Women Who Weightlift
Women Who Weightlift
Analyzing Trends in the Female Weightlifting Space
Overview
The US fitness, gym, and health club market is valued at over $33 billion. I am an active participant of the industry, particularly within weightlifting. As an avid lifter myself, most gyms I have been to across the US and even globally are predominantly male. The second floor of Pottruck, The University of Pennsylvania's health and fitness center, is the primary weightlifting floor. At any random time on any given day, I would guess the male to female ratio on that floor is about 80/20. However, on Instagram and other social media, there seems to be more women in recent years who have started to pick up a dumbbell and lift weights to begin a new fitness journey. This data project aims to analyze the overall trends and sentiments from women about weightlifting in hopes to encourage more women to not be afraid to lift heavy.
Data Sources
Data for the data project was scraped and/or downloaded from Google Trends, WalletHub, Twitter, Reddit, and Open Powerlifting.
Tools
Web scraping from WalletHub was done with Google Sheets. R packages such as "gtrendsR", "rtweet", and "RedditExtractor" were used for data gathering. All data cleaning, analysis, and graphs were completed with R: "dplyr", "plotly", "ggplot2", "wordcloud", and "syuzhet".
Google Trends
Are there certain time periods when women interested in lifting increase? Are these patterns due to external factors?
I look at Google and Youtube Search from the R package "gtrendsR" to try to answer these questions.
Lifting for Women Google Search
Lifting for Women's search popularity on Google peaked in August of 2013. There was a relative increase in searches from 2009-2013, and since then the search term has decreased.
Gym Routine for Women YouTube Search
A similar increase then decrease trend appears with the search term Gym Routine for Women on Youtube, but its peak is about 2 years later in September 2015.
The New Rules of Lifting for Women Google Search
I also wanted to look at resources for women to help them learn more about weightlifting. The New Rules of Lifting for Women (Lou Schuler) is a revolutionary book that changed the way women viewed fitness. Published in December 2005, it took about 2 years to gain traction. From 2008-2014, the book was quite popular, but its popularity has since decreased.
Bret Contreras Google Search
Another great resource for women is Bret Contreras, PhD. On August 2009, he posted his first YouTube video, and in April 2013, he published Strong Curves: A Woman's Guide to Building a Better Butt and Body. Most of his audience is female due to his "Glute Guy" status. Currently, he has over 850k followers on Instagram. His release of Strong Curves and its ensuing popularity (subreddit has 50k members) seems to coincide with the decline in interest for the previous book.
xxfitness Google Search
Finally, there is a subreddit solely for women "who are fit, want to be fit, and like reading about fitness to put off getting fit." r/xxfitness was created in July 2010 and now has 365k members. It gained attention starting in 2014, which perhaps corresponds with the general female interest in weightlifting, the release of Strong Curves, and the launch of fitness apparel brand, Gymshark.
Gymshark Women Google Search
Gymshark, a UK-based sportswear brand, was the UK’s fastest growing retailer in 2016. Founded in 2012, they tripled their sales from 2017-2018 and reached over £100m in revenue last year. Gymshark's marketing strategy of partnering with fitness influencers on Instagram and Youtube who weight lift has been a huge success. They positioned themselves as a fitness line for weightlifters, and their growth does not seem to be slowing down anytime soon.
Location and Happiness
Are certain regions more interested in weightlifting? Is there any correlation with happiness?
Lifting for Women Google Search
Using Google Trends data, I mapped out which states Lifting for Women searches trend the most. States that are grey means there was no data available unfortunately. It seems that the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest regions are most interested in Lifting for Women.
Bret Contreras Google Search
The West Coast, more specifically the Southwest, California, and the Northwest, have trend the highest for Bret Contreras. Parts of the Midwest, the South, and the Mid-Atlantic are interested in him as well. Again, it is difficult to gather the full picture with missing data.
Gymshark Women Google Search
Gymshark Women also seems to be popular in the West, particularly in the Southwest, Texas, and California. They are also searched frequently in the Midwest. However, the hits for this search maxes out at 22.5, compared to 100 in the previous two maps, meaning it does not trend as much as the other two search terms.
Top 15 Happiest States
For this graph, I combined the Google Trends data with data from WalletHub's 2019 "Happiest States in America" report. States that were one of the 15 happiest, and were in the top 15 states for trending Google Searches of Lifting for Women, Gymshark Women, and Bret Contreras are marked in red. (Hawaii, which is WalletHub's #1 happiest state, is also on this list, but I was not able to plot it correctly.) It is unclear if there is a pattern between women interested in lifting and happiness from this graph alone, but perhaps states with high population cities (California, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey) may be a good starting point for further analysis.
Twitter vs. Reddit
Are there similarities and differences between what is said about topics within Women Who Weightlift?
I scraped recent tweets based on search terms from Twitter using the R package "rtweet" and comments from similar search terms from r/xxfitness using the R package "RedditExtractoR" to analyze these words with word clouds of frequency.
Women Weightlifting Twitter
Twitter's most frequent words about women weightlifting revolve around the professional sport, as there are many words related to medals, athlete names, and countries.
Weightlifting Reddit
In contrast, Reddit's word cloud displays more health-related terms for weightlifting, such as "feel"/"good", "muscle", and "calories". I did not include "women" in my search query since r/xxfitness is already for women.
Lifting Bulky Twitter
Many women are afraid of lifting weights due to fear of becoming bulky. The most interesting thing about the word cloud for Lifting Bulky on Twitter is that "female", "women", and "ladies" appear without being prompted.
Bulky Reddit
In reality, lifting weights will make women toned, not bulky. Reddit focuses on the positives of weightlifting, with words like "strong", "muscle", and "love".
Bret Contreras Twitter
Searching Bret Contreras on Twitter does not yield a lot of words, but the ones returned seem to involved wanting advice about how to build strength in certain body parts.
Bret Contreras Reddit
Similarly, Bret Contreras on Reddit also shows body parts (glutes, back), but r/xxfitness is more concerned with specific exercises to help their fitness level, such as "thrusts", "activation", and "squats".
Sentiment Analysis
Analyzing the sentiments from Twitter tweets and Reddit comments (r/xxfitness)Â from similar search terms using the RÂ package "syuzhet".
Twitter Sentiments
All of the sentiments for tweets returned from the following search terms on Twitter are positive. Adding "women" in front of plain terms such as weightlifting increases its sentiment value. Women lifting has an almost 0 value, which may be due to other types of lifting such as women lifting groceries. Additionally, strong curves has a higher sentiment value than bret contreras, which could be due to people liking his book more than the person.
Reddit Sentiments
All of Reddit's search term comment sentiments are positive, too. Strong curves still has a higher sentiment value than bret contreras. Gym has the lowest value, but gym program and gym routine are more positive. Lifting and weightlifting have very similar sentiment values.
Twitter vs. Reddit Sentiments
After putting the sentiment values of Twitter and Reddit together on one graph, it is evident that Reddit almost always has a higher positive sentiment value. This makes sense as anyone could be tweeting about the search terms, but only women who are interested / already do weightlift visit r/xxfitness. Thus, their comments are biased.
Powerlifting
Does the increase in a casual interest of weightlifting for women feed into professional powerlifting?
Powerlifting is a strength sport that consists of three attempts at maximal weight on three lifts: squat, bench press, and deadlift. The dataset used for below is from Open Powerlifting, a project that "aims to create a permanent, accurate, convenient, accessible, open archive of the world's powerlifting data." I cleaned the data with the R package "dplyr". The final dataset contains over 800,000 observations of powerlifters from the USA who competed in 2004 and after, in order to stay consistent with the Google Trends data.
Number of US Powerlifters by Sex
There is always more male powerlifters than female. In the past few years, the number of female competitors has increased, so now there are only about twice as many male powerlifters as female in the US.
Percent Change in US Powerlifters by Sex
In terms of the percent change in powerlifters year over year, males saw a sharp rise in competitors in 2010, while females saw a dramatic increase in 2013 and 2014. This upsurge in female powerlifters in the US corresponds to higher Google search trends for women who lift, the release of Strong Curves, the popularity rise of r/xxfitness, and the launch of Gymshark.
Average Total Lifts (kg)
The total lift is the sum of a powerlifter's best squat, bench press, and deadlift. Males and females saw a slight decrease in the average of their total lifts around 2011. In recent years, both have seen a consistent increase in their average total lifts, but neither is that much higher compared to the early 2000s. Note that the unit of measurement here is kg, and 1 kg = 2.2 lbs.
About Me
My name is Amanda Zhu, and I am a senior at the University of Pennsylvania concentrating in Business Analytics and Operations Management
This website was made for Prasanna Tambe's course: OIDD245 (Analytics and the Digital Economy).