To keep fit, the Omaha Daily Bee advised back in 1911, women should try “the imaginary motion of lifting a piano” and the real-life challenge of pulling a cork from a bottle. “Hold the bottle between your knees and pull and pull at the tightly driven cork,” the writer advised. Sadly, she didn’t specify how many sets and reps of cork-pulling one should aspire to, but she did promise that it would firm up the abdominal muscles and reduce the hips.
It’s worth keeping this sort of patronizing and nonsensical advice in mind as we contemplate what exercise advice women need these days. After leaving the imaginary-piano period behind, researchers moved on to assuming that men’s and women’s training should be more or less the same, or at least that training for women could be extrapolated from studies conducted almost exclusively on men. More recently, the pendulum has swung back. Women, many experts now believe, need advice that takes into account menstrual cycles, menopause, pregnancy, body composition and hormonal profile, differing hydration needs, and so on. It’s not always clear, though, which…
