How I became (nearly) as strong as the average untrained man - EMF 2026

Hi everyone. Thanks so much for coming today. This is the story of how I became roughly as strong as the average untrained man. So before I jump into my story, I wanted to tell you a little bit about myself. So, I'm Jenny. I'm not a professional. I wasn't particularly sporty. I just started weight training about three years ago, and I found that it had an enormously positive effect on my life. And it also radicalized me a bit because it turns out it's actually not that hard to get roughly as strong as the average untrained man. And it made me slightly angry actually because I had thought that I'd been when I'd gone to the gym previously that I was training towards getting stronger. And I realized that a lot of what I was doing wasn't actually very effective and that actually with just a little bit of knowledge I could have been stronger for a long time in the past without very much effort. So with that as my kind of starting point let's jump into the next slide. So these are the main topics that I want to cover today. Firstly, why as a woman would you want to get stronger? Secondly, how I became stronger. And thirdly, some tips and tricks to help you get stronger, too. The other thing I want to say at this point as well is that obviously um I I am a woman and this is kind of the story of how I became stronger. So, this talk is kind of geared up as if you were a female beginner, too. But that being said, strength training is pretty similar regardless of your gender identity. And obviously, everybody is welcome here and the tips and tricks remain pretty much the same however you identify. Okay. So why as a woman might you want to get stronger? Well, the first thing is that it makes your life easier. Now life is full of picking up heavy things. And I have some examples mostly from EMF camp of me picking up heavy things. So the tent carrying it from the car to uh where we pitched our tent. Um this is me picking up a gas canister as well using a hammer to do the heavy hammer thing uh null sector and also carrying a rucks sack on a hike. But of course, there are lots of other times in your life when you need to pick up heavy things. So, picking up children, uh carrying heavy shopping, uh lifting things off, putting a suitcase into an overhead locker on an airplane or on a train. All of these things become easier when you are stronger. Another reason you might want to get stronger is that it can make your life better in your old age, too. So, this is some data from a study that was looking at two groups of adults at various ages. And in orange we have a group who were weightlifting and in blue we have a control group. So the orange group were people who actually weightlifted competitively and the control group were kind of more sort of regular adults. And what we can see is that as people get older even if you are somebody who is you know weightlifting and competing at a very high level your strength or your peak power does decline but you do keep this gap. So you can see even sort of the 70 to 79 and 80 to 89 range there's this gap between the weightlifting and the control group. And that's a very important gap to me because that might be the gap between me being able to go to the toilet by myself and not being able to go to the toilet by myself. So, I'm very motivated to continue weightlifting as I get older. One thing I think that sometimes people are concerned about when um thinking about starting a new strength training regime is this idea that lifting weights might be dangerous. And I don't think that's actually that well supported by the data. So obviously all sport has some risk of injury and weightlifting is no exception. But when you kind of look at sort of the data that is available and admittedly the quality of the data is not brilliant. It doesn't look as if weight training comes out as being particularly dangerous. So this is some survey based data from high school athletes and this what that kind of suggests is that well firstly rugby looks like you are relatively likely to get injured playing rugby. Um, but compared even with things like athletics and soccer, weight training actually comes out as a relatively low risk of injury per 100 hours that you're doing the exercise. Another thing that sometimes people say when I kind of try to advocate for weight training is that they think they're too old to start. And that's definitely not true. There is actually quite good data to support this. So older adults can have big strength gains from heavy strength training. And what I have here is a figure from a meta analysis that's looking at multiple different studies where you basically they're all kind of based around this idea where you'll have a group of adults who haven't done any strength training and then you introduce them to some sort of strength training regime. And you can see even when you're looking at adults who are over 80 years old, they're getting quite high percentages in strength gain per session. So in other words, how much they can lift each session. So across publications, you see a 2.5% increase in maximum force per strength training session on average. And like I said, that's even for adults who are over 80 years old. So it is never too late to start. The amount like the kind of peak amount of weight you could possibly lift might be smaller, but whatever age you start at, it's reasonable to expect that you can get stronger. Another one that people sometimes kind of stumble across is thinking, well, that all sounds nice, Jenny, but I don't think I can keep up a regular gym schedule. If that's the case, this is the sport for you. If you're the sort of person who every January thinks, right, this is the year I'm going to get fit this year, goes to the gym for two or three months, and then stops, strength training is a really great option. And the reason for this is that if you're doing cardiobased training, all of the gains that you get from that sort of two to three month training period will be gone within a few weeks by and large. Whereas, if you're doing strength training, it's a bit different. So this is data from a study where there was a group of women um who were put onto a strength training program for 12 weeks and you can as you can see um the amount that they were able to leg press increased over that time and then they had this d-training period where they just stopped training altogether and unsurprisingly over that time when they then started their retraining at week 24 they had lost a lot of strength but they weren't going back to where they'd started. they'd actually still maintained some of the strength gain that they had built up in that first 12 weeks. And then once they started retraining again, they quickly within about four weeks or so got back to where they were at the peak of their last training session and then exceeded it. And finally, another reason I think that sometimes people don't want to start strength training is that they're worried their body will change in a way they don't like. And in a way, I think this is the most complicated side of the presentation because that's so personal. It depends on what you how you want your body to be. I guess I have a few thoughts that I want to kind of explore here and then but I'm not going to claim that I've kind of got this all worked out. If people want to talk about it in the Q&A session afterwards, I'm very up for a conversation about it. But the first thing I want to say is I think the idea that women's bodies should be small and dainty and implicitly weak is one of these kind of subtly toxic misogynistic ideas that we should challenge. There's nothing wrong with being big and strong and a woman. Um, and the other thing that I guess I would also want to say here is that actually it's quite difficult to gain significant muscle. I think that a lot of the images we see are people who take quite a lot of steroids. Um, but actually if you're not doing that is quite difficult to get really muscly. So for example, I can deadlift about 75 kilos, which is not a huge amount in the grand scheme of things, but I look pretty normal and it's a lot more than I could lift before I started training. Um, so certainly if your goal is to get about as strong as the average untrained man, for most people that wouldn't come with a huge amount of muscle mass gain really. Okay. So hopefully I've motivated you to think, okay, I want to start strength training. So the next thing I want to do is to walk a little bit through my strength training journey. Okay, so this is my life and in athletic achievements. It's not very impressive because I am not very athletic. So my first sports day, age five, I came last in everything because I just did not care. And then I finished primary school and I was picked for zero sports teams, which was perfect because I hated PE. The highlight of my school academic um athletic achievements was in secondary school when I was a reserve on the hockey B team and I think I played one match in the entire term and that was perfect. There was then about 10 years where I didn't really do any significant exercise at all. Like I probably occasionally like went for a run and things like that, but it wasn't really any structured um exercise happening in that time. I got my first ever gym membership around the age of 25. I then started climbing or bouldering uh a few years later and then at the age of about 29, I started lifting weights and within a few months I became roughly as strong as a man. Yeah, [laughter] thank you. But interestingly enough, you might think, okay, so when you got your first ever gym membership, that was when you started building strength, right? No, I didn't really start building any significant strength until I started bouldering. So, what was going on there? Because I was actually trying to build strength when I first joined the gym. I was going to body pump classes where it'd be a big room of people and you'd pick up these light weights and then there was the dreaded squat track where you would do squats continuously with your 5 kilo weight for six minutes. And I thought that was really hard. Surely that means I'm going to get stronger. But I didn't. So what was that all about? And the reason that I wasn't really getting any stronger when I was doing that sort of thing is because I didn't understand the concept of pro progressive overload. Um, and this is a really important concept. Basically, if you understand this and you can apply it, then you can probably get stronger. Um, and it's not very complicated. I was quite angry when I learned about it and then applied it and it worked that no one had told me about it before because I could have just been doing it. [laughter] Um, so essentially if you want to do a progressive overload based uh strength training program, the first step will be you need to decide how many reps and sets you want to do of your chosen exercise. And these should be small numbers. This is important. So I, for example, you could be doing three to eight reps of your exercise for three to five sets. So that would mean, for example, let's say you decided you wanted to do five reps and you're doing squats. You would do your five squats with your weight. Then you would rest for a minute or two. And then you would do that three to five times. And then you need to choose a weight for your exercise. So, the weight that you choose should be challenging but not impossible for your chosen number of reps and sets. It's okay to, for example, be a little bit wobbly when you're coming back up on your final squat. And the final set should probably feel reasonably tricky, but you shouldn't be kind of like, you know, injuring yourself or falling over or anything like that. That means the weight is too heavy. And then once you can complete the exercise with good form for your chosen number of reps and sets, you should increase the weight or the number of reps, but you shouldn't be doing more than say a total of about 25 or so reps over all of your sets. So for example, if you're doing 5x5 sets, so that' be five reps and five sets, then you shouldn't increase the sets, the number of repetitions you do anymore beyond that. You should just increase the weight if you are able to do it for 5x5. And then you just keep repeating this. So you you keep on increasing the weight until you can do it for your chosen number of reps and sets. And then once you're kind of comfortable doing that with good form, you just keep going until eventually you'll find that you can't do it anymore. So once I started applying this, actually I got stronger really quickly. So this is some data from my first three months of uh weight training. Um so this was for a deadlift. So, for anyone who doesn't know, a deadlift is the lift where if you have a barbell on the ground, you bend down, pick up the barbell, and then put it back on the ground. So, quite a useful lift. It's quite functional because you're picking up things all the time in your life, right? Um, so yeah, once I started doing progressive overload, uh, we start off in March at about 40 kilos, I already was reasonably strong, so I've been climbing for a bit. And then by the time that we got to mid June, I was able to deadlift about 72 1/2 kg. And 60 to 80 kg is considered to be about a standard beginner deadlift weight for an untrained man. Hence my claim that I'm kind of nearly roughly as strong as the average untrained man. Okay. So hopefully you're feeling motivated now that this is something that you can do too and that you want to do. So how would you get started? So before you start lifting, I do have some health and safety advice. I am not a professional and strength training like all exercises carries a risk of injury and any strength training that you choose to carry out is obviously at your own risk. Please be sensible if you have a health condition that might affect your ability to exercise safely. Talk to a doctor before you start strength training. And don't ignore injuries. If you have any persistent pain during or after strength training, again, talk to a medical professional. All kind of common sense stuff. I also have some uh lifting specific uh safety advice. So, if you aren't sure how to use gym equipment, ask someone to show you, preferably a member of staff at the gym. Um don't just try and guess because especially if you're doing things with heavy weights, that is again how injuries can happen. And some general advice, if you are lifting weights, always think what would happen if I dropped this weight? If I lower the weight and can't raise it back to the starting position, what would I do? And if you're doing barbell squats or a bench press, always perform the exercise with safety pins. Squat inside and not outside the squat rack. So again, to show the video from the start to kind of illustrate some of these points, this is me squatting inside a squat rack. Now on if you're looking at people kind of doing squats on social media, often you'll see them not squatting in the squat rack. I think the main reason for this is it looks better because this is really busy. But it's much safer to do it like this, especially if you're just starting out, because you can see there are these pins where if I get to the bottom of my squat and go, "Oh no, I can't get back up." I don't just get crushed under the bar. I can just lower the bar onto the pins and then crawl out from underneath. And it's a little bit embarrassing, but the only thing that's been damaged is my ego. Um, so yeah, I would recommend doing this. And again, if something if somehow, you know, at the top of the lift I trip over, again, the the pins will catch the barbell, so I won't get crushed underneath the weight. So, that's the sort of thing that you should be thinking about before you start. Just make sure you're happy with all of that. Okay. So, I've kind of introduced you to the concept of progressive overload, but there obviously is a lot more to that in terms of kind of getting started with a full strength training program. And I would really recommend when you're starting out um at the gym, making sure that you're going in with some kind of plan. Um so I have here a couple of resources that I used when I was starting out that I found useful. I'm not affiliated with either of the resources that I'm going to um recommend. Um I don't get any kickback or anything like that. These are just resources that I found useful and that you might find useful, too. So the first one is a book called Liftoff Couch to Barbell. It's an ebook. It cost about $20. So, it's not free, but I say it is a really useful resource. It's written by a woman and again, it's kind of geared towards women. And this is really useful because it starts with unweighted exercises. Um, for instance, using a broom handle and works up to doing the exercises with dumbbells and barbells. And you can kind of start at different points depending on how much strength you already have. But I say this is a really good resource, especially if you're maybe feeling a bit nervous about going to the gym for the first time because you can just start this at home. Um, and it's also a really good resource if you're not already strong enough to lift the barbell for say the bench press or the overhead press, which is quite common for female beginners. The other thing that's really great about this particular resource is that it contains links to videos teaching the proper form and the exercises outlined in the book. And I think that's really really valuable because if you Google or go into YouTube and type in uh good form for squats, you will get thousands of videos. But anybody can upload a video onto YouTube and some of them do not in fact have good form. Um, so it's really helpful to have somebody who's already done that filtering and to help you find videos that will actually teach you good form properly. Uh, the other resource that I say I found quite useful was a free resource called Strong Lifts 5X5. This one you can just Google uh because it's all online. Um, it does provide text and picture guides on form for the exercises provided, but I'd say it's a little bit less comprehensive. The big thing that I say is kind of worth bearing in mind for this one is that the program assumes you can already lift the barbell for all exercises. The barbell weighs about 20 kilos uh for reference. So that might not be true for bench press and for overhead press for a lot of female beginners. It wasn't true for me. I couldn't it took me a while to be able to work up to be able to lift 20 kilos over my head. Okay. So what do you need to get started? You need a flat pair of trainers. This is important. So, you don't want a pair of like cushioned trainers or a pair of like heeled shoes. You want the soles to be flat. So, think like a Converse or a pair of bands. Uh that being said, this is a pair of shoes from Sainsburries. Uh they cost I think £8 or something like that. And they've lasted like 3 years, so you definitely don't need anything fancy. Um you also obviously need a water bottle. I don't think I need to say that on a day like today. Um, you need, I'd say, a plan for what you're going to do when you get into the gym because otherwise, for me at least, I walk in and I'm like, "Oh my god, there's so much equipment. What am I doing? How much can I lift? How do I use the equipment?" So, I would really recommend getting yourself a plan. And the easiest way to do that is to use one of these training programs as a starting point. And if you are doing barbell lifts, especially for the first time, or if you're using any equipment for the first time that you haven't used before, I would really recommend having somebody show you how to use the equipment safely, especially for how to safely use a squat rack to make sure the pins are at the right height andor a bench press rack again to make sure it's set up in such a way that if you did fail a lift, you wouldn't get hurt. So, the other thing that you'll need obviously is a gym membership. So, there are a few things that you might want to think about when you're choosing a gym, assuming that you don't already have a membership. There's some kind of like very kind of simple things and obvious things like how busy is it? Uh, are there going to be cues for the equipment you want to use? How much does the membership cost? Is the gym in a convenient location? Ideally, you want it to be somewhere that you pass regularly, like partway along your commute. Um, some other things that may be a little less obvious, but quite important. Are there staff around who you can ask if you're not sure how to use a piece of equipment? Um, that's quite important, I'd say, actually, even if you're more experienced because you might at some point decide, oh, actually, I do want to use that thing with cables over there, but I don't really understand it. Another thing that you want to look into is what increment their dumbbells go up in. So, if you can't lift the bar immediately over your head or press it, then you'll probably end up starting out with dumbbells. And that means that you're going to want to um make sure that the increments are small enough that you can progress. So it's best if the gap between the different dumbbell weights is 1 kilo. So in other words, that mean if you were looking at the dumbbell rack, let's say that you started off with a 5 kilo dumbbell, the next one should be 6 kilos. Some gyms will go up in 2.5 kilo increments. So that would mean that the first one would be 5 kilos and the next one would be 7.5 kilos. That's okay. It's workable, but it's not ideal. you might find it a bit harder to progress if they go up in 5 kilo increments. So it's like the first one is 5 kilos and the next one is 10 kilos. That's basically useless. Um you will find it really difficult to progress. And I'd say that that would be a reason not to choose a gym. Uh similarly, if you want to use some machines, you want to check what weight increments they go up in. And again, smaller is better. It's much easier to get stronger when you progress in small increments. And then if you're thinking, okay, actually I'd like to learn how to use the barbell. There are some barbell specific things that you might like to look out for. So firstly, do they have lighter barbells? So the standard barbell is 20 kg, but there are 10 and 15 kilo bars in existence, but not all gyms carry them. So that might be something you'd like to look out for. The other thing that I'd say is quite important as a female beginner to look out for is whether they have bumper plates for lighter weights. So, what this means is that the kind of traditional um barbell plates are made of metal. And basically, the lighter the weight, the smaller the circumference of the plate. And that's problematic because let's say that you like, okay, I want to start out my deadlift with 30 kilos, so with two 5 kilo plates on the end of the 20 kilo bar. That means that the bar will be really, really close to the ground. And that makes the lift much harder and it's hard to do it with good form. So, what you want is a gym where they have these like colorful rubberized plates where all of the plates are the same size regardless of the weight. Um, up to 5 kilos at least. They're like if they carry 2.5 and 1.25 kilo plates, then those will be smaller and that's kind of unavoidable. Um, but yeah, that's something that's definitely worth looking out for because it will make especially lifts like deadlift much easier. You want to check what the smallest barbell plates they carry are, and the only acceptable answer to this is 1.2. 0.25 kg or less. Um the reason for that is that otherwise you will just find it very difficult to progress uh some of your heavier lifts. And then some kind of again like some sort of things that are related to how busy the gym is. Do they have a squat rack and how many squat racks do they have and how busy are they? Do they have separate racks for bench press and a separate deadlifting platform? These things are not essential, but if they don't, it means there's going to be a bigger queue basically for the squat racks because it means all of the barbell lifts are going to be pushed onto one piece of equipment and it can take quite a long time to complete a barbell workout. So, you might end up waiting for really quite a long time for that equipment to come free. The most important piece of advice I have is make sure you're happy with the gym's safety before you start lifting. Always think, what would happen if I failed this lift? And if you think it would be dangerous to fail a lift, get someone to show you how to fail it safely. And also make sure you can fail it safely with the empty barbell. There's absolutely nothing wrong with just putting on the 20 kg barbell, you know, squatting to the bottom of it, and then just making sure that you're able to drop it onto the bar safely, onto the pins safely. That's fine. That's just a sensible thing to do when you're first starting out to make sure you're happy that if you did fail with a heavier weight that it would be safe. Okay. So a few kind of final things before I kind of wrap up. So people often kind of think a bit worry a bit as well about whether they need to radically change their diet in order to start a strength training program. There is a lot of stuff about this online. I'm going to kind of give you a very brief summary here. If you're wanting to change your diet to start strength training, the general advice is more protein is better. My other piece of advice would be it is much harder to build muscle and get stronger if you're in a calorie deficit. So if you are starting a progressive overload program for the first time, I wouldn't recommend attempting to lose weight at the same time. And the reason for this is just that you might find it quite frustrating. It's just going to be much harder to get stronger whilst you're in a calorie deficit. And if you're feeling really tired and not progressing at the gym, um my other piece of advice would be just ask your GP for a blood test to rule out any vitamin deficiencies because sometimes that can be a sign that maybe your iron is a bit low or something like that. Uh so then in terms of the um importance or not of diet so for me I didn't change my diet beyond making a vague uh effort to eat a bit more protein and eating a bit more because I was hungry in my the months where I increased my deadlift from 40 to 72 kilos. Um and for reference I eat a largely vegan diet. So it's not as if my diet is like super high in protein to begin with. A lot of programs suggest counting calories uh usually because you should kind of eat a little bit more because you're building muscle ideally. I've never done this because I just don't want to. It doesn't make me happy. Um and it seems to have been fine. Uh I also only lifted twice a week rather than the recommended two times a week in all of the programs and I still got a lot stronger. So all of that is to say that when you're especially when you're first starting out a program actually it's quite easy to get quite a lot stronger without much effort. is kind of more when you're trying to get I don't know say from like 95 kilo deadlift to 100 kilo deadlift that maybe these kind of things about diet and how many times you're training and so on start to become much more important but you can get a huge amount of progress without everything being perfect especially when you're first starting out I think sometimes we get a bit into a mindset where it's like ah a professional athlete would do it like this so I should also do it like this but I'm not a professional athlete like I'm okay being kind of mediocre but a bit stronger longer than I otherwise would be. And the final thing that people sometimes think about, should you change your training based on your menstrual cycle? And the short answer is we don't really know because all of the studies are kind of rubbish. So studies on the relationship between phase of menstrual cycle and of athletic performance have found conflicting results. I think the main reason for this is that the studies are often quite poor quality. They often have a small sample size and they often don't control for hormonal contraception, which seems like quite a big oversight when the whole thing you're trying to do is investigate the relationship between the phase in your hormonal cycle and your athletic performance. So, we don't really know if there's a relationship between menstrual cycle phase and athletic performance. So, what I would recommend is basically work out what's right for you. Um, for myself, if I don't feel like training when I'm kind of in PMS or at the start of my uh, period, then sometimes I don't go to the gym because I know I won't enjoy it and that makes it harder to go the next time. But sometimes I feel like actually I will feel a bit better if I move my body around a bit and I'll go and sometimes that works out. So just see see what works for you. Okay, so that's pretty much everything I wanted to talk about today. So, I'll finish up with an action plan for getting started. Hopefully, you're feeling motivated to begin a progressive overload program. So, the first step is decide which program you want to use to get started. Uh, like I said, I'd recommend either Strong Lifts 5X5 or Liftoff Couch to barbell. Uh, you obviously need to then obtain a gym membership, shoes, and a water bottle. You need to get somebody to show you to use any equipment that you don't know how to use for the progressive overload program and then you can begin. So, thanks so much for coming to my talk and if you have any questions, I'll be in the Q&A tent just after. Thank you. [applause]