When I joined a gym last year, I was searching for a way to process my anxiety and reduce risk of injury from long-distance running. My goals were modest: I wanted to learn how to do proper push-ups and feel a little bit less intimidated by a squat rack. What I wasn’t expecting was that I’d fall in love with lifting weights — and experience a profound spiritual and emotional transformation that bled into every other aspect of my life.
Among women who lift, this deep internal change appears to be common. Yet it is often missing from mainstream conversations about fitness, which focus on how our bodies look instead of how we feel in them. Like many women, writer Casey Johnston, 37, was “pursuing hotness” when she began strength training 10 years ago. Her purpose shifted quickly as she began to feel “completely different” in her body, an awareness she seeks to share with other women in She’s A Beast, a newsletter that demystifies strength training for 33,000 subscribers. She’s writing a book, A Physical Education, about the “surprising impact on mental, physical and spiritual health” of strength training. When she’s asked how lifting weights has changed her, most people expect her to talk about physical strength or discipline, she tells me. But “it just completely changed everything about how I feel and think,” she says.
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“I had one alcoholic parent, one mentally ill parent, who I felt I had to manage a lot of the time,” Johnston says. She dissociated from her own needs, a relationship reinforced by diet culture. Lifting forced her, for the first time, to focus on how she felt in her body. “That's such a central concept [in lifting] — how I felt — because everything flows from how you feel.”
The first step is learning proper form, which is essential to prevent injury. To deadlift, for example, I had to learn the hip-hinge movement by pulling my hips far back and keeping a neutral spine. Focusing on form forced me to pay attention to sensations in my body, an awareness that stayed with me after I left the gym. I noticed how small changes in stress, hunger, rest and mood affected my performance, and began prioritizing sleep and nutrition. For me, as for Johnston, learning “how it feels to be in your body was just a zero-to-one atomic change.”
Lifting also forces you to be present, which is a common mindfulness technique. “If you're lifting something really heavy, you can't think about anything else except for your technique,” explains powerlifter Christina Leonatti, 56, who in 2019 broke a world record in bench press in her weight class and division. “All of the past, all of the future, all of that stuff that’s anxiety-ridden just has to melt away. Over time, that habit ‘carries over’ to other parts of life,” she says.
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There are many known physical benefits to consistent strength training: It improves metabolism, cardiovascular and joint health, and increases bone density. Studies suggest that resistance training also helps reduce symptoms of depression and may ease anxiety. But what constitute, in my opinion, the greatest benefits of resistance training — the self-worth and mindset shifts that Johnston and Leonatti articulate — are harder to measure. “I train people and I understand the science behind it. But I’m not an expert as to why this works, because I can’t explain it. I just know it does,” says Leonatti.
Leonatti found powerlifting at one of her lowest points and credits the sport with saving her life. Now it’s part of her mission to introduce lifting to as many people as possible, especially as an outlet for at-risk youth and women. She started nonprofit Pull Your Heart Out, a mentorship program that aims to build community around lifting. In June, she finished building a mobile gym that she hopes to take to low-income neighborhoods.
Most importantly, lifting “teaches you how to fail,” she says. Failure is not just a part of the process but the point of the process — to get stronger, you have to lift to the point of failure, where you’ve exhausted all the strength you can muster. Over time, Leonatti says, this cycle builds a “very slow, patient process of believing in yourself.” For Johnston, becoming comfortable with failure through lifting “introduced me to this version of this growth mindset, where I'm not perfect, and it's unreasonable to try to meet the expectation of being perfect, especially when it comes to work or to relationships.”
One doesn’t have to be a record-holding powerlifter like Leonatti or a 10-year veteran like Johnston to experience these benefits — the key, in addition to consistency, is following a beginner-friendly program and lifting a little heavier every week. “I think you'll be surprised how gratifying you find it and how much stronger you can actually get very quickly without being some special Olympic athlete or football linebacker,” says Johnston. I saw this happen within my first four weeks and I was hooked. Within a few months, my deadlift progressed from 90 pounds to a one-rep maximum of 185 pounds — 1.8 times my body weight, and a weight I once considered impossible.
After experiencing the impossible becoming possible again and again, an interesting thing happened: The scope of what I thought I could achieve expanded, both in and out of the gym. While I still experience anxiety, lifting has helped ground me and deepen my faith that I can cope with scary feelings that feel overpowering. (Leonatti puts it more bluntly: “When you get strong physically, you get strong mentally. You take less shit.”) In just a year, I have felt a quiet confidence and growing sense of inner peace, and in a society that demands women shrink, I’ve felt an unexpected, profound shift in mindset that has enabled my expansion.
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