Ladies enlighten me

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I work in a middle and high school so I can definitely attest to this. Plus, it's really not that long ago that I was in middle school myself ( only 10 years)

When girls are young, they can easily be on the same level as boys and they really don't care what boys think. They're not concerned yet about if anyone "likes" them or whatever. They play the same sports and a lot of times they're on the same co-ed teams.

When they start getting into middle school, girls are becoming concerned with how the boys see them. I never really understood this part while I was in school, myself, because I never cared. I was still a tom-boy and loved to get sweaty during gym class. However, the girls that do care what the boys think and want to look delicate and pretty will not lift a finger to look sweaty during exercise. I knew some girls in high school who could run a 7:00 minute mile if they tried, but chose to walk on the day that we ran in gym class because they didn't want to be sweaty or mess up their hair.

Middle and high school is really when being self conscious sets in, too. Girls care so much about how they look and how they are represented to others, that they need to maintain it at all times. This is a danger zone for girls that age because they are so impressionable. Eating disorders can begin around age 12/13 (I know sometimes a lot younger too) and can really manifest themselves when the girls get to high school. A lot of those same girls that wouldn't exercise in gym also didn't eat lunch because they wanted to remain skinny and didn't want to be seen chowing down in front of anyone.

Hope this helps!

i'm assuming you are joking that you need help figuring this out.

When I was in middle school, I was aware of myself and what my peers would think. If I got sweaty, It would mean my hair would get wet too. This meant my hair would be a mess. We were not given blow dryers or enough time to fix our hair so therefore we would not want to get sweaty enough where it would mess up our hair.

If you think about it, most gyms have hair dryers, etc. so that you can fix yourself up if you needed to.

I can't speak for all girls, but when it came to participating in gym at school, I didn't think about magazines or hollywood, etc. It was just that if you got sweaty from playing gym, it meant your hair was a mess.

I think that's the kind of age where girls start to worry about what they look like - if you run around too much and get all sweaty, it'll ruin your hair/you'll break a nail/make-up will smudge... etc etc.

Personally, I didn't really care, but then I was never one of the girly girls that got up at 6am to straighten their hair. Except for the fact that my school didn't have showers we could use after PE, and it's never pleasant to do an hour's exercise then have to stink your way through the rest of the school day!

But it's not just teenage girls, I still play a lot of sport at uni, and to me getting hot and sweaty and looking a bit of a mess is something that goes with the territory, but a surprising amount of my hockey team get really worried if the men's teams are watching or we have a team photo at the end, and won't run too much on the pitch in case they mess up their hair/go red in the face/sweat/whatever. It irritates me, I've always felt that those girls need to just get over the fact that if you exercise, you're going to look like you've exercised!

Sometimes it will depend on the group the girl is in. If the girls in the group are getting more "girly" they may shy away from anything that gets them dirty or sweaty. That's the age we start noticing the magazines telling us what girls/women are supposed to look like.
As impressionable youth, we don't see them sweaty and dirty so we can't do that either.
I'm speaking generally, obviously. I'm trying to channel my inner middle schooler....
Also girls are more interested in making an impression on the boys who probably don't even notice. haha

Girls can be very easily influenced by the media and by their peers. Especially when puberty hits. I went from active, being involved in soccer, kickball, softball, dance, whatever, to NON active. Once I hit the age of 12 I stopped playing anything sports related and convinced myself I was too uncoordinated and clumsy to do anything. I actually still have that belief and have been working on breaking it as of lately... :ohwell:
I went from not caring about anything to wearing t-shirts over my bathing suit because I was so self conscious even though I was a rather scrawny kid...

Thing is, it's different for everyone.
Like billieljaime said..... we will probably find a cure for cancer before figuring out the pre-teen female mind.... :laugh: :laugh:

Dont think that this is talked about as much but even at 12/13 years old, girls care a lot more about what other girls think of them then any boys. A female doesn't want to appear out of shape if they cant run as fast as another girl. She doesn't want to be the sweaty one when other girls don't perspire as much. She doesn't want to smell if she does perspire, because girls in the locker room not boys may smell her. In fact i was one of them that would rather not even change in front of other girls, so i would "forget" my gym clothes and that meant i didin't have to participate as much. Remember that girls and boys in middle school don't really mix yet. I mean girls spend much more time with female peers than male.
To add to that though, males are still very much "boys" in middle school and females are not! So just like on the elementary playground a boy might poke fun at a female classmate for looking weird when she tries a push up or pull up those types of things. That is a big "turn off" as far as physical activities go for girls that age. Mostly boys and girls in middle school are on different levels.
I remember the first time i weighed 100lbs in Junior high school. I developed a very bad body image and ED soon after, only because my friends (who were all lil shorties like me but without the DD cups) had yet to reach the triple digits, even though many taller girls were there back in 5/6th grade.

So yeah, its complicated. hope that helped shed a little light on the subject.

At that age, I was a little overweight (but in my head I was huge) and I was unfit. PE wasn't fun. I felt self-conscious about changing in front of other people, and self-conscious about running around, red, sweaty and out of breath in front of other people. Kids can (and were) cruel. Swimming was the worst - being self-conscious about your body and how it's changing, and then having to stand around wearing very little in front of the thinner, more confident girls (who were probably dealing with their own issues) was bad enough, then having to stand around wearing very little in front of the opposite sex just made it 10x worse. Kids at that age (male and female) are generally not that comfortable with their bodies, and are getting the hang of changing shape, body hair, body odour etc.

Being unfit meant that exercise was unpleasant anyway (I think fit people forget or don't realise how uncomfortable it is to be gasping for breath when you're out of shape - it's just not the same when you're fitter). Additionally, at my school, the kids who were good at sports got to play real sports. The kids who weren't had to run around doing "ball skills" (whatever the sport) and never got to play a real game. It was boring, and we were always aware of being the ones that didn't have a hope of making the team. My memories of PE are mostly running up and down a muddy field around plastic cones, or running up and down a field in the general direction of a ball, trying to look involved enough not to get shouted at. Most of the PE teachers I ever had were super-sporty and had little sympathy for the overweight/unfit/uncoordinated/unmotivated kids. We got school reports for PE, and year after year I was told I was uncoordinated, and that sports weren't my forté. It was easy for me to believe it.

PE and sports put your body on display and make it the focus in a way that doesn't matter so much when you're younger. When you are super conscious of any kind of attention at all, especially to your body, the last thing you want to do is put it out there to be the center of anyone's attention. Or what you perceive might make it the center of attention.

There are a lot of great answers here! I agree with most of them, either remembering them in myself or seeing them now in my daughter and her friends.

Another one for me was an increased sense of 'self.' I was a chubby kid and really awful at sports/gym, but in elementary school I never really paid attention to the fact that I was so much worse at it than the other kids. The teacher said do it, so I did it! As I got older, I became more aware of the fact that I was BAD at physical activity, and I just didn't want other people to see it. It wasn't so much a fear of messing up my hair or that I was chubby or even caring what the other kids thought--I just didn't like to do things that I wasn't good at, period, especially with others watching. It's easier to pretend you just don't care--or that you don't want to get sweaty, or you're too cool, or whatever--than to admit you're just plain BAD at it.

(Seriously, BAD. Never managed a chin up, push up, couldn't climb the rope at all, completely without grace)

Just bumping so my friends see this...

One time in gym class we were jumping rope, and one of the boys yelled out, "Look at MK's boobies bouncing around!" .... I was officially no longer interested in being active.


Sixteen years later, I just make sure I have a good sportsbra.

My friends who continued to play were either very good at the sports they were involved in, or they had a good (best) friend who was also involved in the sport. Or they were trying to appear well-rounded for their college applications.

For me personally, puberty had a lot to do with my lack of desire for physical activity in middle school. Between the "growing pains" experienced while developing to the awkward need to all of a sudden carry a handbag around with you everywhere.... middle school is a BIG transition for many girls. I was already much more developed than most girls my age by the time I hit middle school and it certainly made me shy to think that I'd be one of the only girls bouncing around gym class or having to worry about whether or not my sanitary napkin was leaking because of the excess movement.