Lifting Weights: Off the Ground and Off my Mind

by Allie Richter

Fervent at the chance to move my restless body, exercise as a little girl meant entering the playground— sprinting to my friends, tackling my favorite slide, and mastering the art of the monkey bars. Exercise was ease. Exercise was play.

As an older girl, exercise was replaced with sports practice and chasing InstagramWW photos on the treadmill. Exercise meant lonely discipline; the gym was a place to get smaller and leave emptier. I was trapped beneath the propagation of beauty equating thinness.

The promotion of exercise for women is rooted in a history of restriction. Corsets, vibrating belts, diets and other confining methods were dubbed the tools used to create the “ideal” female body. Writer Sophie Gilbert notes in her article For Women, is Exercise Power? that female fitness has been regarded “less as a practice that could make women strong, and more as one that could keep them young and make them beautiful.” Exercise, Gilbert adds, is “inextricable from diet culture and beauty culture and everything else built on the truism… to help a woman feel bad about herself.” And like many teenage girls maturing in the rise of social media influence, I adopted this notion.

What once animated joy soon became a punishment that left me a shell of abandoned youthful play. Terrified of bloated breakfast bellies and people hearing me gasp for air as I ran, I did everything to mute and diminish myself. I desperately chased the idealized figure until I no longer had muscles to run the next mile. The gym became a furnace that melted me away, and I ultimately saw how my life dripped off of me too. Grieving my vitality, I knew the only option was to abandon my sexist definition of exercise entirely—smash it to pieces and construct a new mindset.

Progressively, my body acclaimed my quest for strength. I ditched the treadmill and found little girl approaching the playground climb wall. There I was in a male-dominated free weight room, eager to pick up a plate and find my confidence. Enamored with this feeling, I made the weight room my own jungle gym. Squat racks, leg press, and pulldown machines soon became the tools to build my once eroded muscles and confidence back together—higher. Every pound lifted reflected every measure of mental power I was gaining back. I fed my body properly to lift more the following week and break the mental weights that constrained me. I found a new community as I looked to the strong women around me, not to compare but to empower myself. I mimicked their powerful tenacity and I loudly grew back into myself, bursting through the once hollow shell. Now, I make noise by slamming my deadlift PR down, I feed my body the fuel it needs to amplify my muscles, and I. Take. Up. Space. I claim my equipment: ready to grow, and ready to play.