Muscles ripping with effort, Chen Yu kicks off from the ground. Her body sways alarmingly, but then her foot finds its hold five feet off the ground and she’s off: making her way up and across brightly pebbled walls without a harness, over and over, in a montage set to 1990s Mandopop before hopping off and examining the chalk on her manicure in mock despair. “The hands of the working people!” a friend quips, off-camera.

Chen, a 31-year-old strategic planner in Beijing, is also a sports blogger on lifestyle app Xiaohongshu, where she documents her exploits at dancing, working out, and most of all, rock-climbing. She started getting into the sport seriously a year ago after she watched the rock-climbing events in the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and felt inspired by Slovenian athlete Janja Garnbret, one of the world’s top female rock-climbers, who won one of the first Olympic gold medals in the sport.

Rock-climbing is one of many new sports that have become popular among young urban Chinese in the past year, as intermittent Covid lockdowns curtailed travel and many indoor entertainment options. According to a survey of 1,216 respondents born between the 1980s and 2000s conducted by 36Kr, a China-based publishing and data company, it is among the year’s top five trendy sports activities, alongside Frisbee, skateboarding, cycling, and home workouts (often led by influencers or celebrities). Many of these trendy sports are also being pursued by women.

Contrary to the stereotype that street sports are pursued by males, 36Kr’s survey showed that 66.81 percent of women surveyed said they loved skateboarding, almost twice the ratio of men. On Xiaohongshu, which has an immense female user base, searches under the category of “skateboarding” doubled in the first half of 2022, while searches for “Frisbee” soared by 62 times. According to research firm iiMedia, females made up 62 percent of rock climbers in China in 2018.

Chen tells TWOC what she finds most attractive about rock climbing is that it requires all-round abilities: a good physique (flexibility and core stability in particular), climbing techniques, and analysis of climbing routes. This means that physical strength, which usually gives males an edge in many other sports, does not guarantee one’s success in rock climbing. Female climbers, who are typically lighter and more flexible, may even have an advantage on complex routes, where they have to stretch and angle their bodies to reach difficult holds.

Gender segregation in sports is the norm in most schools in China, with boys and girls usually playing separately on sports teams and boys more frequently engaged in competitive sports—basketball and soccer in particular—on the playground. Around 60 percent of young sports players in China are male, according to research firm iResearch.

Before she fell in love with Ultimate Frisbee this past July, Xing Suying, a 26-year-old IT worker in Beijing, had done sports such as swimming and CrossFit, but usually alone and with less enjoyment. “I’ve always wanted to participate in competitive sports such as soccer and basketball, but I couldn’t find girls to play it together, nor did I want to play with boys,” she says. She tells TWOC that she once signed up for a soccer club, but wasn’t accepted because there were not enough girls to form a women’s team.

Frisbee, however, is often played on mixed teams. One type of match, Mixed Ultimate, requires teams to play with a “4-3” ratio, with three positions played by women. Wu Xiaohua, now one of the leaders of a women’s Ultimate Frisbee team called Mega Mad in Guangzhou, tells TWOC she benefited from such rules when she started playing Frisbee in 2012 at the invitation of an American teacher at her high school in Shenzhen.

At that time, Ultimate Frisbee was still a niche sport in China and was played with a “5-2” or even a “6-1” ratio due to the rarity of female players. “As you could imagine, not many girls played sports ten years ago,” says Wu. “In a sport like basketball, even if a girl wanted to play, there was no way for her to join in when all the other players were boys and when the sport allows physical contact.”

Like Chen with rock-climbing, Wu believes her sport is friendlier to women with less physical strength or previous sports experience. Unlike soccer or basketball, Ultimate Frisbee is non-contact, which protects women from unwanted touching or aggressive playing in a mixed game.