I recently received a press release about a random company’s ranking of popular workout playlist songs based on beats per minute.

I listened through the songs and let me just say: they didn’t do much for me. With the exception of a couple Eminem songs, most were just basic rock-and-roll that did not at all stir me to get up and go.

But the list got me thinking:

There should be a WBC workout playlist.

So I’d like to hear from you:

• What are your go-to workout songs?

• Are there any unexpected songs on your workout playlist that you would never hear over the gym sound system but really get you revved up?

Tell me!

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Drop your songs in the comments, respond to this email — or if you’re not subscribed, hit subscribe and respond to the confirmation email with your recommendations.

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I’ll compile your recommendations (and a few of my own) in a playlist that I’ll share in a few weeks, just in time for the heat of summer.

To get you brainstorming, here are some of my go-tos:

1. In Love With a Girl by Gavin DeGraw

2. People Like Us by Kelly Clarkson

3. Chase That (Ambition) by Lecrae

4. MILLION DOLLAR BABY by Tommy Richman

5. Doo Wop (That Thing) by Ms. Lauryn Hill

6. My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark by Fall Out Boy

7. Family Affair by Mary J. Blige

8. shine on by Tori Kelly

9. Desperados by Andy Mineo

10. i by Kendrick Lamar

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Previously in Women’s Barbell Club…

Other WBC news:

I’m posting more on Instagram in an effort to reach more women who are into fitness. If you’re on the platform, follow along — and share with friends!

The fireplace that Johnaphene Faulkner’s uncles had built didn’t work right. Every time her aunts got a fire blazing, it scattered sparks and ashes into the house instead of drawing up into the chimney. Cooking was impossible and the whole house smelled like smoke — so her aunts took matters into their own hands and built a separate cookhouse.1

Stories like this fill the stack of books I’ve kept close to my desk over the past year, as I’ve studied the Homesteading Era, a time period between about 1850 and 1930, when Americans pushed west into areas the United States had claimed, purchased, won, and, yes, stolen. These Americans established new settlements and tried to live self-sufficiently on land that often proved to be tough for farming — and the women played a key role, not just in keeping house, but in building up homesteads, farming infertile land, and doing the hard labor required to improve a claim and receive a deed for ownership.

Without women’s strength, homesteading families would have struggled to survive. But to play their part, they had to defy the gender norms of their time.

Back in the urban northeast, industrialization had led to the “notion of separate, gender-defined spheres,” wrote Katherine Harris in Long Vistas: Women and Families on Colorado Homesteads. As commerce shifted away from families producing goods together in the home, men left to earn wages and “women gained control of the domestic environment.” This is when the idea that men should be the breadwinners and women should take care of the home emerged.

Attached to this was the Cult of True Womanhood, a Victorian notion that narrowly defined femininity as submissive, pure, and pious. Within this framework, women were seen as weak, innocent beings in need of protection not just from the brutality of life but also from moral corruption (a concept that played largely in debates regarding women’s suffrage).

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The idea of separate spheres may have been appealing to women because it gave them some autonomy in the home, but for farmers, it wasn’t an easy thing to live out. And on the frontier, basic necessity pushed men and women outside of their culturally scripted gender roles.

“Everyone was expected ‘to lend a hand,’ and this often led women to perform tasks ordinarily considered outside their sphere,” wrote Sandra L. Myres in Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 1800-1915. “In more settled areas, hired hands, neighbors, or other family members might have been called in to help, but on the frontier, hired labor was not only expensive but often unavailable; friends and family were far away, and neighbors had their own work. Thus, from the earliest colonial frontiers, women worked beside their men to help clear the land, fell trees, construct a shelter, and plant and harvest crops.”

The work put women’s strength and stamina to the test.

1. Even the simple task of preparing a meal involved hours of hard labor before crops were harvested.

When a family claimed an area of land, the first item of business was planting crops.

“The heavy work of transforming the virgin prairies into cultivated farm fields began as soon as the family was settled,” wrote Joanna L. Stratton in Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier. “Invariably handicapped by poor farming tools and unsophisticated agricultural methods, the homesteaders worked relentlessly to produce enough food and any added income to sustain their families throughout each long year. … Usually, it took the strength of several yoke of oxen and several hardy farmhands to push the plow through the rigid soil.”

In some places, the growing season was a flash in the pan, to use a gold mining metaphor. From May to October or even September in mountainous regions, homesteaders worked daily to ensure they would have enough food to last through the long, frozen winters.

Women were in the fields getting blistered and dirty.

“When the strength of the frontiersman and his sons proved inadequate, the mother and the daughters assisted with the traditionally male tasks of planting and harvesting, tending livestock, hauling water, gathering fuel, and even hunting,” Stratton wrote.

If a woman had a particular knack with plants, she might take the lead, deciding when to plant and how to tend the crops. “One man bragged that his wife could plow as well as he could and since he was fond of baseball, ‘[I] sometimes left my wife home plowing while I went away for a game,’” Myres wrote.

2. Bathing, washing clothes, or just a sip of water meant lugging heavy buckets, sometimes for miles.

On the high plains east of the Rocky Mountains, a vast expanse known as the Great American Desert, water was hard to come by — especially when compared to the lush, humid eastern states that many people were moving from.

A well or a stream was a more reliable source than barrels or buckets left outside to collect rainwater, but they could be a mile or more away. Water often had to be carried by hand to the homestead. As Myres wrote:

Often the men would haul the water for the wash, but when they were engaged at other tasks or gone from home, the women had to do the best they could. Leola Lehman recalled that her mother hauled water for several miles in a little wagon in which she pulled her youngest child and four gallon syrup buckets. Another disgusted housewife, whose husband had not found time to dig a well, lamented that it took so long to haul water “I do not get much else done.”

Some families made a yoke to be carried across the shoulders with buckets of water hung on either end. If each bucket held three gallons, the yoke could easily have weighed 50 pounds. Lifting, carrying, and balancing that much weight over a mile or more was no small task.

3. To be a homemaker, you had to build a home.

Once crops were planted, homesteaders shifted attention to building a house. And women provided much-needed help.

In wooded areas, log cabins were the typical structure, and many women would have helped clear the land and cut and stack the logs. On the plains, where wood was scarce and expensive, homesteaders turned to other materials: if there were hills, they might build a dugout, literally dig a hole in the ground for their home, complete with dirt floor, walls, and ceiling, and the risk that a wandering cow would stomp through the roof.

Others built soddies, or sod houses, made from 50-pound dirt blocks cut from the ground. “Harnessing the strength of several yoke of oxen, they used a special grasshopper plow or sod cutter to slice strips of sod from the earth,” Stratton wrote. “A sharp spade was then used to chop the strips into individual bricks.” The bricks were stacked by hand.

If men had home construction under control, women still contributed in other ways. One pioneer dug a storm cellar while her husband built the house, another helped dig a well, and still another did all the carpentry work in her home:

“Let not ladies lift their hands in horror,” Myres quotes Eliza Farnam as saying. “I laughed whenever I paused for a few minutes to rest, at the idea of promising to pay a man fourteen or sixteen dollars per day for doing what I found my own hands so dexterous in.” She knew that doing the work herself would be scandalous to some women, but it made economic sense — and besides, she was good at it.

More than the mythic domestic pioneer, homesteading women carried on — with or without men.

For homesteading women, reality involved serious, life-threatening challenges — from droughts to plagues to sickness. If a woman’s husband took sick or died or left to hunt or find wage-paying work, she had to carry on without him, manage the entire operation, make sure everything still got done — the animals were fed, the crops planted and harvested.

Some homesteading women didn’t have husbands at all. The Homestead Act of 1862 gave single women aged 21 and older the right to claim their own acreage out west. Somewhere between 4.8 and 18.2 percent of homesteaders (those who filed claims under the act) were women, and according to Sheryll Patterson-Black, as referenced in Long Vistas, women homesteaders were actually more successful in improving the land and patenting their claims than men were, which “discounts the theory of woman as helpless, reluctant pioneer.”

Many single woman homesteaders had family nearby who helped, but they still carried out the heavy work of establishing a home on the frontier. And they experienced a new sense of freedom that was foreign to their mothers and grandmothers, and ultimately helped pave the way for women’s suffrage.2

Looking back, it can be easy to imagine these women as some sort of domesticated stereotype, living an idyllic life off the land where the hard work was handled exclusively by men, but that vision is a fantasy. These women were strong, scrappy, intelligent, and ready to do whatever needed to be done, whether the task was labeled “women’s work” or not.

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Previously in Women’s Barbell Club…

Recommended Reads

• ‘Unprecedented’ global effort gives new name to polycystic ovary syndrome — and new hope to millions of women (The Guardian)

• Who Are You Getting Your Health Advice From? (New York Times) – This article turned me on to the American Medical Association’s new Health vs. Hype podcast. I recently listened to their episodes on “protein-maxxing” and creatine, and found them super informative.

• What weights do you actually need for strength training? ( at How to Move) – This guide is especially helpful for beginners who are trying to put together a modest home gym.

Postscript:

This article is my contribution to the discourse regarding Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, a book that IMO did not live up to the hype (though, yes, it’s well-written and yada yada). I wanted more historical fiction and was disappointed that it didn’t deliver that, but there were other issues too. I agree with the following takes:

• I was raised in conservative evangelicalism. YESTERYEAR missed its mark. by at

• The real women of Yesteryear by at Attention Economy

• Yesteryear Is Not A Novel by

Earlier this year, bodybuilder Dana Linn Bailey competed in her first Hyrox. Training for the endurance fitness event felt like a return to her roots as a college soccer player, she said on YouTube. She’s planning to compete in more.

Meanwhile, calisthenics athlete and bodybuilder Taylor Mei, known for her viral calisthenics flows, has taken a step back from bodybuilding to focus more on functional training. She’s doing her first Hyrox in New York City in June and planning to run her first marathon and another Hyrox in the fall — despite hating running. On her YouTube channel, she said she made this shift to test her discipline. She wants to see “if I can do something and stay disciplined when I hate it.”

Both are part of a trend of strength athletes (who are also fitfluencers) switching up their training to chase entirely different goals.

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What does it take to go from heavy lifting or muscle-development work to training for endurance, speed, and agility?

To find out, I talked to Erin “Airin” Avery, PhD1, a powerlifter and bodybuilder who runs She Lifts Academy and a few months ago shifted her training to prep for Apex, an NFL-combine-type fitness competition.

Avery started lifting as a college volleyball player at the State University of New York at Oneonta. She wanted to improve her strength, speed, and vertical jump to increase her odds of getting playing time, so she began experimenting in the weight room. “I ended up liking the gym so much … that I wanted to do more,” she says. She started working with a bodybuilding coach and, her sophomore year, competed in bodybuilding for the first time.

When she moved to Los Angeles for graduate school at UCLA, she kept training and competing as a bodybuilder, but she noticed other women at the gym who were lifting heavy.

“I was watching all these women deadlift two plates or squat two plates, and I was like, ‘Wow, that’s badass,’” she says.

Powerlifting seemed like the perfect way to shift her mindset away from aesthetics in her bodybuilding off-season, when her body naturally held onto more mass. Soon, Avery was splitting her years between bodybuilding training and powerlifting training. At her last bodybuilding competition in 2023, the National Physique Committee (NPC) Junior Nationals, she placed fourth. This past October at the Hidden Strength Showdown, she hit her first nationally qualifying total for USA Powerlifting, moving 892.8 pounds between all three lifts and setting personal records for both squat and deadlift.

“I hit massive lifts that I never, ever thought were possible,” she says. “I broke into the 400s [on deadlift] for the first time ever. It’s a life milestone that I’ve always wanted to accomplish.”

Coming out of that competition, Avery wanted to do something new in her training.

She missed the fuller breadth of athleticism and realized how much she’d been neglecting her cardiovascular fitness. Apex, with its variety of sprint, run, jump, and strength events, caught her eye. Here was an opportunity to lean into her volleyball background and express a more dynamic physicality.

But switching to a whole new style of training wasn’t easy:

1. Ramping up for hard contact with the ground

Avery couldn’t remember the last time she’d run a mile. Her body wasn’t used to hard impact. She had some flare-ups with her shin from adding too much volume and intensity too soon.

“I have had to be very careful about easing into it and not doing too much too quickly,” she says.

To lower the amount of hard impact in a week, she sprints on Mondays and Fridays and has mixed in the assault bike for some of her cardio training.

2. Lifting lower numbers

Apex has two lifting events: as many reps as possible of bench press (115 lbs) and trap bar deadlift (275 lbs). When Avery trains for powerlifting, she lifts way heavier weights but in the low-rep range. For Apex, she’s lowered her training weights so she can do more reps, and switched from low-bar squat to high-bar squat to emphasize her quadriceps more. Changing her back squat has limited how much weight she can move.

“I have a very short torso and very long femurs, so I love squatting low-bar because it’s a lift that’s meant for my anatomy,” she says. “High-bar, not so much. My ankle mobility really has to be on point. … It’s just not as comfortable as low-bar.”

With the low-bar squat, she could move 305 for three reps at a time. With high-bar, 225 became a challenge. That lower weight hurt her ego as a powerlifter and required another mental shift.

3. Learning new skills

To support explosiveness and power in the 40-yard dash, vertical jump, and Apex’s overhead med ball toss, Avery decided to do some Olympic weightlifting and was immediately humbled.

“Olympic lifts are so incredibly technical, and it’s not something that you’re going to nail within a few weeks,” she says. Snatching 90 pounds has been a struggle. “It’s fun when it goes well and you have a good day of Olympic lifting, but when you’re fatigued, it’s just rough.”

4. Finding the right place to train

The variety of events she’s training for has sent Avery looking for different places to work out. She ended up buying a women’s Olympic weightlifting barbell (designed with a narrower bar for smaller hands) because she was struggling to find a gym that, first, had one and, second, had one that wasn’t beaten up. She also spent months looking for a track to train at, finally finding one on a university campus that was open to the public.

“Commercial gyms are not built for this style of training,” she says. “They don’t have places where you can go sprint on the turf. Usually their turf is like 10 yards, if that. … I have like five different gym memberships right now, because I’ll do one workout at this gym because it has this equipment or one workout at this gym because it has turf.”

But the challenges have also come with upsides.

For the first time in years, she’s been experiencing newbie gains, seeing progress nearly every week, especially in her sprint speeds.

She has more energy than she does when training for powerlifting. This could be due to improved cardio fitness or less overall fatigue because she’s not lifting as heavy. “I have more energy throughout the day to just do normal tasks,” she says.

And she’s been enjoying not being stuck in the gym all the time, despite training more throughout the week.

“I love this training style,” she says. “It’s so fun. You get to be out of doors and express your strength on the field.”

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Previously in Women’s Barbell Club

Recommended

• What We Lost When We Lost Self Magazine (Mother Jones) – RIP to Self Magazine, a publication I frequently linked out to in this recommendations section. Self was one of the few women’s publications with legit research-backed fitness articles. If you were a Self reader, I’d love to hear from you about what you’ll miss most about the magazine. Leave a comment or, if you’re subscribed, send me an email.

• The 82-Year-Old Jump Rope Queen of Beverly Hills (New York Times)

• Cynthia Erivo is Defying Gravity. This Time on the Roads (Run)

• VIDEO: Bobbi Gibb, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon, is honored with a new statue (Boston Globe)

A few weeks ago, I saved this Reddit post asking, “Muscular women … how does it actually feel to build and carry that strength?” Reddit tends to be the internet’s snark central, but this thread blew up with genuinely wholesome responses testifying to the difference that getting strong and visibly jacked has made for people.

You could easily spend hours reading the hundreds of responses, but who has that kind of time? Me apparently. I’ve gathered a selection that stood out to me and am sharing them here with no additional commentary. Enjoy =)

Text has been lightly edited for clarity.

Health, Longevity, Energy

DismalDepartment4656: I am in my 30s and I have a LOT more energy now than I used to 5-10 years ago, despite the fact that my life is legitimately busier and more difficult in a lot of ways. As other people my age are starting to talk about how they constantly have aches and pains, feel “old,” etc., I feel like I’m in the best shape of my life so far.

reduxrouge: I’m 43 and have been lifting off and on since high school. It really is the key to feeling young. My mom just turned 66 and she’s been lifting and running half marathons for a couple decades, too. She looks in her 50s. Seeing her compared to my friends’ moms is sometimes night and day. We just hiked the 102-mile Cotswold Way last October in 9 days.

Spell_me: I really can’t believe that I am actually 60. I feel like a kid. I love to MOVE. Even in hard times, I wake up every day feeling the pleasure of having a body that serves me well. Most people I know that are my age (and younger!) tell me they feel like crap and constantly complain about getting older. Not me. My relationship with my body is better than ever.

Say Goodbye to Aches and Pains

TealToucan: I’m 42, and every time I bend over the bathroom sink to wash my face and feel my glutes activate instead of my lower back twinge, it feels like a freaking miracle. I’ve been lifting for a couple years and weigh more now than I ever have, including during pregnancy. But my quality of life is so much better now than when I was thin in my 30s and constantly throwing my back out.

Puzzleheaded_Law_773: I have almost no sciatic pain anymore. I can squat without my knees cracking and bruising. My shoulder doesn’t pop out as much. My posture is better. I’m still fat, but I like feeling the solid muscle underneath all the fat. I feel more confident and have something to be proud of.

“I can do that, no problem.”

Sundae7878: I went paddleboarding with my friend and she couldn’t inflate the paddleboard with the hand pump to save her life. And then I realized how hard life must be for women who have no strength to do things in day-to-day life. I never wonder about whether I will be able to do something. I’m always strong enough. Of course I can lift that box, of course I can inflate a paddleboard, of course I can move furniture and appliances, of course I can shovel lots of snow, of course I can use power tools above my head, of course I can lift my bike onto the high rack in the garage, of course I can carry heavy things up and down stairs.

capslox: My favorite thing about being fit is how adaptable I can be, and how easy it is to switch active hobbies. In the last 12 years I’ve had my personality go from cycling to kickboxing to lifting to dance to climbing. Each hobby switch is easier than the last … I can do side quests like backpacking or a thru-hike, I can pick up skiing, I can train for a half marathon, I can go to a Jiu Jitsu class with a friend and not walk out destroyed, I can accompany a nervous friend to yoga or barre.

locus-amoenus: My strength is never a limiting factor in my day-to-day life. My friends all complain about their knees and backs starting to hurt and mine feel as good as ever. I can help smaller women carry things or put their heavy suitcases on racks and I look strong enough that they ask. Men offer to carry things for me and I get to say “I’m good” and do it myself with zero issue. I’ve had quite a few experiences where I effortlessly handed off something heavy I was carrying (a heavy bag of laundry, a big instrument in a heavy protective case) only for the person collecting it to drop it like a rock because they weren’t expecting the weight and it makes me feel like Anatoly handing off his mop.

mrspillins: One time I really noticed the benefit was at a music festival with my friends (who don’t lift weights). There was a massive hill that we constantly had to ascend and descend. For me it was nothing. I felt solid. I didn’t have to hold onto the fence, my knees could carry me fine. Everyone else, it was like watching old-aged pensioners trying to navigate it. We’re in our late thirties.

Shocking Others with Their Strength

AggressiveSherbetty: I feel like superwoman when I can easily carry 12 packs of lacroix with one hand lol. Also the water cooler at work, most women call maintenance to come change the 5-gallon jug and I’m like, nah, I got it.

Confident_Attitude replied: That last part is so real. I’m naturally pretty strong (broad shoulders and big arms giving a natural advantage) and people are always so damn shocked when I lift up the water jug at work without calling over a guy to do it for me.

Disastrous-Twist-352: I love it when I stroll out of a supermarket with heavy bags and see people look at me in shock.

Not Freezing All the Time Anymore

issathrowawayparty: The first thing I noticed when I started building muscle was that I was better able to catch myself from falling when I slipped on ice. I thought that was pretty cool. My other favorite thing is that I produce my own heat, like I can feel the warmth coming off of my muscles. I spent a lot of my life cold, tired, and anemic, so I appreciate not freezing all the time.

Household Chores and Hobbies Are Easier

orangepeeelss: I can hold the leaking garbage bag at arm’s length the whole way to the dumpster.

littlelivethings: With good core strength, I don’t have back pain from extended standing or carrying heavy things/backpacks. I don’t dread shoveling snow. I can bring in all the grocery bags in one go. I do some woodworking, and I can muscle a lot with gouges and knives without needing a mallet/chisel. I have a 2.5-year-old (who is the size of a 4-year-old), and we go without a stroller most of the time because I can pop her on my shoulders if she gets tired of walking.

Better Mental and Emotional Health

KimBrrr1975: I’ve been going 3 days a week for 9 months now and it makes a difference in every aspect of my life. Not just feeling capable and strong in my body, but it regulates my nervous system so I am less stressed and anxious. I eat better because I want to optimize my workouts. I sleep better. My moods are better. I am a better/stronger hiker (which is my favorite activity). I trust my body and I feel capable, which I hadn’t in a long time. Best feeling ever.

Compliments and Body Composition

Bella_HeroOfTheHorn: My weight stopped mattering for the first time ever …. When I met my colleagues in person for the first time, one of the women immediately made eye contact, flexed her arm, and nodded silently. At a conference happy hour, another person said they’d started lifting weights but had a long way to go and pointed to my arms.

Conscious_Chemist323: I’m about 14 months in. I’ve dropped a jeans size, my posture has changed completely — I’ve gone from rounded shoulders and hunched over to straight back and wide shoulders. … It’s been life-changing.

Used-Lingonberry5896: The best compliment was when a 17-year-old girl (family friend) told her mum she wanted to start lifting weights because she wanted arms that looked like mine.

FlamingMothling: I was probably more conventionally ‘attractive’ before this but I don’t miss being willowy. Muscle is vitality and strength is joy.

That’s what they said. What would you add?

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Previously in Women’s Barbell Club

Recommendations

• 81 years young, trailblazing Duluth hockey player Bonnie Shea is still skating strong (Minneapolis Public Radio)

• Hockey: For new fans of women’s hockey, PWHL offers drama, storylines to follow post-Olympics (The Athletic)

• Soccer: How Denver Summit smashed the NWSL attendance record in their first home game (The Guardian)

• Comedy: When protein’s in everything

• On building bones (Dr. Alyssa Olenick)

When the pandemic hit, , research physiologist, decided to tackle a question he’d been thinking about since the early 2000s, when he was working at the NASA Johnson Space Center:

What is the minimal dose of exercise needed to maintain fitness over time?

He partnered with a few colleagues to dive into the scientific literature for a review published by the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research in May 2021. What the research showed blew him away.

While endurance fitness can be maintained for 15 weeks with two hard weekly sessions, just one strength training session per week (and one hard set per exercise) is enough to maintain strength in younger populations1 for up to 32 weeks — or more than 7 months.

The key? Making sure those sets matched the intensity of a typical training day.

“Some people feel obligated [to] do three workouts a week, every week,” Spiering told me, “but what the science says is a little bit of exercise once a week can help you maintain for a little while. … It gives you permission to take it easy on yourself.”

In one study, professional soccer players who completed one weekly strength training session over 12 weeks maintained their established weight for a one-rep max in the squat, while those who only lifted every other week lost squat strength. Another study showed that younger participants could even increase their strength with a single weekly session, but that finding may be more relevant to beginners than to seasoned lifters.

None of the studies observed powerlifters or elite strength athletes and most of the studies only looked at one aspect of strength, such as squat strength, so it’s not clear whether the once-a-week finding holds true across the board. But it’s likely that a high-intensity (here meaning heavy weight) session per week over several months would at least reduce strength loss, if not prevent it altogether. For those of us who have a modest amount of strength, one session per week at a high intensity should be enough to maintain our strength over a few months.

What to Do in Your Weekly Strength Session

This will partially depend on your goals. Are you mainly looking to maintain squat or pullup strength, or do you want to maintain full-body strength? Your ideal weekly session should emphasize the things that are important to you. You’ll want to prep your body as you would for a regular workout and do one high-quality set of each priority exercise at a challenging weight.

Here’s what we recommend for full-body strength:

1. Prioritize compound movements.

Think: squat, deadlift, row, overhead press. These lifts engage the whole body and cover more ground than, say, a bicep curl or reps on a quad extension machine, helping you achieve greater exercise volume and intensity in less time.

“I would recommend at least one movement that’s a lower-body pushing movement, an upper-body pushing movement, and an upper-body pulling movement,” Spiering said. “At the very least, I would want to do either squats or deadlift, or maybe both, and then I’d do at least one set of bench and at least one set of either pullups or rows.”

2. Do your usual rep range at a weight you typically lift but find challenging.

If you usually lift in the 8- to 12-rep range, do the same thing here. Load up a weight that you would normally move. We’re looking for something heavier than your warmup weight that won’t push you to failure but will require you to lock in. This might look like 50–65% of your one-rep max if you’re lifting 8–12 reps or 70–85% for 3–5 reps (just examples, not prescriptions).

“The science says just choose the same weight, the same number of repetitions [that you normally do],” Spiering says. “The practical part of me says, just make sure that you’re choosing a heavy enough weight that requires a high enough degree of mental effort.”

You shouldn’t load up extra weight to make up for doing less sets. Just load up the amount that you would typically do toward the beginning of a challenging lifting session, and make sure you’re properly warmed up before executing the lift.

3. If you don’t have access to a full gym, get creative to keep intensity up.

The most important factor of the once-a-week session is intensity. Drop the intensity and you will lose strength. But maybe you don’t have access to a full gym for a while and that’s why you’re concerned about losing strength — what should you do then?

Brennan Thompson, PhD, Associate Professor of Kinesiology and Health Science at Utah State University, recommends integrating eccentric and unilateral movements.

“Eccentric training focuses on the lowering phase of a movement, the part where your muscles lengthen under tension. Think about lowering a dumbbell in a bicep curl or descending into a squat,” Thompson said. “Slowing down that lowering phase — say, taking four to six seconds instead of one to two — can make a light weight feel much heavier.”

Try slowly descending into the squat or slowly lowering the barbell back to the floor after a deadlift. You can apply this to pushups: take five seconds to lower yourself to the floor. “This increases the time that the muscles are under tension and the overall effort without needing more weight,” Thompson said.

Unilateral, or single-arm and single-leg movements, can also increase intensity when only light loads are available. Try pistol squats, lunges, single-leg Romanian deadlifts. You can use slow eccentrics to make these more challenging or do higher reps and a greater number of sets. It won’t be quite the same as moving a heavy weight in your usual mode, but it should still help offset strength loss.

4. Don’t just do nothing outside of your workout.

Whatever your reason for only being able to work out one time per week, you’ll still want to incorporate movement into your day-to-day. This might look like swimming or playing volleyball at the beach. Playing tag with the kids at a family gathering. Opting to walk from dinner to a show during your trip to a new city.

“Walking, hiking, or short mobility sessions help keep your body primed,” Thompson said. “This general activity helps keep the body from tilting too far into a catabolic (muscle losing) state and will help with maintenance to some degree.”

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Previously in Women’s Barbell Club

Recommended Reads

• The missing pieces of menopause science (Nature). An interesting tidbit from this article: “SWAN’s results show that some health challenges that were previously thought to be tied to menopause — such as weight gain, insulin resistance and cognitive changes — seem to track more strongly with chronological ageing than with menopausal stage. Although certain cardiovascular risk factors, notably cholesterol levels, rise around the time of menopause, SWAN shows that their contribution is modest compared with those of other risk factors, such as smoking and obesity.”

• With Denver Summit FC, Rob Cohen is betting on Colorado falling in love with women’s sports (Colorado Sun)

• Why Are So Many Teen Girls Still Tearing Their ACLs? (New York Times)

• Can running shoes be plastic-free? (SFGate)

Donovan Thompson’s Instagram is filled with photos of his wife, the world-renowned powerlifter and multiple world record holder Jen Thompson, sleeping. She’s sleeping in the front seat, in the back seat, on planes, on a shuttle, at sporting events, and often in transit from one state or country or continent to another.

“That’s what she does,” Donovan told me in January. She sleeps. Then he launched into a story of how, in 2022, at USA Powerlifting Nationals in Las Vegas, she took a nap between her first and third bench attempts to recoup some energy since she’d already competed that morning in the bench-only meet.

“She was like, ‘I can’t do six top-end benches,’” Donovan recalled. “I’m like, ‘Well, you’re warmed up. Why don’t you just open with your second attempt [weight], skip your second attempt to give you some rest, and then you can go for the world record on your third?’”

She took his advice: pushed 303 pounds for her first bench attempt, napped through her second attempt, and then moved 320.8 for her third, setting what was then her twenty-fourth world record for the lift.

“There is the adage: you get stronger when you sleep,” Donovan said, and from what he sees Jen do, it seems to be true.

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Before Jen was a 52-year-old flaunting her biceps on the internet and making grown men feel weak by casually slinging hundreds of pounds, she was a 5’5” high school long-distance runner growing up in Detroit who made it to state championships for cross country and track not because she loved running (she didn’t), but because, she says, the sport was all about grit, not talent.

She didn’t start lifting weights until college, when she lived in a house with Donovan, who was starting medical school, and two other people. They were all just friends. Donovan, who’s seven years older, had gotten out of the Army five years earlier. In the service, the former lightweight high school wrestler had learned to lift and bulked up from 98 pounds to 150. When he, Jen, and the rest of the crew moved into the house in 1991, he brought lifting equipment that he and some friends had made to order at a fitness showroom. “You couldn’t just buy weight equipment,” he said. “There was one place that had it. You would go in. They had mockups of it, and you’re like, ‘Yeah, I would like a squat rack,’ and they’re like, ‘We’ll weld it up for you.’”

Most days, around 4 p.m., a group of about 10 guys would lift in the basement. They benched Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Did legs just enough to keep from looking like chickens. Took Sundays off, and then would do it all again.

“They always encouraged me to come and lift weights with them,” Jen said, but she didn’t join right away. It was the early ’90s, and she was mainly worried about putting on the dreaded freshman fifteen. “Back then, skinny was pretty, so you had to very much worry about what your weight was.”

But she’d hear the guys lifting downstairs, laughing together, razzing each other, and finally she decided to give it a try.

“She literally couldn’t bench the bar when she first came into the weight room,” Donovan said. But that changed. At some point, the guys got tired of unloading their weights for her sets. “So we made her lift what we lifted,” he said. “She’s so driven … that every day, she got better.”

Lifting with all guys, the bench was the most important lift. “It was the only thing you cared about, ’cause it was what everyone asked about,” Jen said. “No one cared about squatting or deadlift. Your bench press was the true margin of strength back then.”

Jen didn’t realize exactly how strong she’d gotten until 1998, on a trip with Donovan, now her husband, to Venice, California. They came across a bench press competition on Muscle Beach and noticed that the male athletes were moving the same weight she routinely lifted in her bench sessions.

“You must be pretty strong,” Donovan remembers telling her. Jen talked to some of the competition organizers, found out it was a USA Powerlifting meet, and decided to try the sport for herself. The next year, 1999, she competed in her first powerlifting competition, a local meet in Detroit. She was one of maybe two women.

Looking at her stats from that first competition, it’s clear that she had been benching for years, but not really squatting. She failed her first two squat attempts at 185 pounds, the first because she didn’t squat low enough, the second because she lost her balance and fell into the spotter. “The third one, I think they just gave it to me,” she said. But then she benched, at first failing to move that same weight (185 pounds) and then pushing it successfully on her second attempt. For her third bench, she lifted 235 pounds, setting a state record. Her bench was heavier than her squat.

That first competition qualified her for bench press nationals, and her performance there qualified her for bench press worlds. She set new state records at each competition, moving 237 pounds and 253.5 pounds respectively. She took second place at nationals and third place at worlds.

This was all in her first year of competing. Jen was a certifiable newbie who happened to blow her competition (though it was a relatively small pool back then) out of the water. She was still getting nervous during meets, missing lifts because she was stressed about her performance.

She was also struggling to lift in equipment, the ultra-tight garments, like bench shirts and squat suits, that powerlifters wore to move more weight. Lifters would wander around the competition area with their arms out like zombies. “They had their hands sticking straight out from their chest, because the shirts were so tight, you don’t want to put your arms down,” she said. She hated the equipment: “It hurt. When you wore it, it bruised and took your skin away. It really was uncomfortable … and it hurt to try to lift way more weight than you were capable of.” But she used it at meets anyway to keep an edge against her competitors.

In the early 2010s, the explosion of CrossFit led to more people getting involved in powerlifting. About the same time, powerlifting started offering the raw or classic category, where athletes lifted without the skintight equipment.

“[The raw category] is what exploded our sport to where it is today,” Jen says. “And that’s where I found out that I was wicked strong compared to everybody else.”

When she competed in equipment, her bench was in the low 300s. Without her bench shirt, the 132-pound athlete could still move between 280 and 295. While other female lifters were benching 100 more pounds in their bench shirts, Jen was only moving about 30 additional pounds. Strip away the equipment, and her bench was leagues ahead of her competition. At the 2012 USA Powerlifting Raw Nationals, Jen outlifted every other female athlete in the bench, including those from heavier weight classes. Molly O’Rourke, who weighed in at nearly 100 pounds heavier than Jen, benched 264.5, while Jen benched 292.1 pounds. The next closest bench was by Tina Robinson, in the 198-pound weight class, who moved 253.5.

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By then, Jen was also moving multiple hundreds of pounds in her squat and deadlift. She’d decided to get better at all of powerlifting. As she raised two sons with Donovan, the couple kept adjusting their workout routine to maximize strength gains, while juggling family and work responsibilities.

Donovan told her early on that she’d need to compete long enough for their kids who see her win worlds: “You don’t want to look [at the medals] and they’re saying, ‘Mom, what’s that?’ … and them never have seen it,” he said. “I know at least five world meets that she skipped ’cause our kids were little, that she would have won, easy.”

In 2006, Jen competed at Nationals less than three months after giving birth to her second son. “She went to Nationals with my son in the car carrier and handed him to one of the other lifters in the front row,” Donovan said. “[She] went and won the bench press, and picked him back up.”

Donovan talks about Jen with a sense of awe. He compares her to Michael Jordan, and points out that she’s won more world titles in her sport than Lance Armstrong has in his (17 to 1).

“She has a world medal in four decades,” he said. “She got her first one in ’99, so for four decades, she’s been good enough to win the worlds. … Will people bench more than her someday or beat her records? I think the answer is yes. But is someone going to win … a worlds in four decades? Is someone going to win 40-some nationals?”

He doubts it.

Donovan serves as Jen’s coach and brings his medical background as an emergency room doctor to his understanding of training. Through trial and error, he and Jen landed on an 8-day training week, with two days on, two days off, and workouts that cycle roughly every 16 days.

He used to think that anyone could train themselves to be world-class in powerlifting, but working with Jen and coaching the USA Powerlifting worlds team changed his mind.

“It’s something in their makeup, something in their ability to drive harder, last longer,” he said. “I’m pretty good at it, but I’m nowhere near her level. And I try. … You just can’t outwork her. It’s impossible. And I know her pain threshold is way higher than mine too. … She tore her ACL, MCL, and had a condyle fracture of her femur — took Tylenol. She had surgery, took Tylenol and iced it. … That’s the kind of pain threshold she has.”

In 2018, Jen competed in the International Powerlifting Federation (IPF) World Classic Powerlifting Championships in Calgary, Canada. She’d missed the competition the year before due to an injury and was back after having hip surgery. “Even though I had won it three years in a row, no one mentioned I was even a contender,” Jen said.

In powerlifting, the deadlift is the last lift to happen and where the most weight is moved. The entire competition pool can be rearranged based on what people lift.

“In that particular event, I was behind,” Jen said, “so Donovan looked at me and he’s like, ‘Let’s just go for all of it right on the second [deadlift] and see what happens.’” She’d lifted 374.75 pounds on her first deadlift. Now, she jumped more than 70 pounds to lift 446.25, a weight she hadn’t yet pulled in her life. “It basically calculated out that [to outlift her] everyone else would be on their PR,” Donovan said, “or [Samantha Calhoun, Jen’s close competitor who’d beaten her at nationals that year] would have to go for a world record on her second attempt.”

“I came out and I pulled,” Jen said. “It was hard, but I pulled it, and then I watched everyone fighting for second [place]. No one even tried to beat me … and there were some girls that definitely could have tried to go after it, but [if they missed] it would’ve meant they were less than second place, so they weren’t willing to risk it.”

Calhoun lifted heavier deadlifts on her second and third attempts, but Jen still won the competition. Added to her squat, her deadlift PR and bench press (more than 80 pounds heavier than Calhoun’s) gave her the heaviest total.

The international powerlifting landscape has changed a lot since then. IPF and USA Powerlifting went separate ways in 2021 due to disagreements regarding testing for performance-enhancing drugs (comment if you’re interested in a deep dive). Thompson, who has passed every drug test throughout her lifting career, stayed with USA Powerlifting and doesn’t lift on the IPF stage anymore. But she continues to compete.

Last year was a lighter year for her. In March, she had her shoulder scoped to clear out scar tissue from years of wear and tear, and after a week off, started working on rebuilding her strength. Then, in August, she tore her rotator cuff while benching.

“I didn’t quite know if I’d be able to bench press again,” she said, but she met with her orthopedic doctor and, rather than going through another surgery, she opted to lighten things up again and develop more of the muscles around her shoulder. In early February, she benched 300 pounds for the first time in almost a year.

“I’ve had a lot of injuries over my career, but you heal, you get on, and I just love [lifting] so much, I never wanted to quit,” she said.

Because of her injury, she’s not expecting to make a new bench PR at her next competition, the Arnold Classic happening March 5–8 in Columbus, Ohio. She’s hoping to bench in the low 300s and then hit a PR or two in her squat and deadlift. The deadlift, fun fact, is actually her favorite lift, and she has a lifetime goal of hitting 460 pounds. “I’ve hit 457.5, but I’ve never hit 460,” she said, “and I feel like this is the day.”

Regardless, she’s sure to move incredible weight.

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Recommendations

Because of the Olympics…

• Alysa Liu Is Skating Again, Her Way This Time [all the way to the gold!] (New York Times)

• Watch Liu’s gold-medal winning routine.

• PWHL’s influence apparent at Olympics with overtime medal games and the gap closing behind US and Canada (Newsday) I’ve been following the PWHL since their showcase game in Denver brought in a record number of fans. The league is seeking to grow women’s hockey throughout North America and added two new franchises over the last year, with plans for more. This article claims that the PWHL is partly responsible for narrowing the competition gap between nations in women’s hockey.

• Lindsey Vonn says surgery saved her from having her left leg amputated following Olympic crash (Associated Press)

Because of humor…

Because the ads for weight loss drugs are out of control…

Because there are experts…

• Yes, You Do Need a Post-Run Cooldown—But Not For the Reasons You Think (Run)

Hi friends,

It’s been a hot second since I published here and a lot has happened in the meantime. I graduated from PT, made major progress on my return-to-running program, started to feel like I had my legs back, and — the second Saturday of the year — turned my other ankle. I’ll spare you the details, but it was looking really bright there for a second. The plan is to properly rehab this one so I don’t end up with chronic instability and injury like I had with the other one.

(New here and have no idea what I’m talking about? Read all about it in the Injury Diaries, my series from last year that tracked my recovery journey after a much-needed ankle surgery. Not that interested? No worries. I’m bored by it too.)

I took some time at the end of the year to look back on what I’d written in 2025. While writing about my personal surgery recovery journey led to a more frequent publishing schedule, I found that I wasn’t too enthusiastic about those pieces. In general, I’m not really interested in writing about myself. I’d rather write about something that I start off knowing nothing about.

So that’s the plan for 2026: more reported stories and less (maybe no) personal writing.

I have a few pieces in the works: on well-known strength athletes, training, and trends I’m seeing in the fitness space. The first one’s coming to you in February, and I’m planning a monthly cadence from then on.

(Have an idea for me? My inbox is open. Reply to this email or drop a comment below.)

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In the meantime, check out my story about Girls on the Run in honor of the organization’s 30th anniversary in Issue 002 of RunHer Mag.

More soon.

~Meredith

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My favorite WBC pieces from 2025

The last couple months have been the most frustrating in my surgical recovery journey. I thought I’d be done with physical therapy and back to some form of running by the end of September, but instead — after pushing myself too far on a six-mile hike in early September — I found myself with worsening pain. I had to back off some of my hopping for a few weeks, and reintegrate exercises targeting my foot and toes. The running I thought I’d seen glimmering on the horizon turned out to be a mirage.

I thought about writing in the middle of it, but truthfully, I didn’t want to talk about it. Along with being frustrated with my body’s seeming incapacity to continue healing and improving, I was mad at myself for getting too ambitious about hiking and (likely) injuring my plantar fascia in the process. My fall goal of hiking more overshadowed my goal of fully rehabbing my ankle, and as a result, I wasn’t able to accomplish either.

The last couple weeks, though, have finally given me the hope that I will get there. Three Saturdays ago, after a lower body lifting session, I tested out some jogging on the turf outside my gym. My physical therapist had asked me during my previous appointment if I’d tried jogging and told me that heel striking is better for people with stiff ankles, so when I hit the turf, I went heels first. I was a little limpy at first, due to weakness, not pain, but as I warmed up, the limp faded. I was quickly winded, but jogging felt good.

A few days later, I went out again and jogged for a little longer. Then, October 25, I went out again and ran for the equivalent of two Kirk Franklin songs, because that’s the type of mood I was in.

This Wednesday, I went back to PT and gave my physical therapist the update. She had me jog for her in the hallway, printed off an official “return to run” plan, and after a few other exercises, sent me home. The first part of the plan has you run one minute, walk one minute, up to seven times, as a way to reintroduce the stress to your tissues and give them a chance to adjust. Once you can do that comfortably and without needing a few days to recover, you bump up to running two to three minutes, walking one minute, up to five times. I’ve already done more than that first phase, but I’m still going to do one minute on, one minute off the next time I jog.

I don’t want to speak too soon, but I might finally be getting somewhere.

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In the meantime, these last couple weeks, I’ve also had the smoothest squat sessions since my surgery. It takes some time to prep my body for squatting because ankle mobility plays such an important role. But I’ve found a few things that help.

So in the interest of serving any other ankle-impinged lifters out there:

My Post-Ankle Surgery Squat Mobility Routine

I complete all of the following after warming up on a stationary bike. I also do hip prep in the form of bulldogs, pigeon stretch, and child’s pose. Unloaded drop squats help me find the right stance.

1. Static stretches I can’t skip

• Kneeling-with-toes-tucked-under foot stretch: For my poor feet, which got somewhat destroyed over years working food service in bad shoes, not to mention my ankle injuries. 1 minute.

• Standing quad stretch: Stand on one leg and hold my opposite foot behind me. Helps stretch out the front of my ankle, which gets super tight and stiff. 30-second hold, 3 times.

• Basic calf stretch: With my hands on the floor, I plant my left foot flat on the floor and tuck my other foot behind it. 30-second hold, 3 times.

2. Kettlebell to the lower calf

How I do it: Sitting on the floor, I place my leg on the handle of a kettlebell so that the handle is just below the bulk of my calf muscle. I press my leg into the handle and try different angles until I find a tight spot. Then, maintaining the pressure on my leg, I raise and point my foot until I feel the spot loosen up.

What it does: Targets tight, stiff areas of the lower leg that impede ankle dorsiflexion.

3. Ugly cossack squats from the floor

A cossack squat is a lateral squat like this that emphasizes one leg at a time. My left ankle gets so stiff that I can’t do a regular cossack squat without the following pre-work.

How it’s done: Seated on the floor, I straddle my right leg outward and bring my left foot almost to my butt. I plant my left foot into the floor and lean my weight into that foot. I use my hands to help get up onto that foot. I hold in that lower position and press my knee over my foot a bit, then either rock back onto the floor or stand.

What it does: Initially, my heel will lift because of how stiff my ankle is, but after a few times, it’ll stay closer to the ground. I test regular cossack squats from the top to see how my mobility has changed. Once I’m able to get into a more normal position from the top, I do 10–20 regular cossack squats.

4. For when my ankle feels extra pinched

• Extra-long standing quad stretch: I’ll hold the position a minute at a time and go diagonally so my right hand is holding my left foot behind me. This emphasizes the ankle more.

• Banded ankle dorsiflexion stretch: With my foot on a box, I put a band around the top of my foot (lower ankle) and pull the band backward while pushing my knee over my toes. I make sure to also pull my knee backward to work the full range of motion of my ankle, but going forward is where I feel the pinch. I do this a few times until going forward feels more fluid.

Together, these help grease up my joint, get it unstuck, and loosen up what’s tight in and around my ankle. If I prep my ankle properly, I don’t notice it while I’m squatting. My left foot is able to push properly through the movement, and I can hit decent depth.

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Previously in Women’s Barbell Club…

Recommended

• Read: Why even exercise when the world is on fire? (from at )

• Read: 80-year-old grandmother becomes oldest woman to finish the Ironman World Championship (NPR)

• Watch: Multi-part documentary on Olivia Reeves from Weightlifting House: 1, 2, 3.

• Read: Your Warm-Up Might Be Even More Vital to Your Workout Than You Thought (Self)

August 1, I woke up in a tent at a campground on the north side of Grand Teton National Park, ate a breakfast burrito that was crisped on a camp stove, and took a hike with my roommate and her friend.

We were in the Tetons for five days, camping, exploring, and in my case, failing to sleep in a comfortable position. My neck locked up that first morning and I ended up making a pit stop at the Target in Jackson, Wyoming, for a pillow after night two.

This trip had been planned since February or March. From early in my surgical recovery, I had “hiking in the Tetons in August” as a goal. Hopefully, my ankle would be ready for a few miles by then.

My roommate — yes, this same roommate — the mastermind of the trip, had a 14-mile hike through a canyon scoped out. It was her nonnegotiable. By June, though, it was obvious that I wasn’t going to be able to complete it. No big deal. My friend, who joined us on August 2, didn’t have any interest in hiking 14 miles. The two of us would do a shorter trail or something else entirely.

My ankle was feeling good, way smoother and more mobile than it had a month earlier. Two physical therapy visits prior, on July 15, I showed up complaining about stiffness in my ankle. Any time I tried to squat or simply drive my knee forward, it locked up.

My physical therapist pitched the idea of dry needling the area. I immediately agreed.

I’d had dry needling before: When I was dealing with low back / sacroiliac issues in 2018, a chiropractor incorporated dry needling into my treatment (chiropractic treatment did not resolve my issues and I have since become a physical therapy advocate). In 2020, when I hurt my knee playing tennis, my physical therapist at the time also used dry needling.

This time around, the effect was immediately noticeable.

First, my therapist poked two needles into the front of my ankle, where it was stiff and locked up. It hurt, guys. Like, it always feels weird when the needles go in, but this time, they must have been traveling through some gnarly tissue because getting them all the way in took some effort and I had to grit my teeth and scrunch my face to keep from yelping with pain.

I can’t remember if my PT used the electric current on those first needles or if she just let the needles rest in my ankle, but after a while, she pulled them out, had me flip over on the table, and stuck four more needles into the back of my calf and ankle. This time, she used the electric current on two different needles. The current forces the muscles around the needles to spasm, with the goal of wearing them out so they’ll fully relax. It’s a bizarre experience — a forced muscle cramp, but your brain doesn’t understand why it’s happening.

Afterward, my therapist had me do some ankle mobilization to see how my dorsiflexion had improved. It was way better. I didn’t have that locking sensation when I drove my knee over my toes. My ankle felt the closest to normal that it had since surgery.

It stayed that way the next two weeks. The days leading up to my Tetons trip, I squatted with my feet flat on the ground, no heel elevation, without difficulty. I went to PT the day before we left for Wyoming, and my physical therapist asked if I’d like more dry needling.

“I don’t think I need it,” I told her. “I think that did the trick.”

She ended up having me do more bounding and shuffling and changing direction instead. I worked up a sweat from what felt like slow motion running. “How does that feel?” she asked. “It feels fine in my ankle,” I replied. “I’m just out of shape.”

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The next day, we drove through Wyoming. We gawked at the Tetons when they appeared like a jagged wall on our drive, backlit by the sun, and we set up camp around dusk. The following morning, after an ideal camp breakfast, we left for a 3.8-mile hike to Taggart Lake. I brought my ankle brace in my backpack just in case, but didn’t end up using it. We took a long break at the lake — jumped in, ate lunch — and my ankle and foot felt rested enough to go without it on the way back.

In an effort to stick with my physical therapy exercises over vacation, I brought a yoga mat to stretch on. That afternoon, I spread it under a tree at our campsite and started to stretch my ankle, but I didn’t get very far before I was distracted. The mat stayed under the tree for another day or two, before I rolled it up and stashed it on the bear box. I’d intended to at least do my stretching, but who was I kidding?

Sunday, August 3, was the big hike day, and because we only had one car, that meant it was an early morning for everyone. All four of us (now that my friend had arrived) got up bright and early and piled in the car to get half of our squad to the trailhead. There, my roommate tossed me her keys, and I drove my friend back to the campsite so we could actually get ready for the day. We were late for a nature walk, where we’d hoped to learn about the regional flora (though it all looked the same as what I see in Colorado), so we gave up that plan and opted to hike around the short side of Jenny Lake instead.

On the far side of the lake, after seeing from a distance what we were told was a brown black bear eating wild berries, we pushed through some steep elevation gain and hazardous-to-the-ankle rocky trails to soak in Hidden Falls and enjoy the view at Inspiration Point. My lungs were challenged on the way up; my legs felt it on the way down. My foot and ankle were fatigued by the end, and they welcomed rest when we rode the ferry back across the lake.

I’ve been back in Denver now for over a week, and I’ll be honest: skipping my stretching for five days took a toll on my ankle mobility. When I got back, my ankle was the stiffest it had been since the dry needling. But resuming stretching has already helped me regain most of my pre-vacation fluidity. I turned down dry needling again this week because I can tell that stretching will do the job. (Though I might change my mind by next time.)

I’m back to much of my normal activities. Long walks, hiking (aka long walks through the woods), lifting. My PT exercises right now are focused on explosion and absorption. My physical therapist has encouraged me to see what jogging feels like (“but don’t just go out for a run.”). This week, I did a tough leg workout that put me out of breath and left me sore for days. My ankle is not normal, and I’m not sure it will ever be, but it’s coming along. And I’m eager for the next thing.

Barring something incredibly exciting or interesting happening, there will probably only be one more installment in this series — and that’ll be when I’m able to run again. Let me know what else you’d like to read about in future editions of Women’s Barbell Club by completing this survey.

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Previously in Women’s Barbell Club…

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Recommended Reads

• Do You Need to Drink Electrolytes? (New York Times)

• These Are the Most Common Myths About Building Core Strength, According to a Physical Therapist (Outside)

• The Virtue of Integrity (The Atlantic)

What’s coming next?

Something reported on the way for September.

Before gyms. Before weight rooms. Before Zumba and Curves and Jane Fonda aerobics. Before basketball and the modern Olympics. Before Victorianism and the Cult of True Womanhood. Before all of this, a 33-year-old, unmarried, childless Mary Wollstonecraft sat down to write about women’s rights. The right to pursue physical strength featured prominently in her argument.

Born April 27, 1759, in London, Mary Wollstonecraft lived at a time when women were accessories to society and first sons got everything: inheritances, land, education. She was the second of five children and the oldest daughter, but her older brother was the only child nursed by her mother and the only one to receive a full education. Even her younger brother was overlooked. Her alcoholic father was abusive and irresponsible with the family finances. Her mother was weak and beholden to her husband’s whims; she looked to her first son for emotional solace and lashed out at her other children. Mary was often on the receiving end of her mother’s wrath and, it seems, from the beginning had a clear-eyed view of the injustice of her position.

Why should an accident of birth, in terms of family, time period, and sex, leave her with less? Why should she be overlooked and neglected in favor of a brother who just happened to be the firstborn male?

The laws of primogeniture, the structural reason for this favoritism, offended her, but the injustice extended beyond that. As a child, she saw her mother’s dependence on her father, her inability to do anything to provide for herself. As a young woman, she saw this same dependence among her sisters and peers. Her sister Eliza married an ill-fit match and, after bearing her first child, her mental health fell apart. Her husband blamed her mental state on her personality and likely suggested they have sex to help, because as Janet Todd wrote in Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life, “In medical manuals female hysteria was often ascribed to sexual fear or abstinence.” Before long, Mary helped Eliza escape the marriage, leaving the baby behind because it was legally bound to the father. The marriage that was assumed would provide stability for the rest of her sister’s life had proven the opposite. She was better off on her own.

This dependence on men and the failing health of women around her stirred thoughts and convictions in Mary. Her mother, always something of an invalid, died early. Her best friend died days after childbirth. Her own health was frequently poor. Was this the result of expectations on her class? The sedentary lifestyle of English society? Or was it specific to women, due to their unique biology?

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Mary was living in the middle of the Enlightenment, which fostered the idea that reason, or the ability to think things through, was a distinct part of what made humans human. However, for many philosophers, this didn’t apply to women. Many 18th-century philosophers saw educating women and girls as a pointless endeavor. To them, women were all feelings, no logic. They ought to be educated on things that appealed to the senses and social crowds — learn to be pretty and do pretty things — but don’t waste their time or attention on things that are hard.

These ideas were the natural outflow of the same philosophers’ embrace of the notion that women were inherently weak. Many at this time were heavily influenced by ancient Greece and Rome, thanks to 12th-century translations of classical texts that brought Aristotle and others back into intellectual consciousness during the Renaissance. They also inherited interpretations of biblical texts — from Genesis through 1 Peter, where the apostle tells husbands to give honor to their wives “as unto the weaker vessel” — that saw women as physically, emotionally, and morally weak. While Aristotle convinced 18th-century male philosophers that women were malformed men, a lesser version of the supposed male standard, scripture had long been used to make women’s bodies and their apparent lesser strength into walking metaphors of women’s greater vulnerability to sin, as well as melancholy and other difficult emotional or mental states.

“In earlier times, women’s social subjugation was extrapolated from scripture with its implication of the cursed, dirty female body and its contaminating blood. In the late eighteenth century inequality was grounded on women’s nervous physique,” Todd wrote.

Using these ideas, philosophers of Wollstonecraft’s day argued that women because of their weak constitutions couldn’t handle more taxing on their systems, and thus shouldn’t participate in rigorous education. In fact, it would be better for them to let their minds and bodies rest at all times, as much as possible. Reserve their energy for what women were really for: bearing children. Outside the swirling thought world of philosophers, the wasting away disease of consumption (aka tuberculosis) shaped beauty standards in the late 18th century. Women of higher classes wanted to look sickly and frail. Wollstonecraft wrote of an acquaintance who bragged about her fragility as if it were some sort of achievement.

Naturally, this approach didn’t put women in a healthy position to bear children. Obstetrics was not yet a science and the groundwork for modern medicine was just being laid, so we can’t claim that lack of exercise is the sole reason so many of Mary Wollstonecraft’s peers met their fates after giving birth, but knowing what we know now about exercise’s benefits for pregnant women, it likely played a part.

These detrimental effects on women’s health and the health of their offspring may have influenced Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau when he wrote Emile, a treatise on education that set forth his thoughts on gender dynamics. In Emile, Rousseau gave a less rigorous physical and intellectual education to the main character’s future wife Sophie, because: “When once it is proved that men and women are and ought to be unlike in constitution and temperament, it follows that their education must be different.” As historian Jan Todd (no relation) wrote in her book Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful:

Where Emile’s physical training was expected to instill the desirable attributes of strength, autonomy, and independent thinking, Sophie exercised because it enhanced her physical appeal to Emile. The more attractive women were, Rousseau reasoned, the more men would wish to mate with them, and the stronger the family would be. A eugenicist at heart, Rousseau claimed, “Women should not be strong like men, but for them, so that their sons may be strong.” From Rousseau’s narrow perspective, woman’s potential was limited to a sheltered, hidden life as man’s companion and mate. … Rousseau feared the exaggerated delicacy he saw developing among some upper-class women because he believed it would lead to effeminacy in their male offspring.

Still, the physical education he supported for women had limits. Women were not to surpass men, but to live in service of them. “To please, to be useful to us, to make us love and esteem them, to console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable: these are the duties of women at all times, and what they should be taught in their infancy,” Rousseau wrote.

When Wollstonecraft sat down to write A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, Rousseau was her primary intellectual opponent, but she also attacked the cultural expectations of weakness, agreeableness, and delicacy that many of her peers adhered to. She completed the new work, a follow-up to her defense of the French Revolution entitled A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in six weeks, sending chapters as they were finished to her publisher to be typeset. The resulting volume called for women to be able to pursue their potential intellectually, morally, and physically — all of which Wollstonecraft saw as connected.

Her argument focused on women as moral beings capable of developing virtue. Because virtue is expressed through choice, Wollstonecraft argued, women ought to be allowed full access to the things (namely, education) that could help them develop their ability to discern right from wrong. She brought exercise and the pursuit of physical strength into the discussion because she saw women use their weakness in service of their chosen vices: “Women,” she wrote, “sometimes boast of their weakness, cunningly obtaining power by playing on the weakness of men [likely alluding to lust] … but virtue is sacrificed to temporary gratifications, and the respectability of life to the triumph of an hour.”

While she admitted that women were weaker and men were stronger physically, she did not see any reason for women to make themselves more weak or to limit their physical accomplishments to superficial beauty that could win a man’s fickle affection:

In the government of the physical world it is observable that the female in point of strength is, in general, inferior to the male. This is the law of nature; and it does not appear to be suspended or abrogated in favour of woman. … But not content with this natural pre-eminence, men endeavour to sink us still lower, merely to render us alluring objects for a moment. … Nature has given woman a weaker frame than man; but, to ensure her husband’s affections, must a wife, who by the exercise of her mind and body whilst she was discharging the duties of a daughter, wife, and mother, has allowed her constitution to retain its natural strength, and her nerves a healthy tone, is she, I say, to condescend to use art and feign a sickly delicacy in order to secure her husband’s affection?

Wollstonecraft directly confronted the idea that women ought to shrink themselves — whether by shutting their mouths or letting their bodies waste away — in order to avoid repelling men. She saw her peers’ pursuit of beauty and delicacy as frivolous and stupid. This may have been because her mother’s own cultivated weakness did nothing to protect her from the rampages of her alcoholic husband, or because she perhaps saw her sister shrink herself during engagement and marriage only for things to get worse once her child came.

What use was male favor if it could disappear in a moment? Be a whole person, you can practically hear her pleading with other women as she argued with male philosophers about womankind. Her base-level argument in Vindication is the same core argument of modern feminism: that women are people too and ought to be treated as such. Wollstonecraft was convinced that limitations on women prevented them from fulfilling their potential.

“I may be accused of arrogance; still I must declare what I firmly believe,” she wrote, “that all the writers who have written on the subject of female education and manners from Rousseau to Dr. Gregory [a Scottish moralist who encouraged women in his work A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters not to show how educated they were in case it would hurt their marriage prospects], have contributed to render women more artificial, weak characters, than they would otherwise have been; and, consequently, more useless members of society.”

By pursuing strength, women would be able to better care for themselves, rather than being solely dependent on the men in their lives, and they would also have more to offer society at large.

Wollstonecraft supported her argument in favor of women’s strength by calling attention to the natural world, where “every young creature requires almost continual exercise,” and pointing out that exercise would enhance both women’s physical beauty and their ability to carry out their duties as wives and mothers. But her interest in women’s strength had more to do with increasing their independence than helping them fulfill Rousseau’s fantasies as beings who existed purely to serve and please men.

“Men have superiour strength of body; but were it not for mistaken notions of beauty, women would acquire sufficient [strength] to enable them to earn their own subsistence, the true definition of independence; and to bear those bodily inconveniencies and exertions that are requisite to strengthen the mind,” she wrote. “Let us then, by being allowed to take the same exercise as boys, not only during infancy, but youth, arrive at perfection of body, that we may know how far the natural superiority of man extends.”

Wollstonecraft saw her world as one that treated women like exotic birds: “Confined then in cages like the feathered race, they [women] have nothing to do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch.” The focus on superficial appearance rather than personal character, she said, damaged individual women and society as a whole by hampering the development of moral people. She saw women spend their formative years on worthless pursuits, “meanwhile strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty” — all in pursuit of the one thing that could set women up for life, “the only way women can rise in the world — by marriage.” But Wollstonecraft, through the lives of her mother, her sister, her best friend, had seen the promise of marriage as a lie.

Women could live a better way, if only they were allowed the opportunity to develop themselves.

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Vindication had little immediate effects in England and elsewhere, though individual women were moved by it. The book only sold between 1,500 and 3,000 copies in its first five years in print and did not gain a following to spread its ideas, according to Janet Todd. What effects it may have had were bemoaned.

“A ‘mother’ wrote to the Ladies Monthly Museum to lament that her four daughters had been corrupted by the book: one lost her ‘softness’ and indulged in horse-racing, fox-hunting and betting; a second had taken up Latin and Greek; a third was scientifically dissecting her pets; and a fourth was challenging men to duels,” wrote Todd.

Meanwhile, Thomas Taylor, a neoplatonist who translated the complete works of Aristotle and Plato into English, wrote a response to both Wollstonecraft’s work and Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man that made a mockery of their arguments for human rights. His response, Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, extended liberty to animals, with vegetables and minerals to follow. It included “unsavoury anecdotes of animal-woman copulation,” explained Todd. Because of course: “The rights of woman must lead to sexual chaos, while, in an unhierarchical world, women would always be violated.”1

Wollstonecraft’s work enjoyed a better reception in America. “In Massachusetts, John Adams’s sister-in-law Elizabeth demanded a copy from Abigail while she was in London,” wrote Diane Jacobs in Her Own Woman: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Though the book’s initial impacts were small, flip ahead 233 years and — despite remaining gender inequities globally and upheaval across the West — we are living in a world that Mary Wollstonecraft would marvel at. Women’s economic independence may be the greatest it has ever been. In the West, we are generally not dependent on male favor to make a living or have a home or clothes on our backs. While certainly women are still subject to abuse and exploitation, we are not bound to men by social and legal structures in the way we were even half a century ago.

But we haven’t left all the cages that Wollstonecraft identified, even if the doors are open.

The fixation on superficial appearance that she denounced in the late 18th century hasn’t gone the way of the horse and carriage. If anything, it’s gotten worse. Technological advancements — from photography to television to the internet to social media and the smartphone — have fed a culture that was preoccupied with appearance back when the only way to know what you looked like was via a pool of water, a mercury-backed mirror, or a painter’s portrait that took days to complete. Today, new beauty products are released every month, representing a nearly $300 billion global industry in 2023, while cosmetic procedures like botox, fillers, and Brazilian butt lifts drove a $112 billion market in 2022 with expectations to triple by 2030. What women have gained in economic independence is doubly taxed by what we spend on unnecessary matters of appearance. We may be mostly free of male domination when it comes to our finances (set aside the gender wage gap for a moment), but we’re not free of the male gaze, whether the beauty standard of this instant is what men actually find attractive or not.

If Wollstonecraft were to visit our world today, she’d probably be stunned by how many women intentionally exercise,2 but I think she’d also be surprised to see how many women exercise for the same reason that women of her day spent hours on fainting couches: to preserve an appearance of delicacy, rather than to pursue strength. SkinnyTok and the idea that women should exercise in order to reduce how much space they occupy would be out of the question to Wollstonecraft. Holding back in the gym because you don’t want to get “too big” or “too strong”, because you don’t want to scare off a potential partner, would sound foolish to her.

“But should it be proved that woman is naturally weaker than man, whence does it follow that it is natural for her to labour to become still weaker than nature intended her to be?” she wrote.

At the same time, she would likely empathize with us. Her own life showed how hard it is to swim against the current of patriarchy. After the release of Vindication, she fell in love with Gilbert Imlay. He fathered her first child but refused to marry her and soon left. Wollstonecraft wrote letters begging for his return and followed after him around Europe. His rejection drove her to attempt suicide twice, revealing the same dependence on male favor that she reviled in Vindication.

Later, she formed a relationship with philosopher William Godwin. They married when she was four months pregnant with their daughter, Mary (later Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein). Though the marriage was uniquely equal, it didn’t last long. Ten days after their daughter was born, Wollstonecraft died, leaving to the imagination what their marriage may have looked like with the new life they’d created.

“I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body,” she wrote in Vindication. But an endeavor is never a guarantee of achievement. It’s not easy to pursue mental or physical strength when there are structural obstacles, legal and physical bullies, people out there who don’t want us to be more than we are, or our own insecurities and vulnerabilities that get in our way and hold us back. But the obstacles we face today are nothing compared to what Wollstonecraft and her peers were up against. As much as our social norms and stigmas may parallel the things that relegated 18th-century women of society to delicate activities that wouldn’t make their faces flush, we have the right to challenge and defy today’s norms.

Our rights are also a responsibility — to ourselves, those around us, and those to come. If we want the world to be better for women, we have a role to play. Chances are, we won’t make positive change by using exercise to shrink ourselves. In 1792, Wollstonecraft wanted women to grow stronger. Today, she’d probably want the same thing. So go ahead, make Mary Wollstonecraft proud, and exercise your right to pursue strength.

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Previously in Women’s Barbell Club…

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Recommended Reads

• Jan Todd May Be the Reason You’re Lifting Weights (New York Times)

• Should I Buy a Weighted Vest (Deep Dive by )

• 3 Simple Exercises to Build Explosive Strength, According to a WNBA Coach (Self)

What’s Coming Next…

More Injury Diaries

I’m three sessions deep into my return to lower-body lifting.

Two weeks ago — about a week after the last time I wrote, when it felt like a full athletic recovery was nowhere in sight — I finally tested out deadlifting and front squatting. The days that led to that moment made me feel exactly like this song. After publishing my maybe-too-melodramatic love letter to long walks, I proceeded to fret over my ankle and its perpetual soreness, stress over that letter from my insurance, and cry at physical therapy.

Yes, you read that right: I cried at physical therapy.

I picked a great day for it too. My regular therapist was out of town so I was working with someone else. This therapist I could tell from previous observations was really good at her job, but she was also the type of personality that moves way faster than I can generally keep up with. Her questions and directions kept coming, and then her corrections:

“You shouldn’t need to hold on for this.”

“Take a break. I can hear your joints cracking on both sides.”

Maybe it was her speed, maybe it was my mounting worries about running out of insurance approvals or the bump on my ankle that I thought was my bone spur growing back. Maybe it was hormones (likely; I started my period the next day) or maybe it was a lack of sleep. But halfway through my session, I found myself holding back tears and right at the end, when the therapist told me to walk around a little —

“How does it feel?”

“It feels fine,” I shrugged back, and then I couldn’t keep myself from crying.

The therapist, PT assistant, and rest of the team didn’t know what to do. The assistant set me up with an ice machine like usual and then came back with a box of tissues. The therapist asked, “Are you okay?” I nodded and managed to say, “It’s just a long time,” and she tried to comfort me by saying they tend to see people for a while because recovery takes time.

“But you should be able to hike this summer.”

I nodded and the tears kept coming.

The recovery process involves trust. Not just trust in myself (the easy part), but trust in healthcare providers like my surgeon and physical therapist and trust in my body itself, that it will heal and respond to the exercises the way it’s supposed to. I knew at the outset that this process would take time. In 2020, when I went to PT after hurting my knee playing tennis, I took longer than the average person to recover. My therapist then assured me that everyone heals at their own rate. I figured this would be the same.

But that doesn’t make waiting any easier. Patience is a virtue I chronically lack, and waiting for things to happen that are outside of my control is not my idea of fun. The good news is that some of those things I was missing a few weeks ago weren’t too far off.

What led me to go ahead and try lifting Monday, June 2? I think I looked at my “get my legs back” plan and saw that I was at the lifting stage, and I think my nervousness about running out of approved PT sessions convinced me I might as well try to lift now so I could tell my therapist how it felt.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d been pretty consistent with my upper-body workouts over the last few months, but how were my legs? Would I even remember how to lift properly?

I did deadlifts first. In my socks, as always. And I kept it light. Started with 65 pounds for 10 reps, did a few warmup sets with progressing weight, and then settled on 125 for five sets of 10. I could tell my back was deconditioned and I had to actively think about pushing through my left foot, but my ankle and legs felt solid. Then I tested out front squats.

Front squats are generally easier mobility-wise than back squats. They don’t require as much ankle flexion as a back squat (especially for someone with my dimensions), but I still got stuck on the way down. Full depth was out of reach because my left ankle would only fold so far. I did 5x5 slowly with super light weight (the heaviest I went was 85 pounds) and tried to focus on keeping my foot engaged through the whole movement. Along with lacking ankle mobility, my arch didn’t have the endurance to do its job for 10 reps at a time.

Those observations weren’t surprising at all, nor were they disappointing. The most important thing: I had no pain in either movement.

That week, the first week of June, I reported back to my therapist about my first lifting session. She gave me more stretches to help with my ankle mobility and recommended I elevate my heels for now when squatting. That same day, the receptionist had me fill out a questionnaire to help with insurance and told me I should be fine as far as approvals go for the immediate future. I also asked my therapist about the bump on my ankle and she checked it out.

“I can feel what you’re talking about,” she said, and then she pulled up a diagram of the talus bone. She emphasized that it’s supposed to have a ridge and mine was in normal range. The mass that was there pre-surgery, then, must have been inflamed soft tissue, and my bone spur had been somewhere else, I guess. Since she told me that, I’ve barely noticed that part of my ankle. It still gets sore sometimes, but I’m not obsessing over it.

Last Tuesday, I lifted for the second time and felt more confident. I went heavier on both (up to 145 on my deadlift) and used lifting wedges for my squat. I still noticed the weakness of my arch when squatting, but I’m expecting that to improve with time.

Since I last wrote, I’ve taken multiple long walks, started using my roommate’s massage gun to work out the knots in my calf, and now three weeks back into lower-body lifting, I’m practically jittering with anticipation of a full recovery. My PT exercises are currently focused on speed in my ankle to prepare me to run and jump again. My last therapy session, I did some hopping in the leg press machine (which combined with my squat session left my quads sore for three days), and my left leg was only slightly less fluid through the movement than the right.

You would have never thought I’d cried at PT the way that appointment went. I felt the closest to athletic that I’ve felt in a while — except for my time working on my deadlift.

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Previously in Women’s Barbell Club…

Recommended Reads

• The Denver Onyx Are Absolutely Dominating Their Competition (5280 Magazine) — I wrote this one! Took a deep dive into my local pro women’s rugby team, which happens to be the top contender for the inaugural Women’s Elite Rugby Legacy Cup. If you’re in Minnesota, you should totally go.

• Attempting Movement: Learning to Let the Body Be (From the Hand by ) — Angelina and I were classmates in college, and she is one of my favorite writers on here. Always has beautiful thoughts to share and her word choice is impeccable.

• Inside the Exclusive, Obsessive, Surprisingly Litigious World of Luxury Fitness (The Atlantic) — I’d never heard of Tracy Anderson until Monday of this week, and then I spent way too much time watching one of her workouts on YouTube and groaning. Two things I’ll say: 1) If you do any movement over and over again for 30 minutes, you will wear out and get sore. That doesn’t mean it’s an effective workout. 2) Save your money and just do this Barbie workout from when I was a child.

What’s coming next…

I said this last time, but I’m finally drafting this piece so watch for it in a few weeks: What one of the earliest feminist writers has to do with fitness

I started walking during COVID. In 2020, when my gym was temporarily shut down and I was sick of being contained by the low ceiling of my basement apartment and the weather was getting nicer, I started wandering my neighborhood. I crossed streets I hadn’t crossed before, traveled farther north, then east, then south. I happened upon neighbors’ fairy gardens and little free libraries, marveled over beautiful houses and landscaping, took pictures of shrubs so overgrown there was a boxy path cut out of them to let people through to a house’s front door. I discovered a church’s prayer garden and columbarium, where members’ ashes were buried under flowers in various stages of bloom. I started taking my Bible there every once in a while and sitting to journal, pray, reflect.

I walked with no time limit except for the sunset, the fall of dusk on my city. There were days in the summer and fall that I walked late enough to see people’s porch lights flick on, the commotion of households hidden behind curtains and stained glass.

These walks introduced me to a city I’d known primarily through my reporting. Away from the screen, away from the news cycle, I could observe the mundane activities of life in a place. The lifecycles of plants in well-meant landscapes. The changing inhabitants of fairy gardens that, from at least one porchside conversation with a stranger, I learned were the product of pandemic-era boredom. There were days I’d walk or bike to the park, a backpack of activities loaded up, my skin lathered with sunscreen. I’d watch society rollerblade and frisbee itself through summer. But my neighborhood walks were different. They whispered to me about belonging, laying down roots, building for the long term.

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I miss those walks. I’m almost four months out of surgery — the stage at which my surgeon said I should have no more activity restrictions — but my ankle’s strength and endurance is not yet to the level needed to walk comfortably for 30 minutes, much less an hour.

Last week, I traveled across the country for my little brother’s wedding. Already sore from an intense physical therapy session, I grimaced my way through the airport, onto multiple sets of escalators and moving sidewalks. I did my PT exercises on Wednesday and Thursday surrounded by my family as we chatted about nothing in particular. Wednesday night in the shower, I looked at my foot and saw purple bruises all along the outside of my ankle. Friday, I donned my ankle brace before hitting the dance floor with my nieces and nephews. Saturday, I walked around a nice neighborhood on the edge of Indianapolis with a few of my siblings, looking at the geese and ducks along the canal, hunting for a public restroom with my sister. I had to put my brace back on for the walk back from the portapotty because my ankle started screaming at me. I wore it through the Indy airport, took it off for my flight back to Denver, put it back on once I landed. But even with it on, I hobbled through the airport to the train and eventually to the curb where my roommate picked me up to bring me home.

I stayed off my feet for most of Sunday and did my PT exercises in the evening. My single-leg calf raises felt harder than a week earlier, probably because my foot was still fatigued from the day before.

There’s always a stage in recovery when you wish you’re better than you are, and that’s the stage I’m at. The weather’s nice, the plants are growing, the mountains are calling, and I am still mostly stuck on the couch. My ankle isn’t ready for pickleball or hiking or long walks.

I can garden, but don’t quite trust the ground with its unpredictable divots. I’m allowed to bike but haven’t braved that yet (maybe this weekend). The day before the wedding trip, my physical therapist told me the only things I’m officially not allowed to do are running and jumping, so I can start lifting again, but it’s not a 0 to 60 sort of thing. I’ve got to ease back into it, build up my volume in terms of reps and weight, see how my body responds.

After she told me that, I sketched out a rough plan:

This week I made my first go at the top leg workout (labeled “Start with”), except for the bike part. Tuesday evening, I did the squats, lunges, and glute bridges in my living room. I couldn’t get full depth on my squats because my ankle mobility is so bad, but I did what I could. Thursday, my inner thighs were still sore, but no major soreness in my quads, which was encouraging.

Thursday, I also got some annoying mail from my insurance company, telling me they only approved 6 more physical therapy sessions since my last approval — which means I only have two more approved sessions left. Yeah right.

I want to tell them (and maybe this will happen when I inevitably call) that I would love to be done with physical therapy by now. But I’m not there yet. My therapist has only recently introduced more challenging lateral movements and my ankle has been sore almost nonstop. I need at least four more weekly sessions, but it’s not like PT is my new hobby. I want to leave it in the dust as soon as possible, go back to running, jumping, and lifting heavy weights.

And long walks. I’d really like to return to long, leisurely walks.

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Previously in Women’s Barbell Club…

Recommended Reads

No articles this time around, but I recently finished reading Bonnie Tsui’s book, On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us an Why It Matters. It’s a thoughtful hybrid memoir that integrates her childhood introduction to different forms of exercise via her dad, some of the science of muscle, and relevant human stories, all gathered around the themes of strength, form, action, flexibility, and endurance. I especially enjoyed the strength section, which told the story of women’s physical culture historian Jan Todd, who with her late husband basically founded the field of physical culture history.

What’s coming next?

What one of the earliest feminist writers has to do with fitness

There’s a point in Casey Johnston’s new book, A Physical Education, that’s clarifying for me. In chapter 26, after nearly 200 pages chronicling her journey into weightlifting and all the lessons she learned (or unlearned) along the way, Johnston recounts going home for Thanksgiving and trying to pitch strength training to her mom.

The effort doesn’t get very far: Johnston takes her mother to the gym and tries to teach her to squat. She complains and argues the whole time. When they’ve finished lifting, Johnston’s mom is not convinced it was enough of a workout so she steps away to do more of the kind of exercise she’s used to.

Later on, Johnston broaches the topic of calorie expenditure and how much her mom ought to eat, which leads to her mother saying she’ll gain weight if she eats more. Johnston asks why it would be so bad if she gained three pounds. Her mother’s response:

“No one likes fat old women.”

The whole interaction is stunningly familiar. The back-and-forth between a mother and daughter, where the daughter is trying to share newfound knowledge that she believes will help her mother be less miserable, only to have the mother take it as an insult to her own intelligence: “Well, I’m just stupid, I guess.”

How do we all have the same mom? I wondered, but it wasn’t just the mother-daughter aspect. The scene drew to mind conversations I’ve had with Gen X women worried about their waistlines and posts upon posts in women’s fitness groups on Facebook and Reddit where women are asking for advice on how to lose a measly six pounds and the same “calories in, calories out” garbage gets regurgitated in the comments, regardless of whether the person posting mentions brain fog and fatigue in workouts.

Attempts to challenge the previous generation’s long-held notions about bodies, exercise, and scales seem mostly futile.

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Casey Johnston has been writing about lifting for years. She started her column, Ask a Swole Woman, in 2016, originally publishing through The Hairpin, then Self and Vice, before going independent with her newsletter She’s a Beast. Through Ask a Swole Woman and She’s a Beast, Johnston built a reputation for herself as a source of reliable, no-BS fitness advice that made gym bro topics accessible to people with no training background.

In many respects, A Physical Education, releasing May 6, is a culmination of Johnston’s fitness writing, but it’s not a manual or book of how-tos. Instead, the hybrid memoir tells Johnston’s own fitness story, taking tangents along the way to dive into fitness history and science and debunk common misconceptions about strength training, body recomposition, and food. Along with reading about Johnston’s first failed attempt at benching the empty barbell (what the kids call a canon event), you learn alongside her about the simple elegance of a strength program, that women being cold all the time may actually be due to not eating enough, how muscles rebuild themselves during rest, and that the difference between the sexes in terms of relative number of fast-twitch versus slow-twitch muscle fibers is overblown.

Many of the misconceptions are things Johnston had to unlearn in order to fully embrace her own strength. While lifting gave her permission to question what she’d always assumed about her body, questioning those assumptions allowed her to get more out of lifting.

As Johnston grows stronger, she marvels at her body’s ability to adapt. She flexes in the mirror and admires the previously invisible muscles on her back. She moves the giant bag of kitty litter with remarkable ease. She’s stunned that someone like her could get strong like this. Why doesn’t everyone lift?

This is why she starts telling people about it. Her friends. Her mom. (I assume this is also why she started writing her column.)

A Physical Education is basically a book-shaped show-and-tell about why Casey Johnston loves lifting. She’s not making an argument. She’s just showing us: This is how lifting changed me and this is everything I’ve learned about it. All benefits, basically no downsides. And did I mention that you get to eat a lot? Cause you do. You need to eat a lot if you want to get stronger.

It’s as if she stepped back from that conversation with her mom, evaluated all the things that might hold her mom back from trying to lift heavier, and decided to write what she wished her mom would know — about Johnston’s personal experience and the facts that support her pursuit of strength.

When you find something you love, you want other people to love it too. When you discover a new way of living that breathes more confidence and energy into your existence, you want the people you love to reap the same benefits. For those of us who love fitness, the challenge is to share that love without being obnoxious, without being pushy, without coming across as arrogant know-it-alls. Hopefully, without being challenged to an impromptu arm-wrestling match.

For women who love lifting, the waters can seem especially choppy. Our bodies are often in the limelight. Comparison is a commonly harbored disease. You never know what someone might take personally. Is it possible to be sensitive and honest and direct all at once?

One particular strength of A Physical Education is that Johnston is sharing her own story. Yes, it’s full of facts and figures that preach the benefits of lifting, but it’s grounded in her individual experience. She was worn out from years of endless cardio and dieting. She didn’t consider herself an athlete. She didn’t think she was strong. If an everyday, non-lifting, non-gym-going person is looking for someone to relate to, Casey Johnston is it. And if they dive into her journey, join her on the floor of Richie’s Gym in Bushwick, Brooklyn, they might just be on the way to their own re-education.

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Previously in Women’s Barbell Club…

Recommended Reads

• Big Shoulders Are In (Elle)

• What Is Hyrox and How Is the Workout Different From CrossFit? (Self)

• Sleep is essential — researchers are trying to work out why (Nature)

What’s coming next?

More Injury Diaries or something out of left field

I started this newsletter with the goal of delivering stories and articles on women in strength sports and the emerging science of female physiology and fitness — largely because most women’s magazines do a horrible job of covering these areas. There are very few places to pitch stories on strong women, their athletic feats, and what exercise scientists are learning about female bodies. I want to write those stories, while also publishing pieces that provide historical / cultural context (and critiques) to current mindsets around women’s strength.

Personally, I don’t feel that I’ve been accomplishing this — but I would like to hear from you. Take the Women’s Barbell Club survey and let me know what you think of the newsletter and what you’d like to see more (or less) of. I look forward to reading your responses!

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Sore Calves

These days, I’m limping. Not necessarily because my ankle hurts or feels particularly weak, but because my muscles are sore.

On Wednesday, my physical therapist sent me home with new exercises after putting me through my hardest PT session yet. Under her supervision, I did single-leg calf raises and RDLs. She gave me a band to wrap around my toes and had me crouch slightly and walk sideways in both directions. I stood on a balance board on one foot and intentionally rocked my foot forward and backward, then diagonally. She brought over another circular balance gadget and had me stand on one foot and attempt to write the alphabet with my foot.

My ankle, my calves, and my legs all felt the burn, and Friday, two days later, my left calf was still sore and tight — enough to make me limp around my apartment.

That’s how calf soreness always goes for me.

I remember being in my early twenties and doing a tuck jump / sprint workout in the grass outside. My calves were so sore the next few days, they felt like a clump of knotted ropes on the backs of my legs. The same thing would happen anytime I’d do box jumps or jumprope after a while without. The workouts felt good and challenging. The recovery hurt.

During one of my first PT appointments after surgery, my therapist mentioned how quickly calf muscles are deconditioned. I’ve known this from experience, and now I’m learning it even more from experience. My foam roller and my roommate’s massage gun are about to get a whole lot more use.

Thursday night, a day after that first brutal PT session, I tried to do my prescribed single-leg calf raises. My right leg felt fine, no problem. My left leg, nope. I instantly felt how fatigued both my foot and leg were. I broke the reps into smaller sets — 3-5 at a time instead of 10 — and I didn’t force myself to finish. Today, I’m still sore.

I know this is just a precursor to how sore I’m going to be when I start deadlifting and squatting again. Bring it on, I guess?

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Previously in the Injury Diaries…

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Book review of Casey Johnston’s A Physical Education

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Sunday, I took a slight risk.

At the gym, after riding the exercise bike for 15 minutes and doing a few light rounds on the hamstring curl and quad extension machines — my first “leg day” since before surgery — I sat on a plyometric box, held a kettlebell on my left knee, and did about 50 calf raises on my recovering ankle.

I didn’t have permission to do this. While my physical therapist had me do a couple standing exercises the previous week, all my home exercises were still seated with my foot dangling in the air, tugging against an elastic band in all directions. But a combination of noticing how much my left calf had shrunk relative to my right and the sense that a few calf raises might help me toward the goal of being able to fully extend my foot was enough to convince me to go for it.

The next day, back to my regular PT exercises, I pressed my foot into the pull of a band, trying my best to point my toes. Ever since my surgeon had given the okay in mid-March to extend my foot, my focus had been on regaining the range of motion I’d lost when my foot was casted and booted up. I’d already seen progress — enough to send weird foot-sort-of-pointing photos to friends. Look! My pointing is getting better!! But Monday night, the progress could have been identified by someone who hadn’t seen how bad my range of motion was before. I was several degrees shy of full extension, and the gap was close to closing.

Then, Wednesday, two days later, I rushed through my PT exercises before a friend stopped by, and my toe pointing was even better — we’re talking 2-5 degrees shy of matching my other foot. What!

In my head, the leap in progress was directly tied to those random calf raises the day before, but:

The seated calf raises weren’t the first time I’d gone off-script with my exercises. A couple weeks earlier, I’d started stretching the front of my ankle by folding my leg across my lap and pulling on my foot with my hand. The next time I saw my physical therapist, she instructed me to stretch in exactly the same way, which made me more confident that I should listen to my body’s urges to move.

Last week, the outside of my ankle started aching to stretch, and my therapist, when I told her, encouraged me to “lean in — but,” she caught herself, “not actually. Don’t put weight on it. Just, like, stretch it.” “Yeah, I got you,” I replied.

This week, my instincts had me:

• Pulling my knee back between ankle flexion stretches in an attempt to help the muscles on the front of my ankle relax

• Trying to engage the muscles at the back of my heel when I did the lap stretch from earlier so my toe pointing would improve without my foot’s arch looking like a crescent moon

• Doing a few standing calf raises between calf stretches against the wall

Back at PT on Thursday, my therapist celebrated my increased range of motion and then set me up against a ledge for — I bet you can guess it — calf raises.

“Have you been doing these?” she asked.

“Not … prescriptively,” I responded.

“Instinctively?”

“Yeah.”

“Great!”

I did a few plain calf raises, and then she set me up with a ball between my heels to garner more engagement from the inside of my foot. It was harder. I did my best to go slow and controlled, grimacing at the familiar pain flaring from the front of my ankle.

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I’ll be honest: it feels good to be affirmed in following my body’s instinctual urges for movement. Despite what living with a chronic ankle injury for 15+ years might suggest, I’ve long prided myself on being tuned into my body. Over the years, I’ve used a mix of intuition, Google, and memories from elementary school gymnastics sessions to develop stretching sequences that help my neck, upper back, and hips feel better.

It’s seemed like my body knows what my body needs, even if my mind doesn’t — but is that crazy? I can picture the faces of friends and family responding to me saying something like that or, “My legs are itching to run,” like I would say in college, walking back to my dorm with friends after dinner. I know how these things sound, but is it all that different from a baby reaching for their toes? Or bouncing their legs when they’re held, standing, on someone’s lap?

The body was made to move. It has a remarkable ability, in many cases, to heal itself. And movement is medicine, so it stands to reason that on the path to rehabilitating an injury, what the body itches for movement-wise might just align with what physical therapists are trained to have their patients do.

Seeing those physical urges to move line up with my physical therapy sessions is helping rebuild trust in my body.

I still have flashing moments of imagining my ankle cave on a misstep. A few nights ago, instead of the falling dream that wakes you up with a start, I dreamt that I turned my ankle again — and I jolted to consciousness. The same image occurs to me every once in a while when I’m fully awake. I’m afraid that after going through all of this — the surgery, the months of healing and recovery — I’ll step wrong on a trail or sidewalk or street and I’ll be right back to where I was. Loose, messed-up ankle that can’t seem to hold it together. More damage to the joint. Arthritis before I’m 40.

But that itch in my ankle to move, to stretch, to push itself, expand its range, testifies of an intelligence that gives me hope. It’s not just my mind that wants my ankle to heal. My body does too.

My ankle wants to be whole, and it’s working with my conscious self to make that happen.

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More Injury Diaries orrrr a history-based thought piece

At the start of this series, I promised to share what I’m doing to stay active while recovering from ankle surgery. But you may have noticed I haven’t written a single thing about adapted workouts or navigating the gym in a boot or focusing on core and upper-body work. That’s because until a few weeks ago, I did basically nothing in the realm of exercise.

That’s right. I — Meredith Sell, self-described fitness enthusiast to the point that I run this newsletter — didn’t work out for a solid month post-surgery.

Weeks five and six, I pulled my dumbbells and kettlebells out of the closet for one seated workout in the middle of each week. Then last week — seven weeks post-surgery — I finally made it back to the gym. One time. On Thursday.

This week, I went to the gym on Monday. I had all intentions to go again on Thursday, but that didn’t happen due to heavy fatigue that hit me like a load of bricks. I napped instead and wrote this.

Waiting that long to go back to the gym was somewhat intentional. I know myself. I know my tendency to overextend myself. I knew the chances of me doing something at the gym — even a seated lift — that put too much pressure on my ankle and slowed down the healing process were not zero.

As much as I didn’t want to lose loads of strength, it was more important to me not to mess anything up in my recovery.

• Main goal: Heal and recover well.

• Secondary goal: Don’t shrivel up.

• Important reminder regarding secondary goal: Muscle/strength can be rebuilt.

Then there was the fact that my gym is highly inaccessible. You have to walk across an entire complex and climb a flight of stairs to get to the fitness area. I certainly wasn’t going to do that on crutches, and the first few weeks in my boot, just thinking about that walk made my ankle ache. So I waited. And you know what? I’m okay with that.

My first time back, the gym was eerily quiet. Last Thursday, I climbed the stairs to the main fitness area and was met with silence and emptiness. There was maybe one other person on the floor. Denver has been enjoying a lengthy false spring, so I’m guessing the normal crowds were outside enjoying the weather.

It was nice to have the place to myself. Nobody looking at me or getting in the way. I’m definitely a loner at the gym. I do my own thing. I don’t really talk to people. I’m there to work out, not navigate social dynamics.

I did seated overhead press with the barbell, followed by chin-ups and alternating dumbbell bench press — a good first upper-body workout to wake everything up. I definitely went lighter on the dumbbell bench than I would have pre-surgery, but I was happy with how things felt, especially the chin-ups. My time away didn’t melt off all my strength. Yay.

Monday, I did seated overhead press again but went heavier. Followed that up with incline dumbbell bench, tricep dips, and ring rows. The main movement that felt weaker was the dips. I’ve never felt strong doing them, but pre-surgery, I could at least do controlled negatives on the rig. This time — either because my chest was super tight or because I’ve lost my triceps — I had to do dips from the bench and bring my feet super close to take some weight off. I might be drilling dips in the coming weeks to rebuild what I’ve lost.

While I’ve lost some strength, I’m not surprised that overall my upper body feels all right. I’ve been able to do pushups and pullups at home, and my arms and shoulders got some work when I was on crutches for three weeks. I’ll feel the real difference when I’m able to do lower-body lifts again. It’s been 18 weeks since I moved the barbell in a deadlift or squat, eight, almost nine, since air squats and lightweight kettlebell RDLs. Whenever I get the green light to start squatting, that DOMS (delayed-onset muscle soreness) is going to hit hard.

In other news: I’ve been going around the house sans boot or brace for the last week, and Tuesday, my physical therapist told me to ditch the boot, so I’ve transitioned to wearing my lace-up ankle brace when I leave the house. No long walks yet, but I can see them in my future.

At the beginning of all this, I was expecting it to feel like everything was taking forever, like I was never going to be back to normal again, but since getting off crutches, time has seemed to speed up. Part of me misses the slower days and the excuse to lounge around the house. I think I needed that break, the forced slow-down. I might end up looking back at this time as a pseudo-sabbatical. That’s not too bad, for how much I was dreading surgery and everything that comes with it. We’re on our way up.

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Saturday, February 22, Mike Aidala took the floor at V23 Athletics, a mixed-modality training gym south of Denver, to attempt his second world record in the Turkish get-up. Three years earlier, the performance mindset coach achieved his first world record in the same place, moving more than 13,000 pounds in the form of heavy kettlebells over the course of one hour (a record that has since been broken).

This time, he was aiming for the heaviest single repetition of the movement that would break the standing Guinness World Record of 200 pounds. All the gym’s kettlebells were neatly shelved along the wall; instead, a thick axle barbell sat on the floor, waiting to be loaded up.

Aidala, who’s gained notoriety through his circus-style strongman stunts, knew he’d be able to set the new record. He’d already maxed out the lift in a training session at 245 pounds. But telling Guinness World Records you’ve done something isn’t enough. He needed official documentation: a Guinness-approved scale and video so officials could review and certify his attempt. That, along with raising awareness of Mission 22, an organization supporting veterans, was what the day’s event was for.

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Caution tape roped off his lifting area, giving him ample room to warm up and drop lifts in the sights of spectators. His warmup didn’t take very long. He lifted the empty bar, working through all seven steps of the Turkish get-up and reversing them back down. Then, he did a rep or two with more weight. His first record-breaking attempt, 224.2 pounds, moved easily, and he took a quick break before attempting to max out the lift.

With the bar loaded to 255 pounds, he laid down, pulled the bar over his chest, benched it off the ground, and shifted his right hand to the center of the bar. His left hand let go, and Aidala proceeded into the rest of the get-up. It took him two attempts to successfully lift the weight. On his successful second attempt, he focused hard and fought to maintain balance all the way up and down. But he got it:

Shortly after he set the record, I interviewed Aidala to learn about how he trained ahead of time and what tips he’d share with other athletes. Here’s what he said:

1. Hand placement is everything when you use a barbell.

With a kettlebell, the weight falls to the back of your forearm and might shift a little through the movement, but when you use a barbell in the Turkish get-up, it’s like lifting a see-saw overhead.

“I have tape in the middle, so I know exactly where I want to put my hand,” Aidala says. “Some of the heavier attempts, I actually had my hand in the wrong spot, and the barbell would twist.”

The Turkish get-up already involves shifting your weight and center of balance. A twisting or lopsided barbell makes it even harder to manage those shifts: You might be able to get up to your elbow and your hand, but it will be harder to pull the weight back over as you move into the lunge.

“If your hand is four inches off-center, you’re going to be fighting it the entire time,” Aidala says. Put your hand in the right spot, roughly the center of the bar, and the movement won’t be easy, but it will be easier.

2. Keep your eyes on your hand.

Your whole body needs to be locked in the entire time you’re doing the get-up — and this includes your eyes. Keeping your eyes on your hand will help you hold the bar or kettlebell above you in a somewhat steady position, while also helping you move under the weight in a way that won’t send it flying in one direction or the other.

It’s as if a line is drawn from your hand to your eyes, and as you move through the get-up, that line extends through your shoulder, your arm, then your spine and leg, what Aidala refers to as columns. “You get to the shoulder, you’re on that column,” he says. “Then you get to the hand, you’re on that column.”

3. Train your sticking spots.

The two hardest parts of the Turkish get-up are shifting to the elbow and completing the lunge.

“If I can get to the elbow, I can most likely get to the lunge, and if I get up from the lunge, I can pretty much finish the lift,” Aidala says.

To train for his record, he focused on building maximum strength in his legs, arm, and wrist, and he drilled the different get-up positions — sometimes not even completing the full movement, just seeing how much weight he could move and still get onto his elbow or how much he could hold in one arm overhead. Exploring his limits in those positions helped him gain confidence in loading more weight for the full movement.

4. Know when to bail and give yourself plenty of space to do so.

There are a couple ideal times to bail out of the get-up: at the beginning, when you’re trying to get up to your elbow, and halfway through when you’re shifting into the lunge. In both cases, you’ll want to direct the weight in a particular direction depending on where it is above you.

The kettlebell is harder to bail because your hand is caught in it, so if possible, lower yourself down instead. If you’re using a barbell, push it in the direction it’s already falling — either forward or backward — and get yourself out of the way. Be sure to practice bailing with light weight before you load heavier weight. If you try to ego lift in the Turkish get-up, you won’t have an ego left.

Wherever you’re training, make sure you have plenty of room to throw the weight without it hitting anyone or anything. In his training, Aidala used large diameter wagon wheel plates to be safer, but 10-pound bumper plates are a good option once you’re comfortable with the empty bar.

5. To go heavy, train the get-down.

In the same vein as my tips for athletes chasing their first pullup or pushup, practicing the Turkish get-up in the opposite direction — that is, the direction of gravity — could help you on the way up.

For Aidala, this looked like loading the bar with 300 pounds, lifting it overhead on one arm, and proceeding to lunge down, put his opposite hand on the ground, slide to his elbow, and lay down. For the rest of us, this could simply mean grabbing a 25- or even 15-pound kettlebell and proceeding through the movement backwards.

Don’t be surprised if you get a little confused on the way down. It’s hard to remember all the steps of the Turkish get-up in the first place, and even Aidala got thrown off when he trained the get-downs. “I’m not used to starting at the top,” he said. But take your time and work through it.

Oh, and if you want to set the first female Guinness World Record for heaviest single repetition Turkish get-up, looks like there’s no current record holder so it could be yours. (Shout-out to Jaclyn Vazquez of West Bend, Wisconsin, for holding the female record for most weight lifted in one hour with the get-up.)

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More of the Injury Diaries.

P.S. If you listened to the voiceover, thanks for bearing with me.

Navigating life on crutches in the winter as a 30-something woman who lives in a basement apartment is not the most fun thing in the world. For three weeks, I limited how much I left the house because most outings weren’t worth going up a flight of stairs for. When I did leave, I’d strategize ahead of time: I should park in the alleyway lot so I’m closer to the door that leads to the elevator. But sometimes, my strategizing would fail: Opening heavy outer doors on crutches is harder than I expected. And then there was the time I was returning to my car after meeting a friend for coffee and a strange man took a second, followed me down the block, and peered in my vehicle as I locked my door and shifted into gear. Fun times.

Those times ended on Tuesday, February 18. That day, my second cast was sawed off, I was given a walking boot and two compression socks, and I hobbled out of the doctor’s office with my crutches under my arm.

It didn’t quite feel like freedom, though. Almost immediately, my calf cramped up and I had to find a way to walk that let my booted leg ease into movement. My left leg felt noticeably weaker than my right leg. And then there was the fact that the boot added a couple inches to my leg length, so my hips were off-kilter. By the time I made it down the long hallway to my new physical therapist’s office to schedule my first session, my hips were already complaining.

The next day, I showed up to my first physical therapy appointment, ready to start rehabilitation but unsure what to expect. My doctor had given me strict limitations for the first three weeks in the boot: no bending my ankle inward and no extending my foot beyond 20 degrees.

Now, nearing the end of the three-week period, I’m happy to report that my ankle (and foot) is feeling way stronger and more stable than that first day I booted up.

A few things about life over the last few weeks:

Chunky-soled shoes (or at least one) are a must when you’re in a boot. It took me a couple days to figure out that my hiking boot was the perfect shoe to wear with my Aircast. Initially, I was wearing my gym shoe, but then I tested out my teal Columbia boot and sighed at the feeling of level hips. It really is the little things, folks. Since then, I’ve only worn one other shoe out and about, and that was only because I needed to look professional and my trail-broken hikers aren’t quite that.

Toe yoga is surprisingly hard — but like most things, trainable. Take your shoes off and try this: raise your big toe while pressing your little toes into the floor, then switch and raise your little toes while pressing your big toe into the floor. Hard, right? My first few days doing PT, I had to hold my toes down to be able to do this. It wasn’t until my fourth or fifth day that I could do it without my hands. Now, I’m a certifiable toe yogi.

It took me two weeks, but I’m fully back to standing showers. I still have my neighbor’s shower stool just in case, but my unbooted foot feels fine for the 10 or so minutes I’m under the showerhead. Progress.

Going down stairs is still harder than going up. Part of this, I think, is because the boot restricts movement in my ankle, but it may also be because my balancing muscles on that side aren’t as strong right now and that’s more noticeable on the way down.

An object at rest tends to stay at rest — but I finally broke through and did a workout on Wednesday. I stayed home, pulled my 8-pound and 12-pound dumbbells and 35-pound kettlebells out of the closet, and proceeded to do some upper body lifts — seated overhead press, bench press laying down on the floor — along with chinups and pullups. I’m sore today, mostly in the triceps, so I guess it worked.

I might actually go to my gym next week. My physical therapist has given me the okay to use the recumbent exercise bike and the leg machines for hamstring curls and quad extensions. If I do, that’s what the next edition of the Injury Diaries will be about.

In the meantime, I’m anticipating my next doctor’s appointment this-coming Tuesday. Hopefully, I’ll get the all clear to point my toes and start more advanced PT movements.

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Turkish get-up tips from a two-time world record holder

It took me forever to get my first pullup. Or rather, it took me forever to find the right approach to build the strength for my first pullup.

My junior year of college, I took a one-credit weightlifting class. Part of our routine for half the semester were pullups or — in the case of the women — assisted pullups where a partner held your feet and helped you up as you pulled with your arms. It was the first time I moved through the full range of motion, and though I got stronger over the half semester, I still couldn’t manage a full pullup by the time the class ended. But I felt that it was within reach.

The rest of college and the first few years after, I tried to progress to a pullup. I used the pullup machine at the gym and tried to add on more weight. I tried jumping pullups — literally jumping up to the top of the pullup position and lowering myself down. When I started doing CrossFit in 2016, I added banded pullups to the mix, while the rest of the training regimen beefed up my shoulders and back and made my upper-body muscles visible for the first time.

I felt closer to doing a pullup than ever before, but still couldn’t manage one.

It wasn’t until 2018, when I was consistently CrossFitting 4-5 days a week, that I fixed my sights on achieving my first pullup and succeeded. The accomplishment was certainly helped by the strength I’d built through the rest of my gym’s programming — but ultimately, it resulted from intentional, focused effort in the form of specific drills I did almost every day I was at the gym for something like 4-6 weeks.

For the longest time, I thought I would never be able to do a pullup. But I was wrong.

Since getting my first pullup almost 7 years ago, I’ve slowly built up to higher reps. My current PR for strict pullups is 8 in a row, and I’ve maxed out my weighted pullup at 37.5 pounds, just barely failing at 40 pounds the last time I tried. The progress hasn’t been linear — I lost a lot of strength during the pandemic and had to rebuild — but the graph has trended in the direction of stronger. Which is just cool. Doing pullups makes me feel like a superhero. I’d love for you to join the club.

How to Get Your First Pullup

1. Dead hang from the bar.

The pullup involves strength and coordination. It also involves grip endurance and the ability to move up and down without swinging. To develop this, practice simply hanging from the pullup rig. Hold your spine in a neutral position (don’t arch your lower back) and look straight ahead. Build up to about 30 seconds.

2. Engage your shoulders.

It’s not just your arms that are engaged in the pullup. Your shoulders initiate the pullup and enable your back to participate in the movement. To engage your shoulders, hang from the bar and draw your shoulder blades together. These are called scapular pullups. Do 5-10 of these at a time, pulling your shoulder blades together, releasing, and repeating. Over time, work up to 3 sets of 10.

These may feel strange at first — that’s okay, most unfamiliar movements do — but don’t skip them. One of the hardest parts of the pullup is the initial pull. Drilling this movement will strengthen the beginning of your pullup.

3. Hold yourself in the top position. Then slowly lower yourself down.

With the help of a box or chair, jump up to the top position of the pullup. Your hands should be outside your shoulders, your chin over the bar. Hold yourself in this position for as long as you can, and then slowly control your descent. Try to accumulate 60-120 seconds in the top position, even if you have to do 10-second holds.

When you lower yourself down, maintain as much control as possible. Your muscles should be engaged; don’t just drop. Descend as slowly as possible. Do this at the end of each hold and then do a few more negatives, for a total of 5-10 controlled descents.

4. Do partial pullups.

From the top position, lower yourself down just slightly and pull yourself back up. At first, you may only be able to manage a few degrees of the movement. That’s fine. Over time, you’ll be able to extend further down and still pull yourself back up. Do 3-7 reps, but keep your focus on the range of motion. Don’t rush through these reps. Slow is better.

Pair these with the scapular pullups and as much of a pullup as you can manage from the bottom position. You may find that you have a sticking point somewhere in the middle, likely where the pullup switches from being primarily a back exercise to engaging the arms more. Working the top and bottom of the movement will help you get past that sticking point.

5. Keep running the drills.

Once you can manage a 20-second dead hang, start doing the rest of the drills. Do scapular pullups first, then holds at the top of the bar, then partial pullups (if you can manage them) from the top of the bar, then negatives. You may not be able to do any partial pullups at first, but they’ll come soon enough.

Do these drills at the end of your regular workouts 3-5 days a week — yes, including leg days. They shouldn’t take you too long and working already fatigued muscles may help you get more out of the drills. Progressively build up your reps and time under tension, and pay attention to how each drill feels. The full pullup may take a while, but you should see each drill get easier as time goes on. Consistency pays off, so be consistent. Over time, your partial pullups will get stronger and cover a greater range of motion — until you find yourself doing the full thing. Trust me, you’ve got this.

Note: These drills are not a replacement for regular strength work. Pairing them with an upper-body lifting program will help you progress to a pullup more quickly, especially if your program includes rows, lat pulldowns, and tricep work.

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More Injury Diaries — guess who’s finally walking again!

Last Sunday, in the lobby after church, a guy came up to me and asked me about my cast. I remembered that he’d been on crutches last summer, showed up to our children’s ministry in a boot and mentioned to other volunteers that he’d broken a bone without even knowing it. (Me too, apparently.)

I gave him the general rundown: long history of injury, what my surgeon did, expected timeline. 

“I’m six months ahead of you — it gets better,” he said.

I started asking him questions, all the questions I’d been wondering about my future pouring out.

He told me he’d had the same basic surgery to tighten up connective tissue, though no bone spurs or anything like that. I asked him where he had his surgery. His answer was the same place and same surgeon as me. He was on crutches for two or three weeks, so I’m not a special case.

How about recovery?

He told me when he started physical therapy, he knew it was really important, so he found a place close to his work and went twice a week. Now, he’s back to his normal activities: CrossFit, lifting, squatting, etc. “I don’t do box jumps, but that’s just because I’d rather not take the risk,” he said (paraphrased).

This week has been banal and frustrating. A third week mostly stuck in my basement apartment (because stairs are too hard to leave for small reasons), polluted by either food poisoning or a stomach virus that hit me hard Tuesday night, forced me to scoot around my apartment like a baby, and left me a shell of a human being for 30+ hours. 

Suffice it to say, I’m tired of not being able to walk. 

I’m tired of not being able to comfortably cook a tasty meal. I’m tired of only taking 5-minute seated showers because who knows how long the plastic bag and towel around my cast will hold up. I’m tired of the piles of stuff growing in my apartment because I can’t easily move things from where they are to where they should be.

If I hadn’t gotten sick on Tuesday, I would have attempted a seated workout on the floor outside my sport closet, which contains a couple kettlebells, two sets of light dumbbells, and the odd lacrosse ball, but alas. This is my pity party. Aren’t you glad you came?

That conversation on Sunday was a bright spot. It sparked hope at the beginning of my week, helped the whole recovery process seem less daunting. This is only temporary. I’ll be back to my normal programming before long, and this will seem like a blip in the past. But object permanence — or rather, hope permanence — is hard sometimes.

Last week, I interviewed a pelvic floor physical therapist for an upcoming edition. She shared how her journey into pelvic floor therapy started with her own devastating cliff jumping injury. The time she spent rehabbing her pelvic floor with a physical therapist not only restored her to normal baseline function and changed the focus of her career, but also enabled her to return to running, one of the activities she most enjoys.

I’ve heard stories like these before — a devastating injury that looks life-altering is somehow rehab-able. Another person overcomes the odds. I’ve also heard stories of injuries that are life-altering — lifting accidents that cause paralysis, neurological damage from surgery — and yet, people carry on with life and fitness, finding new ways to express their full selves despite what they’ve lost.

Stories like these are encouraging. They show that coming back is not only possible, but likely. The body, though fragile, is also resilient. But these stories also, honestly, confront how much of a spoiled baby I can be. Oh, poor Meredith, she has to be on crutches for a measly three weeks. Get over yourself. Point taken. Yes. Enough whining already.

So maybe that’s all I’ll say for this week. Being sick when you’re on crutches is legitimately awful. I don’t recommend it. And I’m looking forward to replacing my cast with a boot. When that happens, I might make myself some tikka masala to celebrate. 

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