Originally posted by VirginiaR:
Back in high school, when I took weight training for P.E. (it had a nice male/female ratio), I read a published novel by an acclaimed author (*and* I mean a NYTimes Best Selling author), where at the end of the book the main character (a woman) bragged about finally working up to bench pressing forty-five pounds. Since that's the weight of a standard bench press bar, it made me wonder how exactly weak she was when she started her work out routine months earlier. A wrong fact like that can throw the reader out of the story (or make the reader throw the book across the room). So, know that errors happen to the best (and well-paid) of us.
We did a weights unit in P.E. when I was in high school, and the teacher insisted that girls not try to lift more than 25 pounds. Many of us lifted more than that on a regular basis, especially those of us in a lot of academic classes, since the school had no lockers and we had a lot of textbooks to carry. (Six textbooks can weigh between 40 and 50 pounds, plus notebooks, binders, food, drinks, etc. My backpack regularly weighed 60 pounds or more.)
