Supporting powerful, empowered women

We all know a healthy diet and exercise is important, but a group of Australian fitness trainers are trying to make a healthy life a reality for the country’s women by making exercise less boring.

Libby Babet, Cassey Maynard, Alicia Beveridge and Sian Johnson have banded together to create a face-to-face and online fitness training that aim to empower women and boost not just their fitness but their outlook on life.

Ms Babet says the group, who founded the BUF Girls Movement, realised many women are put off by physical activity because it sounds like too much hard work.

“A lot of people are too scared to do organised exercise, or turned off by a narrow image of what fitness is,” she told Hatch.

The group emphasise ‘movement’ instead of  ‘exercise’ in their classes to make working out sound more like fun and less like a chore their clients ‘should’ be doing.

They also share personal stories of challenges from their own lives, including chronic illness, divorce and self-esteem issues, so that female clients don’t get put off by being trained by women who are supremely fit and healthy.

The BUF group also has a policy of not posting ‘before’ and ‘after’ images from clients on their website, although they don’t mind if female clients do so on their own online spaces.

“A woman’s body shifts so many times throughout her lifetime and our worst nightmare is anyone seeing a photo posted by us online that they might look back on and feel bad about later,” she explains.