I lift heavy weights and am pretty strong for a woman of my size, but one area of weakness that I work hard at improving to not much avail is my grip strength. I can deadlift a 240 lb barbell with a symmetrical overhand grip for one rep, so my grip is relatively strong in short bursts compared to a woman who doesn’t lift weights, but I’d never know it for all the stuff I can’t do around the house!
I have to run jar lids under hot water and hit them with a butterknife to get them open. I have to carry heavy grocery bags with their handles in the crook of my elbow, because my hands will drop them. I have to carry soda case boxes with both hands, because I can’t get a good one-handed grip on the end from any angle. The other night I made corn on the cob for dinner and tried to snap a large cob in half so it would fit in the pot, and I just couldn’t do it. It’s a pain in the ass to know you are indeed strong enough to all this heavy stuff, but you have to make accommodations or do it in multiple steps just because your dumb hands will give out on you if you try to do it all at once.
I’ve tried using spring weights to increase my grip strength, but…man, they hurt.
I am very fortunate to have inherited the feminine poise of my mother as well as the strength,stamina and high motabolism from my father. I can lift just as much weight as my brother’s and my husband but I have to weigh in on the argument. I disagree that training with weight is how to gain strength as a woman,because your a woman right,you don’t want to lose that feminine softness that is unique to being a woman. Sure there is benefit in some weight training but if you want to be able to start the mower it’s more about core strength. If you are dedicated and feel like improving physically the best way is Pilates or something similar as it does increase strength dramatically if you persevere and as a bonus it tones you long and lean so you can start that mower gain subtle tone and definition and you will be smokin’ hot while pushing the mower. I am 40 and I just started Pole fitness classes with all 20 y O women that can’t keep up. I promise you if you dedicate 6 month and be 100 percent dedicated with Pilates 3-4 times a week and walk or jog on 2 of the other days you will do more than the mower
I know this is a zombie thread, but I have to respond to this.
Cautioning women not to weight train because it will make them look unattractive and unfeminine is bothersome. I got “muscled shamed” years ago by my father and it still (stupidly) haunts me. Messages like this make a negative impact and probably lead to women being weaker than they need to be.
Women shouldn’t have to worry about making themselves hot all the time. The OP is about acquiring strength, not making her body look a certain way.
I’m a stubborn man with a stubborn mower and I think of this thread every time I’ve just about worn out my shoulder after 80 pulls and the thing still just sits there unmowingly.
What would I do if I wasn’t as strong as I am? Or when I get older? My window air conditioners are a pain in the ass but I can manage for now. Will there come a day that I can’t change a car tire or battery? It’s scary and, while I can’t fully place myself in the yardwork shoes OP wears, I do get it.
Plus the notions of what is “hot,” if that’s important to you, are not set in stone. They vary from place to place and from time to time and from subculture to subculture.
I would also like to point out that there are men who find it difficult to start those yank-the-cord mowers and that’s why you see a lot of people selling and buying lawn mowers with easier start mechanisms.
The OP kind of implies that the lack of strength to accomplish a specific task constitutes a feminine characteristic. That seems related to the cult of toxic masculinity as much as anything.
Just for one basic thing: goats don’t like grass very much, they are browsers (they like shrubbery). Morgenstern must have meant to say buy a sheep. But sheep don’t like to be alone, so get three sheep. See where this is going?
if you have a small lawn maybe a push mower is the way to go. A sharp push mower is a forgotten but perfectly cromulent machine.
It’s pure reflex; developed in some people who drove before seatbelts were standard, and ingrained so deeply that it’s automatic. The part of her head that’s doing that is paying no attention to whether you’re grown up now, or for that matter to whether you’re wearing a belt and surrounded by airbags.
I may have told this story before on these boards: somewhere back in the 1970’s, a friend and I had a flat tire. We couldn’t get the lug nuts off to change the tire. We put a cheater bar on the lug wrench, and couldn’t get the nuts off. We jumped on the cheater bar; didn’t work. We gave up and called a garage.
The guy who came out took one look at us and said something along the lines of ‘Hah. Girls. Of course you can’t get the lug nuts off!’
It was worth needing to have the car hauled in to the shop to be able to laugh at him when he couldn’t get them off either. Whoever had last put them on had gotten a little too enthusiastic with the power wrench; there was no way they were coming off without power tools.
Yeah, this. Many of the tools, grips, etc. are designed for male-size hands. Sure, that allows for more leverage; but they don’t design them too big for men’s hands, now do they? even though that would allow for more leverage yet.
There are tools designed for smaller hands; they may be harder to find, but in most cases they exist. Some of them even aren’t pink.
Don’t give a damn about it, myself.
I’m just as much a woman with muscles as without them. Maybe more.
But this doesn’t mean I can brute force every problem I encounter.
The magic trick for jars btw is double-sided tape around the outside of the lid
And many times my body type is suboptimal; e.g. my hands are too big for certain fiddly repair jobs, and any work that needs squatting down near the ground, my knees have a veto.
All of us have physical limitations and need to be resourceful sometimes, I think it’s a mistake to frame things as “How do single women cope?”, even if the OP is speaking from the perspective of a single woman herself.
Recently, I came across a post on Reddit written by a woman who–like myself–prides herself for being tough and mechanical and independent. She was sad because in her effort to wrench off a stuck lug nut, she had rounded it, thus making it even more stuck. And she was afraid the car mechanic she took the problem to was going to laugh at her for being a dumb girl.
I felt like I could have written that OP.
I know what you are saying about weakness being universal and not the domain of any one gender. But nontheless the feeling of shame and embarrassment a person feels can come from a genderized place. Women are constantly being told to rely on men to fix our problems. So when we stray from this advice and come against failure, it stings. It stings in a different way than when a man fails at something. When I fail at something because of physical weakness or lack of dexterity, I hear a little voice in my head: “You are a stupid girl trying to do something you have no business trying to do. If you just had a man, you wouldn’t be in this predicament.” The predicament could be anything from being stuck on the side of the road in the pouring rain to not being able to start a lawnmower.
So this is why my OP was addressed specifically to women. I wanted to hear tales from other women who experience this kind of self-talk. Don’t worry; I know it is irrational. I know it is toxic. I just wanted to someone to help me not feel so weird about it.
It comes from being socialized to see lawn mowing as manly work. monstro and I grew up in a home where chores weren’t 100% split by gender (my father did laundry and frequently cooked), yet yard work was always something only my dad and brother were responsible for. My sisters and I were never even taught how to operate a lawnmower. It remained an object of mystery to me.
Now as an adult, even though I know damn well mowing the grass is well within my capabilities, I admit to having a mental block when it comes to the whole thing. I still have not operated a lawnmower. My husband has explained the mechanics of how to work our electric one and he showed me how simple it is, but my brain still thinks it must too hard for me to do. So I just don’t bother.
I’m fully aware of how irrational this is, and it’s exactly why I believe the way we are socialized early in life matters in lot. If I’d encountered the difficulties monstro had described in the OP, my brain would have instantly screamed “See, this is why Daddy never had you do this shit!”
(Yes, I’m aware that this is the second post I’ve made in this thread in which my father come across as a sexist prick. He’s really not a horrible person, I promise.)
Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine we had evolved as considerably shorter, more delicate, lighter-bodied creatures with less physical strength. How would be cope?
• The tools would not be the tools we have now. They would have different handle lengths, different overall weights. The pull cords would be engineered not to require a pull strength that exceeded what many people using the devices could attain. The sledgehammers would not be so heavy that we could scarcely lift them and couldn’t aim them effectively if we did.
• Things that a person could not do alone would be done as part of a team effort, or with tools. Humans as they actually exist don’t walk out onto the streets and sidewalks after a hurricane and grab downed oak trees and hoist them up against their hips and walk off with them. We also don’t feel pathetic or weak because we can’t. We aren’t elephants.
•If we evolved as a patriarchy with the same sexist attitudes and had the same kind of sexual dimorphism, there might be the same tendency for the tools to have been developed with the stronger male physique in mind — male as “normal”, female as “weak” — and the notion of the female folks as “the weaker sex” could be just as eroticized or fetishized, or just as connected with the sense of what is appropriate for girls and women, as we have now. But the male individuals in this hypothetical society would be scarcely able to do the physical tasks that the female people in our real life species can do now.
The last time our father came to visit me, the first thing he did when we pulled up in front of my house was to compliment me on the nice-looking yard. I was pleasantly surprised. Then he said, “I was afraid it was going to be so wild and overgrown that I would have to do something about it.”
