Chinese women don't sweat!

That's right, it appears that Chinese women don't (or won't?!) sweat. SHEinChina (Suzhou blogger and fellow gym junkie) recently wrote about never seeing Chinese women exercising, and therefore sweating, when she went jogging in Suzhou. I thought back to this yesterday as I puffed my way through an interval training session at the gym.

There seem to be some commonalities amongst women visiting the gym in China. Chinese women seem to visit the gym in twos - maybe there is a 'buy one, get one free' deal on memberships at the moment - and must always exercise on machines side by side. There are some compulsory items to carry as well - towel (although it is never needed), mobile phone (on a pretty lanyard), ipod (or similar) and drink (preferably not water, but something flavoursome). One very important rule of course, is not to exercise hard enough to break a sweat and you must always be able to watch TV, talk on your mobile phone and talk to your friend on the next machine. Free weights are a no-no but machines are okay, as long as you don't exert yourself too hard. The classes are also always popular with the Chinese women, particularly the belly dancing and the yoga classes.

I'm not really sure why these women actually visit the gym, when they are not exercising hard enough to sweat. Maybe there are very different philosophies on 'real' exercise in China? Maybe I'm an exercise snob? There must be some Chinese women doing 'real' exercise because when I looked up the 2008 results of the race I'm running next week, the winner was a Chinese girl, who ran the 8km race in 29 minutes! I'd better train harder!