Fitness, Faith, and Femininity Part 2

This post is a continuation of our series on Fitness, Faith, and Femininity. You can check out the intro here and the first post here. 

Today I will be answering Sarah’s question. Sarah wrote, “What about the music, images, and clothing that seems to seep into the work out world? Doesn’t that influence your gym?”

This is a subject my husband B and I talk about A LOT. If you Google “crossfit” you will get pictures of men and women in various levels of dress. There is a lot of skin shown in the “crossfit” world. These people are SUPER proud of their bodies and seem to have no qualms about showing it to the world.

I disagree.

My body is not to be viewed by anybody who might walk/drive/bike by while our garage is open for training. My body belongs to my husband. I work out in capris and a crew cut t-shirt every single day. Some women will say, but that is so HOT. My response is usually along the lines of, “I live in Killeen Texas where it is 100+ degrees during the summer and we train at 5:45 the hottest part of the day. I don’t want to hear that you get “too hot” in a workout to wear modest clothes.”  

So what are our standards?

We don’t use the term “crossfit” for our training. We call it training. In our gym we have established a pretty serious set of rules; these are not suggestions or requests. They are rules. If you want to train in our home, you follow these rules.

Shirts stay on in our gym, male or female doesn’t matter.

No strappy shirts, no short shorts.

We bend, jump, run, trip (ok, that is mostly me), climb, lift, and stretch. If you want to wear an outfit to training, put it on at home and do those movement where you can watch yourself in a mirror. I don’t want to see cleavage, or your thighs. If you are wearing something that doesn’t meet our standards for modesty I will pull the woman aside (B would pull a guy aside) and tell them why it doesn’t meet the standard and then provide them with an appropriate piece of clothing to borrow for that day.

So why are we so serious about modesty in our training environment? Our sight is one of the best ways for Satan to sneak in and mess up our world. Sight causes a lot of people (male and female!) to stumble.  Our gym is meant to be a place for Christians to fellowship while they train and discipline their bodies. I do not want someone to come to our gym and be distracted by the clothing that I am wearing. I want the women who come into our gym to feel comfortable having their husbands there. Our gym is also meant to be a place to bring nonbelievers to allow them to see that Christians are real people. We sweat, we fall, we bleed, and we fail. How is our testimony impacted by the clothes we wear? We are called to be set apart, not to blend in. Jesus says that we are called to “let our light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in Heaven” Matthew 5:16.

So when you walk into our gym what will you find? There are no mirrors lining the wall, there are no scantily clad people checking each other out. There are memory verses up on our records wall, and there is a constant focus on Christ in every work out session. 

Shine on!

A reminder: I write this with the hope of encouraging other Christian women to love their bodies and use them. Let me remind everyone that this is a Christian blog. If you can’t be nice, don’t post on this page. Any lewd, discriminatory, or hateful comments will be removed at my discretion.