There’s a huge discrepancy in the number of men and the number of women in sports. By about two million. After high school millions of women and girls stop exercising. Some studies say that’s because they’re afraid of judgement.

Sport England started the This Girl Can nationwide campaign to crush that fear and get women and girls moving, regardless of shape, size and ability.

Want to see the research? Go Where Women Are, includes up-to-date info exploring the relevant motivations, barriers and triggers to getting more women more active.

This Girl Can

The groundbreaking This Girl Can campaign is the first of its kind to feature women who sweat and jiggle. It seeks to tell the real story of women who play sports by using images that are the complete opposite of the idealized and stylized stuff we’re used to seeing.

The campaign doesn’t hold back in trying to encourage women to beat their barriers. “Sweating like a pig, feeling like a fox” and “I kick balls, deal with it” are among the hard-hitting lines used in the campaign to prompt a change in attitudes and help boost women’s confidence.

“Before we began this campaign, we looked very carefully at what women were saying about why they felt sport and exercise was not for them. Some of the issues, like time and cost, were familiar, but one of the strongest themes was a fear of judgement,” said Sport England CEO Jennie Price. “Worries about being judged for being the wrong size, not fit enough and not skilled enough came up time and again. Every single woman I have talked to about this campaign – and that is now hundreds – has identified with this, and it is that fear of not being ‘good enough’ in some way, and the fear that you are the only one who feels like that, that we want to address.”

Take a look:

For more about This Girl Can, go to www.thisgirlcan.co.uk where you can find out about the women in the campaign, get tips on how to get active and join the national debate. You can also use the hashtag #thisgirlcan to join the conversation on Twitter.

I thought I would share one of my all-time favorite ski flicks in the spirit of back to school and back to winter.

Before there was James Bond, there was Apocalyse Snow. I first saw this classic ski film at summer camp in the French Alps. The movie started the snowboarding revolution in Europe. It’s one part comic-book fantasy, one part rowdy ski film, and one part awesome nonesense. Boy, was it fun to reminisce! It’s in French but you don’t need a foreign language to understand.