Weightlifting is a feminist issue – and it changed my life

Do you feel excluded from the male-dominated ‘testosterzone’ when you visit the gym? Amelia Loulli explains why lifting weights isn’t just for the boys – and why it can be important for women’s health, too

The first time I picked up a barbell, something shifted in my brain (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

I’ve always known that women are strong. Women I know and love have coped with wars; with abusive relationships; they’ve endured episiotomies and labours that stretch into several days to give birth to babies weighing as much as medium-sized bowling balls; they work full-time jobs while raising young children and running a household alone; live with disabilities, mental health breakdowns, cancer, the death of loved ones – basically all the things that require a human being to be strong.

But to me, there has always been one kind of strength that’s been reserved for men – physical strength. Or, more specifically, the kind of physical strength that involves striding into a gym, loading a barbell and picking it up.

If you’ve ever been to a gym and witnessed the “testosterzone” then you might share this belief. This area is generally full of burly men with biceps the size of my head who select the heaviest dumbbells and fling them around making them appear weightless. There’s an energy field around this section that can alienate anyone who didn’t exit the womb and immediately begin pumping iron. Although I only stepped foot inside a gym for the first time earlier this year, I somehow always knew this part existed and that it wasn’t for me. I grew up absorbing the message that, perhaps with the exception of professional athletes, this kind of strength was not for women.

I absorbed plenty of other messages about what women’s bodies were for and the most pervasive functions seemed to be – other people’s pleasure and other people’s judgements. The climate I grew up in was not kind to my developing body; to my burgeoning sense of who I was and what I was capable of. I handled being a young woman during this time by developing a total aversion to any kind of physical activity and, eventually, an eating disorder. I didn’t feel at home in my body and moving it didn’t bring me any joy.

This pretty much continued until early this year when a series of personal traumas highlighted the toll my negative relationship with my body was having on my physical and mental health. A friend suggested I try weightlifting and I responded in my head with all the reasons I couldn’t. But when I stopped to analyse those reasons – they all came down to one depressing common denominator – the idea that I and my body didn’t belong in a training space dominated by strong men. How long was I going to limit myself like this?

A few weeks later I joined a local gym. I’d done some research and begun to get interested in the Olympic lifts and asked to be shown how to use the free weights. The induction staff member smiled politely and steered me instead to the “friendlier” weight machines.

For a while I sat like a good girl on the lat pulldown machine, watching the men cycling their barbells – and then I got angry. This anger turned out to be a good thing. It fuelled me with just enough bravery to get me over the threshold of CrossFit Cumbria and the rest, as they say with any good love story, is history.

The first time I picked up a barbell, something shifted in my brain. It was like immediately undoing decades of my own conditioning – all those years of repeatedly telling myself that I wasn’t strong enough while also believing that there needed to be less of me; less of my body. As soon as I wrapped my palms around the cool metal bar and felt its constant weight in my hands, I was hooked.

With a barbell in my hands, I feel strong, capable and immediately peaceful – I notice that I am here, lifting up something heavy and then putting it down again; doing something difficult and then recovering. It’s life in a microcosm with a killer soundtrack blasting from the box speakers.

In the box I stand taller; I take up space. As someone who has read more than her fair share of self-help books, I am no stranger to the concept of self-love. I just never expected the actuality of it to creep up on me while dangling from a rig trying to do a pull-up, hands covered in chalk, in a black-walled box on an industrial unit.

But it’s true, in this space I do love myself and my body and all of the things it can do. And this still feels radical to me. Along the way, I’ve made new friends and spent time in the company of women who are strong in every single sense of the word, while we flip tyres, climb ropes, master the kipping handstand push-up, the synchro deadlift, the hang power clean, the overhead squat. It turns out, that weightlifting is the perfect antidote to growing up a girl in the 1990s when the most important things a woman could be were skinny and quiet.

Five months after completing the fundamentals intake sessions, where the coaches carefully showed me how to approach the key lifts, I did my first scaled competition and I have two more lined up for next year.

What I realise now is that women feeling shut out of the weightlifting section of a gym is a feminist issue because it not only reinforces decades-old stereotypes of what the female body should and shouldn’t do, it also denies us some of the most valuable exercises available to improve our overall physical and mental health. Weight and resistance training can increase bone density, which matters, because our bone density decreases with age putting post-menopausal women at an increased risk of osteoporosis. This kind of training also provides lots of other benefits like releasing endorphins, improving heart health and has even been linked to a lower risk of early death.

So, if you’re reading this and you’ve never been to a gym because you think you don’t belong there, but you also have a secret desire to feel superbly strong and quite a lot like a superhero, then I hope you will look for a CrossFit box or another gym space that will welcome you wholeheartedly, the way everyone should be welcomed, then stand in front of a barbell and give a deadlift a go. It might just change your life too.