Just Because You Have a Vagina…

Doesn’t mean you have to train like a pussy. I know this revelatory statement doesn’t exactly fall in line with my previous posts directed at women, but it is true. Though women have for millennia been typically dissuaded from becoming athletes, or from engaging in much in the way of physical activity at all, certain women, and groups of women, have excelled as athletes and participants in physical culture. Unfortunately, modern women have in their minds only Eastern European swimmers and farm women in their minds as toilers at lifting heavy weights, and they thus have an altogether mistaken impression of what the results of heavy weight training are.

The most badass female athletes of the ancient world seem to have all come areas around the Near East –the Mediterranean, Southern Russia, and Central Asia. The earliest accounts I could find of women who were renown for both being hot as shit and brutal fucking athletes were the Spartans. Spartan women enjoyed far more freedom than did other Grecian women, and were pretty much like a cross between hardened military wives and WWE female wrestlers- they dressed like total sluts, trained in the nude, and screamed statements like “Come back with your shield, or on it” and “Where have you come now in your cowardly flight, vile varlets? Do you intend to slink in here whence you came forth?”, whereafter the loudmouthed badass pulled up her miniskirt and flashed her vag at her own cowardly sons. (1) Sparta’s women were known for being total bitches, obviously, in addition to being the hottest broads in the entire ancient world, in spite of the fact that they were forbidden from wearing any kind of makeup or wear jewelry of any kind. Gladly, they were well-educated, witty, and ascerbic, and spurned the vapid, shiftless layabouts they saw populating Athenian parties.

Basically, it would be like having one town consisted of nothing but a cross between Jennie McCarthy and a champion fitness competitor publicly mocking the Kardashians, all the while dressed like whores and planning to stab a motherfucker if he didn’t bring the goods later that evening.

The Romans also had their fair share of women athletes, including female gladiators, who were considered something of a violent sexual sideshow. Domitian regularly held brawls between chicks and midgets, for instance, and an inscription at Ostia (had I known this when I was there, I would have tried to find a topless chick to pit against a midget) proclaims that women fought in gladiatorial matches there beginning around 300BC and kept doing so for at least a couple of hundred years. So many Roman women attempted to fight in the arena, apparently, that laws had to be enacted to prevent them from doing so, but that didn’t prevent women from training their asses off, getting jacked, and shedding some fucking blood for the entertainment of the greasy, unwashed, Roman hordes.

See her neck bent down under the weight of her helmet.

Look at the rolls of bandage and tape, so her legs look like tree-trunks,

Then have a laugh for yourself, after the practice is over,

Armour and weapons put down, and she squats as she used the vessel.

Ah, degenerate girls from the line of our praetors and consuls,

Tell us, whom have you seen got up in any such fashion,

Panting and sweating like this? No gladiator’s wench,

No tough strip-tease broad would ever so much as attempt it. (2)

Everyone knows the story of the Amazons, a semi-mythical race of hard-as nails broads from either the Ukraine or Crete, who ruined lives and broke hearts to the point where we’re still making movies about them. Amazonian women were so fucking hard that their customs declared that "No girl shall wed till she has killed a man in battle", they are credited with inventing the battle axe (the labrys, a doubleheaded axe common in Minoan, Thracian, and Greek culture and range in size from 1-6lbs), and they spawned an entire genre of art (amazonomachy), which features buff, big-tittied, angry broads slaughtering Greeks by the boatload.

Another chick from that general neck of the woods who generally got after it was a 13^th C Tatar princess named Aiyaruk. According to David Willoughby, this broad wouldn’t marry anyone she could beat in wrestling, and successfully defeated over 100 suitors over the course of her life. Each many was required to put up 100 horses for the opportunity to wrestle her, and she allegedly amassed over 10000 horses but throat stomping each sorry motherfucker into the ground. Now, this chick was alleged to be a giant, but given that the average height of a Mongol woman is 5’1”, I highly doubt she was over 6’, but she was said to have been stronger than any man in Turkestan. Sick.(3)

Skip forward to modern times. Some chicks appear to be getting the message that lifting weights will not magically turn you into a Slavic farm woman, fat, overly muscular, and generally fucking haggard. Instead, it’ll make you lean, generally improve your outlook on life, and possibly earn you free drinks at the bar when you smoke a couple of dudes in armwrestling. Crossfit has shown, if nothing else, that doing compound lifts will transform chick’s physiques into a level of badassedness that most chicks don’t even believe to be physically possible. Most chicks will continue eating their same shitty diets and fucking around with cardio all days long, and continue to look like a wad of warm cookie dough for their shitty, misapplied, half-assed, laughable efforts. If they properly apply themselves, however, they can look like the following broads:

Vulcana: English pro strongwoman who could do a 2 Hands Anyhow of 201 (bent press 145 lbs, 56 lbs kettlebell in the other hand) at a bodyweight of 125.

Kara Bohigian: Champion powerlifter who dabbles in Oly shit as well- built this body lifting fucking heavy.

Hannah Johnson: IPA National Champ at 132 lbs, and winner of the Harley Davidson Bikini Contest.

Crossfit chicks: They’re hot. The end.

Thus, a few suggestions for any chick who is reading this(as if there is a woman on Earth who reads this), or suggestions you could give chicks who could stand to apply CnP principles:

· Nothing will make chicks huge, outside of heavy anabolic use. The size of their physique will be dictated, by and large, by their diet. Keep it paleo and you’ll keep it tight.

· Lift fucking heavy. We all know what lifting light get you- a shitbox physique to go with your shitbox regime. Form follows function, as the Bulgarians are fond of saying.

· Just because you’re a women does not mean that you need to train less, lighter, or less intensely. The Chinese dominate women’s weightlifting, and their coach has been quoted saying that women have a greater work capacity than men. Bizarre, but true.

· Focus on lower body work- chicks have better leverages for it due to their hip structure, it burns the most calories, and it works the typical female “problem areas” the hardest.

If you know a chick who’s gonna lift, give her those suggestions. If you’ve got a wife/girlfriend/friend who doesn’t want to lift, let her know that she needs to make with some form of grilled meat and stay the fuck out of your way while you're lifting. And by the way, as a bit of motivation for those of you who could care less about broads lifting, Liu Chunhong is a Chinese chick who holds the world record at 152lbs (69 kg), and she clean and jerks 347.6 lbs, snatches 281.6, front squats 440, back squats 506, and JERKS 385 OFF THE FUCKING RACK. (4)

Embarrassed? I sure as fuck am. I’ve never wanted to look like a chick before today. This sucks.

Go pick up something heavy and think about what you’ve not yet done.

1. Plutarch. Moralia. “Sayings of Spartan Women.” http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/Sayings_of_Spartan_Women*.html

2. Juvenal, Satires, c. 2^nd C AD. http://ejmas.com/jcs/jcsart_murray_0703.htm

3. Willoughby, David. The Super Athletes. P.580.

4. Wikipedia. “Liu Chunhong.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Chunhong