowledge lie and how we can, on a community level, go about reducing those gaps.

The Research

I initially wanted to create a survey that explored the barriers perceived by people who don’t do strength training. In building it, however, I realized that it’s naive to think only people who don’t lift weights see the stigmas and hear the incorrect facts about the activity. 

As a result, my survey first determines whether the respondent is currently or was recently engaged in a strength training program. If they never have, or it’s been more than 2 years, they are routed to questions about why they avoid strength training. If they fit the former segment, they get the same kinds of questions, worded differently. 

There is no way to cover everything I want to know. Not without alienating the vast majority of folks who begin the survey. I want to know all about why strength training gives people the ick at one point or another, but I’ve got to start somewhere. That’s why the survey asks some basic questions and some follow-ups about how they’d best fill in any comfort or understanding gaps they might have. I also ask for their favourite fitspo folks, not to shame any creators I don’t feel are giving good info, but because I want to understand where people are getting their data and whether their particular barriers might be traceable to a certain type of consumed content (for better or for worse).

Finally, I ask all respondents if they would be interested in discussing their answers further. I hope this will give me a core group I can reach out to for individualized hot takes. I also have a newsletter in the works, so obviously, I’m going to pitch the mailing list.

The Goal

From what I’ve said so far, maybe my goals with this project are pretty obvious, but it gives me a giddy rush to explain them, so here I go again.

When I started my fitness education journey, I was thinking of pivoting my career—either completely or partially—into training. I’ve had the opportunity to build workouts and talk fitness with a number of friends, and it’s been nothing but enjoyable, but it also made me realize two things: 1) I’m gonna need so much more education before I feel comfortable billing myself as a true trainer taking on lots of clients, and 2) I don’t think I want to go that route.

Good personal trainers are amazing folks with tons of knowledge who are out to make people happier and healthier in a positive life- and body-affirming way. They deserve their hourly rate—and then some, probably.

However, what planning this project and survey has shown me is that I’m much more interested in pursuing strength training education from a community standpoint. I want everyone to strength train. While it’s totally possible to educate yourself from the ground up using free resources, many people don’t have the time or inclination. A percentage of those people also don’t have the money to hire a trainer or even go to a gym.

With all that, I see my trajectory taking me to a community recreation organization (that’s British Columbia Parks and Recreation or BCRPA in my case, but they’re everywhere), acting as something along the lines of “Director of Community Fitness Programming” or the like (I totally made up that title but I feel like it must exist). Think building curriculum and discussing government subsidies for community (and maybe school-based) initiatives that ensure we’re educating our citizens on the necessity of movement for continued physical health at all ages, not to mention a reduced toll on healthcare systems.

When I let myself really spin off into dreamland, I picture running seminars for other community orgs that want to implement my team’s ideas and working hand-in-hand with mental health professionals, physical therapists, and other experts to develop holistic programs that meet everyone where they’re at and engage them in something that’ll help them keep moving throughout their whole lives.