Our Mission: What Makes Us Different?
By Alex Beasley, Coach & Creator of Atlanta Women’s Barbell Club
At first glance, our classes are among the many options for group exercise. We operate in the niche of strength training, but are still a coach-led group workout much like our peers. This is generally how prospective clients first interact with us: coming in to learn about barbell lifting and perhaps to achieve a specific strength goal. While we are invested in teaching the barbell lifts and getting our clients stronger, we are even more invested in using the barbell as a tool to teach members more about themselves & their capabilities. Specifically, our mission is to: “...build a supportive, diverse, and safe community of women who are driven to grow stronger physically, mentally, and emotionally.” [1]
As mentioned, most club members come to us with the goal of becoming physically stronger. As a direct result of pursuing these goals they also experience psychological benefits in tandem. Those benefits are a direct consequence of confronting physical challenges, setting meaningful goals & achieving them, and performing beyond self-imposed limitations. While these aren’t the only benefits of becoming stronger, we feel that building both self-sufficiency and self-efficacy are major pathways to building positive self-esteem, learning, and ultimately goal achievement.
Self-Sufficiency
There is a significant individual element to our classes. We don’t load bars for clients or do their bar math, there aren’t mass demonstrations to the class by coaches, and generally clients come in and get started on their own with minimal coach interference. This doesn’t mean that coaches don’t spend adequate time with class participants; on the contrary we spend more individual time with clients compared with most group exercise modalities, either in coaching technique or troubleshooting problems. What it does mean is there is a self-sufficiency element to the class.
This element is not an accident, but rather a purposeful objective of the class. Part of the on-boarding process for new clients is teaching them the skills they need to be able to complete their workouts with minimal logistical help, so they both:
learn how to train on their own; and,
are able to spend the majority of their workouts getting valuable coaching on their lifts.
Ultimately, this helps clients to stay connected to both learning and achieving their performance goals, while not getting bogged down in minutiae.
Self-Efficacy
Where self-sufficiency is the direct result of our class organization, the building of self-efficacy is the direct result of our mission. Self-efficacy refers to an individual’s belief in their own abilities to attain a particular outcome, even in the face of challenges or obstacles. In more detail:
“Self-efficacy reflects confidence in the ability to exert control over one's own motivation, behavior, and social environment. These cognitive self-evaluations influence all manner of human experience, including the goals for which people strive, the amount of energy expended toward goal achievement, and likelihood of attaining particular levels of behavioral performance.” [2]
In our classes, this looks like setting and achieving specific performance goals, personal responsibility in attending scheduled workouts (both in class and outside of class), confronting difficult sets or possible repetition failure, and a continuing dedication to learning and improving. These are experiences had by every client to some degree and a significant part of what we believe makes barbell training valuable. Simply put, we see barbell training as one of the best ways to help you be the strongest and most confident version of yourself, which shows up outside the weight room.
Our Classes: Are They Right for You?
At Atlanta Women’s Barbell Club, our goal is to help barbell beginners learn what they need to know to feel confident lifting on their own. We don’t want to keep clients reliant on us to make progress. What we do is teach you what you need to know and walk with you toward achieving the goals that are important to you. We hope to show you how capable and strong you can be if you have the right information and commit to applying effort toward what you want to achieve.
References
[1] Beasley, A. (2021, February 18). About. Atlanta Women's Barbell Club. Retrieved March 29, 2022, from https://atlantawomensbarbellclub.com/about
[2] Carey, M. P., & Forsyth, A. D. (2009). Self-efficacy Teaching Tip Sheet. American Psychological Association. Retrieved March 23, 2022, from https://www.apa.org/pi/aids/resources/education/self-efficacy