“I don’t want to bulk up.” “I do more Pilates and yoga than strength training.”
If you’ve heard phrases like these, or said them yourself, you’re hearing the echo of a message that’s been around for decades: women should train differently than men — lighter, lower intensity, more caution. Two experienced CrossFit coaches recently sat down to talk about why that message has never held up, and what CrossFit has believed about training women since the very beginning.
If you’d rather watch or listen to this conversation, you can do that here.
A Myth That Predates CrossFit, and Still Won’t Die
More than 20 years ago, CrossFit was already pushing back against the idea that women should stick to yoga, Pilates, and toning exercises while avoiding heavy lifting and hard conditioning. That messaging hasn’t disappeared. It shows up any time someone says they’re avoiding strength training because they don’t want to “bulk up,” or they’d rather stick to lower-intensity workouts because that’s what they’ve been told is appropriate for them.
CrossFit’s answer has been consistent since the start: To achieve elite fitness and health, men and women train the same way. That doesn’t mean every individual is treated identically; personal differences always matter. But in general, to build broad, inclusive fitness and real work capacity, the adaptations men and women are chasing are the same.
One of the clearest examples: the sport of gymnastics doesn’t put women on rings. CrossFit does, and always has. Today, women are crushing it on rings in CrossFit gyms everywhere.
From the Weight Room to the Whiteboard
Rewind 20 years, and even in collegiate strength and conditioning programs, women weren’t lifting heavy. Women’s training leaned toward endurance work and machines, not complex, loaded movement. CrossFit helped change that mindset. Now it’s normal to see women doing pull-ups and Olympic lifts regularly, right alongside men.
The results followed. General fitness improved for people who had plateaued under old approaches. Markers like bone density improved, too — something that matters for everyone, but comes up constantly in conversations specifically about women’s health.
What ‘Training the Same’ Actually Looks Like
So what does this look like in practice? Women should be doing dedicated strength training, heavy days, just like men. They should train with intensity at least a couple of times a week. That intensity is always relative to the individual, but the coaching should be clear: Don’t hold women back. Programming should include the same variance that CrossFit is known for.
Nutrition follows the same logic. It gets individualized, but it starts from the same basic principles for everyone: enough protein, good whole, unprocessed foods, in the right amounts. Get that in place, and you’re in the ballpark, no matter who you are.
The Menopause Conversation
There’s a lot of noise right now around perimenopausal and menopausal women and how their training supposedly needs to be different. Strip away the noise, and much of that advice ends up sounding a lot like standard CrossFit programming: strength training, hard and intense exercise, and other activities layered in for enjoyment.
The individualization that does happen isn’t about changing the program’s principles; it’s about a coach adjusting to what an athlete can handle on a given day, physically and psychologically, whether that’s related to menopause, a hard week at work, or where someone is in their monthly cycle. That kind of in-the-moment adjustment applies to every athlete, not just women going through a specific life stage.
Menopause and perimenopause bring real risks: loss of bone density, muscle mass, and strength. Those are exactly the things heavy lifting and intense training help prevent. This is more than aging gracefully. It’s aging elitely, and the CrossFit Games Masters division is proof of what’s possible. Masters athletes don’t follow a special program. They lift heavy, push with intensity, eat well, and stay active, which are the same fundamentals available to anyone.
Individual Coaching Isn’t the Same as a Different Program
It’s worth drawing a clear line here: Coaches absolutely make individual adjustments, for any athlete, based on what they’re seeing that day. That’s not the same as maintaining a separate set of training principles for women. The program’s principles don’t change. How a coach applies them to a specific person, on a specific day, does.
Training Through Pregnancy and Postpartum
The same philosophy carries into pregnancy. Rather than following a blanket rule like “stop lifting after the second trimester,” the approach is conservative and communicative: constantly checking in, asking how something feels, adjusting day to day based on the athlete’s answers.
That doesn’t mean anything goes. Coaches should make sensible modifications tied to real injury risk, not fear. Late in a pregnancy, that might mean skipping inversions or a rope climb, not because pregnant women can’t do them, but because the risk of a fall isn’t worth it when the goal can be met another way. It also doesn’t mean pretending every week feels good. Some weeks, an athlete might feel nauseous, exhausted, or unable to eat well, and training takes a back seat while the coach focuses on helping the athlete feel better and keep moving. That’s true for any athlete going through a hard stretch, not just pregnancy.
At no point does “you’re a woman” or “you’re pregnant” become a blanket reason to stop. The goal stays the same: maximizing health and fitness for the individual in front of you.
The Proof Is in the Results
Eric O’Connor (CF-L4) works with athletes ranging from 45 to 85 years old and regularly tracks scans and metrics. The pattern holds up: lean body mass increases, athletes gain muscle, and the results speak for themselves, often before any explanation is needed.
That objectivity is part of why CrossFit coaches trust this approach over messaging built on hypotheticals. As one put it, paraphrasing a well-known line from CrossFit founder Coach Greg Glassman: Write your fitness goals on a piece of paper, seal them in an envelope, and set them aside. Do CrossFit for six months. Pull the envelope back out, and you’ll find yourself moving in the right direction, whatever you wrote down. The intensity and the movements are where the results come from, for men and women, at any stage of life.
A Video That Changed What People Thought Was Possible
Much of this mindset shift traces back to a single video from 2005, where three athletes — Nicole Carroll, Eva Twardokens, and Annie Sakamoto — were performing hang power cleans and muscle-ups in the original CrossFit gym in Santa Cruz, California. It later became known as Nasty Girls. At the time, it showed people something they didn’t know was possible, or didn’t know women were doing. That kind of proof, watching real results happen, carries more weight than any study.
No Shame in Scaling
There’s one more thing worth saying plainly: There’s no shame in scaling to the “women’s” weight in a workout. That’s not a lesser version of training. It’s the same program, applied to you, and it’s exactly what people should expect to see and celebrate at any CrossFit gym.
About the Author
Stephane Rochet is a Senior Content Writer for CrossFit. He has worked as a Flowmaster on the CrossFit Seminar Staff and has over 15 years of experience as a collegiate/tactical strength and conditioning coach. He is a Certified CrossFit Trainer (CF-L3) and trains athletes in his garage.