My decision to research female free weights trainers arose through my personal involvement in sport and fitness as well as my academic interest in the female body. As a competitive football player, I took part in weekly strength and conditioning sessions with my teammates. I enjoyed weight training so much that I completed additional sessions on my own, beyond those required for football training. Over a two-year period, I became more confident in the free weights areas, began to use the areas independently without a coach and started to programme my own training regime. Because of my enjoyment, I became a qualified gym instructor (in February 2014) and a personal trainer (in June 2014) and developed a passion for writing health and fitness programmes for others. I subsequently interviewed for a Graduate Fitness Officer position, in summer 2014, which gave me the opportunity to work within a fitness facility and embark on a postgraduate research degree at the same time.
Through my role as a Fitness Officer working with clients on a one-to-one basis, I became increasingly aware that many women who were new to the gym engaged in exercise to lose weight and tone their muscles but were nervous about becoming too muscular. Working more closely with women who wanted to train in the free weights areas, I found that they did so for a variety of reasons. For instance, while many women sought to improve muscle tone and lose weight, some were specifically training for events such as weightlifting or powerlifting. For others their use of free weights accompanied their training for another sport, or was undertaken to maintain general health and wellbeing. I became interested in understanding what motivated females to take part in free weights training and also their worries about becoming too muscular. These initial observations as a Fitness Officer helped to direct my subsequent research.
Choosing which fitness facility to undertake the research in was important, as good access to the facility and ensuring a sufficient number of participants were available for the study was paramount. It was vital, therefore, to choose a facility that had an extensive free weights area so the chances of encountering a variety of female free weights users were higher. The fitness facility I chose was the one that I trained in for four years and where I was employed as a Fitness Officer. This choice offered three clear advantages. Firstly, the gym had two large free weights areas that were separate from the rest of the gym (discussed in Chapter 3, Section 3.2). Secondly, I trained at the facility and used the weights areas four to five times a week. This meant I had already established friendly relationships with some of the female free weights users and knew that a substantial number of women used the free weights areas on a regular basis. Thirdly, through my role as a Fitness Officer, I was often on the gym floor talking to members about their training regimes. Female free weights users frequently engaged in discussions with me regarding their training programmes because of my experience as a Fitness Officer and as a passionate free weights user. I did consider there may be limitations in choosing the fitness facility that I worked in. For example, participants might not open up to me about any problems they encountered as free weights users because I was a member of staff, however this did not seem to be a problem as I was a well- known face in the free weights areas.
In September 2014 I began my role as a Fitness Officer at the fitness facility used within the study. Six months into my postgraduate study and work as a Fitness Officer, I had developed, through my review of literature, my experience as a Fitness Officer and my own free weights training, a clear focus for my research and sought formal ethics approval for the project, which was confirmed in May 2015. With ethics approval in place I commenced the formal data collection phase of my work in June 2015, following principles of a participant-as-observer such as recording my observations of potential participants when working and training, or engaging in casual conversations with potential interviewees. This then gave me the opportunity to ask females who regularly used free weights to take part in my main data collection technique, interviews. The twenty one-to-one interviews with
weights users. During this phase of the study I also made a number of observations and recorded these in a field notebook, some of which informed my discussions in Chapters 3, 4 and 5. These observations also helped shape the focus of the study and helped identify topics to explore in the interviews. Additionally, casual conversations with participants before or after their interviews often occurred in the free weights areas, after asking participants for consent to use these conversations, a small number of which were used to inform my findings, these will be clearly identified in the subsequent chapters. Importantly, although the formal period of data collected from interviews was completed in January 2016, my contract as a Fitness Officer and my use of the facility for my personal training continued until the end of August 2016. The study was informed by my own experiences in the fitness facility before June 2015 and after January 2016.