...women do have a mental block about cycling the slide. For a number of them, it's a "manly thing" that they think must take a certain amount of strength which is beyond them.
Although this is what I first believed and what I thought the first few times I taught a female to shoot, I don't think this is actually the case. What changed my mind was spending more time with my wife, both shooting and in other activities. No one told my wife racking a slide was difficult. She comes from a country where no one has pistols openly. Her only experience shooting was with a revolver into a water trap in order to perform forensic ballistic tests during her masters program. She had no idea about the slide going into it. All she knew was I did it without any sign of struggling. Even so, she couldn't do it and she spends an hour or more a day training. She used to train at the Mexican olympic training facility. She is small, but not wimpy.
With this, and some other things, I started to figure it out. I built my muscles digging ditches, doing pull-ups, splitting wood, sparring, climbing, carrying feed/water buckets or ammo cans full of sand, a Summer spent shipping hundred pound compressors out of a warehouse, etc. She trained on "nautilus" style machines with just a few free weights mixed into the routine. Not to say I never touched a free weight or made the mistake of sitting down at a machine, but that isn't where I built my strength.
She was incapable of leveraging her strength in a real world situation. Her muscles were not trained to work together. Her muscles were only trained to do certain very specific movements one muscle group at a time. I couldn't do double what my wife could on most of the Nautilus machines, but she couldn't help me with an awkward item I could easily pick up myself, like our small apartment size love-seat. I could easily pick it up from the center by myself, but moving it from one room to another without destroying every other piece of furniture was a challenge. Even if I gripped the item at an odd spot more than half-way in order to take more than half the weight.
I think, for many women, and probably a growing number of men who work in offices and hit the gym morning or night, training the muscles to work together and at different motions than those nautilus machines require, is what is needed.
http://gawker.com/5917788/exercise-machines-are-for-cripples
They do seem to accomplish that tone/fit look quite well though.
