Run a Google search for wedding fitness, and you’ll be bombarded with results touting any number of bridal boot camps, bridal body-prep programs, and wedding dress workout plans.
What you won’t find much of, however, is anything targeted toward grooms. No groom boot camps or get-trim-for-the-tux programs.
“Wedding fitness is like everything else in the wedding industry,” says Beth Helmstetter, a West Hollywood, Calif.-based wedding and event planner. “It’s highly marketed towards women. More and more, men are getting involved in the planning of the day; however, historically, this has been a day more focused on the bride than the groom, and I think wedding fitness is following suit.”
RELATED: TRENDING LIFE & STYLE NEWS THIS HOUR
With more than 2 million marriages taking place in the United States each year according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, why aren’t more gyms and nutritionists targeting men with their weight-loss messages?
Dr. Jean Grow, a professor of strategic communications at Marquette University in Milwaukee who has studied gender issues in advertising, says the lack of wedding fitness-related messaging targeted toward men is consistent with how the two genders have historically been marketed to.
“As consumers, women have been trained to prepare for (physical) perfection,” she says. “Men have not.”
More Top Picks Best Garage Floor Epoxy Kits
“Guys aren’t as worried about (losing weight) or as self-conscious about it as the women are,” says Marc Hanrahan, a Westmont, Ill., newlywed who married his wife, Jeannie, in April.
Women have also, historically, been the center of attention at just about every wedding in the Western world, with the groom generally relegated to being a complementary aesthetic accessory, albeit one not lacking in importance.
“People at weddings always gush about how gorgeous the bride looks,” says Alissa Rumsey, a registered dietitian and a spokeswoman for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. “How often do you hear them talking about the guy? Very rarely.”
“It’s all about the bride,” adds Heather Ruff, co-founder of Mokena, Ill.-based personal fitness chain Spenga. “The groom is just kind of showing up. Of course, since it’s all about the women, they want to look fabulous. It was an easy market to target.”
Also, men are able to hide more, so to speak, when they’re at the altar than their brides are.
“Men are expected to wear a suit, which covers up their entire body while women are expected to wear a wedding dress that usually shows their upper bodies,” says Maddie Evans, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas who is studying wedding body expectation and preparation when it comes to brides and grooms. “If it is a form-fitting dress, it will also outline her stomach and butt. Since brides will have more bodily exposure in their dresses, it makes sense that they feel more pressure to tone up and slim down.”
Personal trainers say there are a couple of reasons wedding fitness continues to be bride-focused. Ruff says it’s partly because men are not as open to wedding weight-loss messaging as women are.
“Men aren’t as open to saying that, but they do want the same results,” she says. “They want to look good in their tux; they want to look good standing up at the altar. There’s a little bit of a pride factor there that (grooms-to-be) think, ‘Oh I don’t need help. I’m a man. I know my way around the gym,’ but they want the help without saying it.”
Personal trainers say there’s more money in targeting brides than grooms.
Dina Castillo, a Chicago-based personal trainer and the owner of On Another Level fitness, offers a wedding boot camp program that is open to both men and women.
Castillo has been conducting wedding-themed workout programs for more than a decade and says she’s not sure how many grooms have come through her programs, but she knows it’s not nearly as many as the number of brides she’s trained.
“I would probably say it’s probably 100 or less,” she says. “Over the summer months during wedding season, we would see 125 people in a month during the program. Some of them were bridesmaids. Out of the 125, there would probably be 120 (women) and five men.”
That’s not to say men are mostly opposed to the idea of getting in shape before their wedding.
Take the Hanrahans, for instance.
Three months before Jeannie and Marc walked down the aisle and said, “I do,” she decided to sign up for one of Castillo’s wedding boot camp programs, which involved a meal plan designed to get her to eat healthier. Some gentle persuasion from his bride-to-be led Marc to follow the same diet.
“I was not the healthiest eater,” he admits. “I would work out hard, but I would eat what I wanted, and this was a good change for me. Seeing her work hard made me want to get off the couch and do the same.”
Jeannie says she lost about 10 pounds in the months leading up to the wedding, and while Marc didn’t keep track of his own progress on the scale, Jeannie says she — and others — noticed results.
“Friends would come up and notice Marc, definitely — in the arms, shoulders, chest — was getting bigger, buffer, more toned,” Jeannie says.
Matt Lindner is a freelancer.
RELATED STORIES:
How to find a good personal trainer
For women, the chinup is an elusive but worthwhile goal
Reboot your mind while waiting
.galleries:after {
content: ”;
display: block;
background-color: #144A7C;
margin: 16px auto 0;
height: 5px;
width: 100px;
More Top Picks Netgear Arlo Pro
}
.galleries:before {
content: “Life & Style Photos and Video”;
display: block;
font: 700 23px/25px Georgia,serif;
text-align: center;
color: #1e1e1e;
var playlist = ‘chi_life_style’,
layout = ‘autoblurb’,
iu = ‘%2F4011%2Ftrb.chicagotribune%2Ffeature’;