‘Strong is the new skinny’: Is strength training progress for women or just another body image trap?
Strength Training Is Changing the Conversation About Women’s Fitness
Qwenews.com – For many women, exercise advice once revolved around becoming smaller. Long cardio sessions, calorie counting and appearance-driven goals were often treated as the default path to health. Today, more women are picking up weights, drawn by the practical value of muscle, stronger bones and greater capability through midlife and beyond.
That shift can be genuinely empowering. It can also carry a familiar risk: replacing one narrow ideal with another. When strength is promoted mainly through images of lean, visibly muscular bodies, a health-focused movement can begin to feel like another demand to look a certain way.
From “Buns of Steel” to lifting for function
Writer, educator and parent coach Oona Hanson, whose work focuses on families navigating diet culture and eating disorders, remembers a different fitness message aimed at her Generation X peers. The “Buns of Steel” era was less about performance in the gym than about fitting an aesthetic standard.
Women were often warned away from lifting because they might become “bulky.” Cardio dominated women’s fitness culture for decades. But a growing understanding of the value of maintaining muscle, especially in middle age, has encouraged many women to reconsider resistance training.
Strength work can help support bone density and physical function as people age. Even a modest routine may help address the decline in strength that can accompany getting older. Those benefits give women reasons to train that have little to do with chasing a smaller clothing size.
A healthier goal can still become pressure
Liz Bucar, a professor of religion at Northeastern University in Boston and author of Beyond Wellness: How Restoring the Religious Roots of Spiritual Practices Can Heal Us, once approached fitness almost entirely through cardio and the pursuit of being smaller. In midlife, she has found value in a different perspective.
“We’re all being told, actually, oops, all that advice was terrible.”
Bucar, who now works with a strength coach, described how years of intense cardio and disrupted menstrual health can have consequences for bone health. For her, measuring progress through lifting can feel more protective and less tethered to traditional appearance standards than counting calories.
“I love the idea that we’re creating this whole generation of grandmas who can’t knit and bake or whatever but are the first in our line of ancestors who can lift our husbands over our heads.”
Her point is not that every woman should train the same way. It is that physical capacity can be a meaningful ambition in its own right. Being able to carry groceries, rise from the floor, move furniture or feel steady while navigating daily life can matter far more than whether a body resembles a fitness advertisement.
When “strong” becomes another body standard
Fitness journalist Mikala Jamison sees real promise in strength training. She writes the Body Type newsletter and is the author of the forthcoming book The Forever Project: How Exercise Strengthened Me Inside and Out for the Long Haul. Jamison has described strength work as an important part of her own recovery from an eating disorder.
For people whose past exercise habits were intertwined with diet culture, a focus on what the body can do may offer a more constructive relationship with movement. Jamison describes fitness as an opportunity for women to care for themselves and take up space.
“Taking care of yourself through fitness feels like inarguably a good thing to do. It’s women taking up space.”
Still, she is wary of the slogan “strong is the new skinny.” It may sound liberating, but it can preserve the same old pressure when strength is presented as acceptable only on a conventionally thin body.
“More women are strength training than ever before in America. The benefits of that can’t be overstated. But at the same time, the face of that message is often women who are still objectively small, just with some additional obvious musculature.”
Social media can intensify the problem. While women in bodies of many sizes train for strength, highly curated fitness imagery often promotes a specific visual combination: visibly defined muscles alongside continued thinness. That image can make people feel they have failed even when they are becoming more capable, healthier or more confident.
Strong bodies do not all look alike
Keri Harvey, a certified personal trainer and co-owner of Form Fitness Brooklyn in New York, emphasizes that larger people who lift are too often excluded from popular ideas about athleticism. A body may be strong while still having fat, cellulite or proportions that do not match social-media fitness trends.
“And yet there are people in larger bodies who are strong as well, and their bodies also have cellulite. Their bodies also have fat. And it may not look like the person that you’re seeing on Instagram or the magazine cover, but that is still a strong body.”
Building muscle may not even align with the expectation of making the body smaller. Harvey reminds clients that muscle needs space. Stronger lats can affect bra sizing, while more developed arms may change the way a shirt fits. These changes are not evidence that training has gone wrong; they can simply reflect adaptation.
A more useful measure of progress may be less visual: adding weight gradually, improving balance, feeling more comfortable with movement or developing the confidence to try something new. Strength training does not need to be another project of body surveillance. It can be a practice of support, resilience and respect for bodies as they are.
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