With all of the friends I’ve made over the years through sports and athletics, it sometimes feels like I came to it pretty late in life. As a second generation Vietnamese-American woman, a childhood of sports was always presented to me as a quintessentially American thing; middle-class American families, white and black, encourage their kids to do sports for the sake of proper socialization and to hopefully make for a well-rounded college application in the future, while white and black working-class American families encouraged their kids to do so for the sake of proper socialization and to hopefully make for a college scholarship. My mother was by turns ignorant of, and then dismissive of, the concept of a “well-rounded college applicant,” espousing instead that like an adult’s job is to work and make money, so a child’s job is to go to school and study.
That was all a child was meant to do, in my mother’s estimation, and honestly, I was good at school so this didn’t bother me for a very long time. I was not, however, good at anything athletic; I was always too short for basketball, not fast enough for running races, not coordinated enough for hitting anything with anything else. It was only later when talking to my husband that I realized that parents with an eye for sports taught their kids skills like dribbling or throwing a football at home so they would have a better handle on it, much like my parents drilled me on my multiplication and division skills. I just thought I was bad at it, and like other kids who find themselves excelling in other parts of their life with minimal effort, I just resigned myself to being terrible at athletics forever.
I picked up rugby in college though, for five basic reasons:
1. As a self-identified (and helpfully identified by my peers) small Asian female nerd, no one would expect me to do this and this delighted my contrarian side.
2. Rugby is not big in the US, so hopefully the playing field would be a little more level than if I decided to try, say, club soccer or lacrosse.
3. I am not afraid of being hit–I have not ever been in a fight–but I wanted to see if I could pick myself up from being knocked down.
4. I wanted to see if I could knock other people down. Why? See reason 1.
5. Maybe secretly it was what I was always meant to do, and I would have fame and stardom forever.
Unfortunately for my last reason, I was, at best, average at rugby. However, I tried really hard to get better, even though I had no field vision and terrible ball throwing skills, and in the process of all of that I ended up finding a group of people that I loved and a place to identify with. It also kicked off this current phase of my life where I’ve gone from being “that nerdy girl who reads a lot of books” to “Hieu reads a lot of books and does, like, sports or something.” This was the time when I got some half-assed instruction on how to use free weights by my friends (no offense, friends) and got generally comfortable with the idea of barbells.
My time as an active rugby player didn’t last very long past college–I joined the local women’s club, but trying to balance that with feeling comfortable with the team, starting my first salaried job, living at home with my mom and applying to graduate school was a mess. After working for a little bit and getting my legs again, I started playing an even more obscure (to Americans) sport: gaelic football. I was also, at best, average at that too. Then the first Crossfit box opened up in Baltimore in 2009 and I joined there, hoping once again that maybe I could whip myself into “fantastic shape.”
Enter the Barbells
I struggled with how to write this part for a very long time. Since CrossFit has taken off, there are a flurry of posts out there about how “strong is the new sexy” and “I used to hate my body and just do cardio all of the time, now I do CrossFit (or I started Mark Rippletoe’s Starting Strength) and my body is hotter and I can squat 2x bodyweight for reps, lololol isn’t life fantastic?” I’m very happy for those people and there are definitely positive stories out there. My sister has been doing great with 10 months of Crossfit and doing some paleo/Zone mishmash. However, I didn’t stick with CrossFit long enough (that’s my caveat) and beyond some basic novice gains in my lifts, I haven’t seen any of that. Simply put, this is not going to be one of those pieces.
I went from playing a team sport to trying CrossFit to improve my performance to finally giving up the pretense of ever being a good player on the field. Then I decided what I really enjoyed was messing around with barbells, and so I began switching between powerlifting and Olympic-style weightlifting (hereafter referred to as barbell sports.) My body composition went from being kind of the same to having more muscle and fat and now I’ve leaned out a bit, but I didn’t magically transform into being completely ripped. Surprise! Apparently I have to learn to accept what I look like.
Just a quick aside:
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Powerlifting is a sport that include three lifts: the back squat, the bench press, and the deadlift. In meets, you get three attempts to try to lift the heaviest amount of weight you can at each lift. I tend to think of these as pretty simple movements: can you sit down and stand back up weight on your back? Can you lie in a prone position and push a weight off your chest? Can you pick something heavy off the floor?
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Olympic weightlifting as the name suggests, can be seen at the summer Olympics. It includes two lifts: the snatch and the clean & jerk. Competitors also have only three attempts to lift the heaviest weight they can in each lift. The movements for weightlifting are more complicated: Can you move a barbell from the ground to above your head in one movement (snatch)? Can you do the same thing in two movements (clean & jerk)?
I will say that the best thing about any of my athletic experiences–playing rugby, gaelic football, barbell sports–is that I learned to appreciate of what my body was capable of. I stopped playing team sports because after my initial experiments of “maybe I’m a latent genius at sports” I quickly found out that: 1) no and 2) the people who could pick it up quickly were often people who played different sports at a younger age. I also realized that my social anxiety meant that because I wasn’t a particularly good player (I was probably “average” on a good day), I was overwhelmingly conscious of holding the team back, or even worse, contributing to our losses. (Side note: I have never been on a team with a winning record.) This would transfer over to how comfortable I felt in social events. Did people like me? Were they just pretending to be nice but then shaking their head when I wasn’t around and going “man, if only she’d learn how to sprint?”
Barbell sports were much more comfortable for me: if I do badly, I’m the only person who has to deal with it. It doesn’t affect the standing of the club I represent, or anyone else. It’s just me. And I am much more comfortable with handling that. And honestly, one of the things that helped me feel comfortable with it is that I was comfortable with the idea of free weights before–my brother in law showed me some basics of a barbell squat, a Romanian deadlift, etc., when I was a teenager and then I spent that time dicking around with teammates and friends in the weight room at college.
Barbell sports also reinforces the idea that different body types are okay. That may sound strange in a sport where there are weight classes and where you have to weigh-in to ensure you make weight. However, because of weight classes, I better appreciated the breadth of body types that can exist within a particular weight range. Also, different body types provide different strengths and weaknesses to your ability to execute different lifts. I can squat more than my other lifts because I’m short, and my hips have significantly less distance to travel with lifts. I also have big ol’ thighs and a butt too, relatively speaking for my height/weight. You long-limbed folks that seem so graceful and elegant? You’re probably going to have a hard time with the squat but you’re probably fantastic at the deadlift. Short-armed folks? Bench press. Bench press is your friend.
This has done so much for my appreciation that differing body types are all fantastic. Don’t take too much stock in the whole “I’m the wrong body type for X,” though, because that can be dangerous–some of the more fantastic athletes are the ones who manage to overcome/power through things that would hold them back. I’m still working through a lot of that, but it takes a lot of tinkering with technique and figuring out what is the most effective way for you, with your specific body type to do a lift.
Pretty Numbers
This is a very silly idea, and I’m not sure if anyone else feels similarly about specific numbers when they’re lifting. That being said, I thought it might be fun to share some of what I consider to be “pretty numbers,” thinking that if you stay with some sort of niche activity long enough, you can develop some pretty specific and idiosyncratic preferences. My numbers are influenced by the fact that I’ve switched back and forth between Olympic weightlifting and powerlifting. I’ve never lifted anything above 48kgs/103lbs in Olympic weightlifting, so the kg numbers cut off very quickly.
83 lbs – 15kg barbell (women’s olympic weightlifting bar) + 25 lb plates
95 lbs – 45lb barbell + 25 lb plates
100 lbs – Hooray! Triple digits!
123 lbs – Hooray! One wheel (45 lbs) on a women’s bar.
135 lbs – One wheel on a 45lb barbell!
185 lbs – One wheel + 25 lb plates!
200 lbs – It’s 200 lbs! It’s really sloppy in kgs, but it’s 200lbs!
220 lbs/100kgs – 100 kgs!
225 lbs – Two wheels!
275 lbs – Never got here, but I bet I would be excited about this.
315 lbs – Three wheels! I may never get here, but I would be incredibly excited about this one.
Bodyweight metrics are always exciting, particularly if you are on the smaller side of the spectrum.
1.5x bodyweight – I hit this for reps in my back squat recently and I was really happy
2x bodyweight – These are my general goals for the next year or two in back squat and deadlift
2.5x bodyweight – I can’t
3x bodyweight – If you get this in anything, you are a badass.
In the gyms I’ve been to I tend to be a woman with above-average strength, but of course, it’s all relative. Strength training is such a niche activity; I think I am stronger on average only because most women don’t do it. If the majority of women did barbell sports, my numbers would probably be at best, slightly above average. I have a significant competitive streak, which can be a downer when you naturally suck at athletics and participate in them regardless. However, barbell sports are a strange situation where oftentimes newfound acquaintances and longtime friends say “Oh wow! Bench pressing! I can’t do that, I’m so weak!” and I just want to shake them and say “you can! You probably could lift more than me.”
Barbell sports are tricky to do when you have a tendency to be hard on yourself. There was a forum I was reading where someone joked that their lifting goal was to lift 110% more than their current one rep max. Most people I know tend towards that–once they reach their goal, they move on to another one–but there’s a few exceptions. There are always people who are better, and there are always people who are worse. I’ve tried to not to be jealous of the people who are just stronger, and just focus on in what a wonder it is that they can do it. A woman my size putting her bodyweight overhead in a clean and jerk? Awesome. At the national level, there are teenagers who do that. Also awesome. It’s been said a lot, but people who do strength training are incredibly supportive of one another. I don’t know if it’s because it’s not entirely mainstream (although that is changing because of CrossFit) or because it’s an individual sport.
Everyone has this notion that powerlifters and Olympic weightlifters are either 1) large or 2) ripped like a bodybuilders at a fashion contest. This is terribly far from the truth. For women, the most crowded weight classes I’ve seen are the 58kgs, 63kgs, the 69 kgs, and the 75 kg weight classes. I’ve competed in both the 58kgs and the 63kg weight classes. In my part of the country, many of the records in those two weight classes have been made by women who’ve gone on to be international-level lifters.
Meets: they’re long and they can be nervewracking especially when you feel like you’ll be one of the weaker lifters in your weight class, but I like doing them because it’ a way to give me something to focus when training week in and week out. Maybe one day I might make it beyond the local meets and qualify for a national-level meet, but I don’t think that’s likely–as I mentioned before, the field is pretty crowded at whichever weight class I decide to compete in.
So, if any of this sounds appealing to you, let’s talk!
Tags: fitness, hieu truong, lifting, sports, weights
*whispers* they should have sent a poet
Maybe it’s because I’m nervous about getting comments on something I wrote, but :: whispers:: I don’t understand what you mean.
TV Tropes is here for you.
Wow. Thank you, everyone who feels this way!
I believe it was an expression of awe and admiration (one with which I concur): http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWor…
Edit: Or what they ^ said.
This is so great! And these photos, CAN WE TALK ABOUT THESE PHOTOS?
I AM IN AWE.
SO COOL RIGHT? I love the ones where we can see her face, because YES YAY, what an expression of calm determination, and I love the hooded photos because there is something iconic about them, something almost like a fairy tale, the story of this hooded sprite who can lift stones that would stagger a giant.
Oh man, thanks for that. That is perhaps the coolest way to describe the pictures. ^_^
You’re the poet today
Thank you! You’re looking at some of the best photos I’ve got…except for the ones with the diagonal singlet. I included those for..variety.
1. This is badass.
2. You are badass.
3. I want you on my side in any fights I may encounter in my life.
FIN.
!!!
thank you. ^^
Awesome article. I’ve been dicking around with powerlifting/bodybuilding since high school, but I got back into lifting in a big way after I lost a lot of weight a few years back. I was wondering, could you talk some more about how you got started/how you train with Olympic lifting? I want to get into Oly lifting, but I’m concerned that starting on my own would A. get me kicked out of my globo-gym and B. build bad habits/form without good instruction.
Dooooooooooooo eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet.
Watch out at the globo-gyms, though. Planet Fitness, for example, has disallowed “grunting” on heavy lifts. Seriously. Globo-gyms aren’t always friendly to folks who want to lift heavy.
Yeah, I’m at Prairie Life. It’s not as horrible as it could be, but it kinda sucks. I never drop my deadlifts, just to be safe.
Thank you! Re. Weightlifting: it can get pricey, but I think the best way to get started is to go to a gym with a USAW certified coach. I have more to say but I’m on my phone–I will edit this comment and add more later.
Okay, writing as a reply so you get a notification: I got into olympic lifting because the CF gym I was at was starting to work with a USAW cert coach who wanted to start a barbell club in Baltimore. I was encouraged to do it–everyone at a CF learns the basics of the snatch and a power clean–but I kept on going because I was slightly intrigued by the technique part of it, even though it didn’t come easily. Als, honestly, I got a lit of positive reinforcement that I should do it. I switched between powerlifting and weightlifting for about half a year before I decided I wanted to focus on weightlifting for awhile. I had (still have, if I’m honest) this goal of being able to clean and jerk my bodyweight, which is apparently an unspoken standard of having a good handle of weightlifting. I’m not there–hadn’t gotten there–but I got to just over 100 lbs at 127 lbs, which is closer than where I started. ^^
Weightlifting can be psychologically taxing–you’ll have bad days, but then after a few weeks, a lightbulb will go off in your mind and you’ll figure out one minor thing that will make your form so much easier, and those days are the best. The days where you PR, or when a weight you struggle with suddenly seems light are also the best. And you spend the rest of your time chasing that.
Man, that sounds kind of dysfunctional or like drugs, I guess. hahaha.
Alright so I legit want to get into this and I supposedly have space built into my budget for it (now that friends aren’t getting married across the country) but I…don’t know where? I’m near-ish this place: http://www.quadsgym.com/ but they don’t have classes and I don’t think I have enough money for trainers, but I have a metal spine and thus Worries About Form.
But I love feeling strong!
Do you have the Starting Strength book? Get the book first and read it from cover to cover. That’s a good, cheap place to start. Form is covered. http://www.amazon.com/Starting-Strength-3rd-Mark-…
Rippetoe also has a bunch of youtube videos that deal with form and typical problems. http://startingstrength.com/
This is how a lot of people get started.
Good luck!
Yes! I just started working on the SS program and it’s so great! I was scared at first but Mark Rippetoe explains everything in super intense detail, and he’s even funny sometimes. http://imgur.com/sdvuwJV
I started weightlifting when I was 11 or 12, when my dad got into bodybuilding, but I stopped a couple of years later when he did, and I’ve only recently taken it up again. I’ve even got itty bitty baby guns now! So awesome. http://imgur.com/ZONYKOl
His crazily in-depth form descriptions are really helpful. Also, the Dork to Diva series by Stumptuous is really good and I got started with her beginner work-outs, which I like a bit better than the Starting Strength ones.
Love your story, and I’m with you on the pretty numbers idea 🙂
Thank you! I had no idea if pretty numbers were just a concept that was in my head, but people do talk about the 1 plate/2 plates/3 plates thing a bit, so I was hoping others could relate. 🙂
You played for UMBC!! My team probably played your team back in the day (I graduated from Mary Washington in 2010)! Like you, rugby was my first sport ever. I was okay at best but I stuck with it because it was fun and I felt powerful for the first time in my life. On the other hand, I never managed to learn how to tackle properly so I wasn’t much use on the pitch.
i’ve been toying around with what I want to do next sports wise. I like running but my knees hurt if I do it too much (thanks, rugby injury). Weightlifting might be my thing? Even though I took a weight training class in college I’m still intimidated by all the bros on the freeweights though. Not to mention I haven’t managed to figure out how to carve a big enough chunk out of my day to go to a gym.
One of my personal goals this year is to pitch judo as a sport to anyone who looks like they might stay still enough to listen, so you’ve been nominated as my next victim 😀
Pros: You can do awesome things with your body (Like throw people! In the air!), no matter what kind of body time you have. Badass women to look up to- like Kayla Harrison, the only USA gold medalist in the sport (the men haven’t caught up yet :P). It’s great from a full mind-body integration standpoint, and people at all kinds of fitness levels start at all sorts of points in their lives- you’re never the only beginner. Also, I’ve practiced in four states and always found dojos with great people- on the whole the asshole quotient is pretty low.
Cons (if some cons seem like pros, you definitely should check out a class): Very physical- your face will be in somebody else’s armpit and vice versa, frequently. Learning to fall can definitely be scary (knowing how to fall, totally awesome). On average, it’s a fairly male-dominated sport, and given that you have to execute all the techniques you learn on another person, you need to be/ be able to learn to be pretty comfortable with aggressive physical contact with guys.
But if it sounds like it might be vaguely interesting, I highly recommend checking out a dojo near you and seeing if it looks like fun- it’s certainly the most awesome thing I know how to do with my body.
-end spiel-
I fully support your judo-pitching! I’ve always been really intrigued by the martial arts too, just could never stick with something beyond the intro class when I was in college. I think I would be more likely to do it now, I just don’t know if I can afford a membership to a good lifting gym AND to a good martial arts school.
Judo dojos are notorious for not charging enough money to run a sensible business, so it might not be as pricey as you think…
I’m like you, just backwards- I’m pretty sure I’d like lifting, just can’t fit it in with the judo!
Ahhhh yeah, I think so at the Virginia Invitations.. in 2003! haha, that was so long ago.
Definitely looking into weightlifting or powerlifting. Crossfit is also really popular among retired rugby players.. I think in 2008 or so there were a slew of teams that jumped on it to find their edge for matrix matches, and then some of the players just slipped to crossfit. See: one of the most awesome American flankers, Phaidra Knight. 😀
I almost tackled Phaidra Knight once. It was awesome.
WHOAAAAAAAAA
It was during an NY B-side match; they threw some A-side players in. Everyone (on my team) was grumbling, but I didn’t really know who she was at the time, just that a train ran me over and I couldn’t quite hold on.
WHOOOAAAAAAAAAAA
[seriously, I would probably be grumbling too, putting ringers into a B side match! who did you play for? A friend of mine plays for NY now.]
1. I love this.
2. Are we ever going to get more Feel the Burn? I’m really trying, Nicole. I am.
I miss Feel the Burn so much!!!! I just love reading about other people’s fitness business for some reason.
I was so happy to see this because I was just thinking how I missed Feel the Burn as my shoulder ripped through a shirt the other day. Could be because was cheap outlet mall shirt, could be I am turning into SheHulk with my new commitment to pushups.
I’m not as committed to my pushups as I’d like to be, but we’ve been doing them in this class I do a couple times a week and now I can do 8 “regular” pushups in a row! It’s hard, but I can do them!
As a woman with consistently poor athletic ability, I both avoid team sports and love weightlifting for the same reasons. Even rec-league isn’t fun when you’re worried your teammates keep wishing you wouldn’t show up so they could play better. Weightlifting is just for me, though, no one else sees my numbers, and I can’t let anyone down if I don’t do well and it’s perfect. I’m not very competitive, so the competitions don’t interest me, I just like lifting things up and putting them down.
My first sports were university intramurals, with teams that didn’t really have enough players. Which turned out to be great, because even when I sucked I still genuinely helped by showing up and thus helping to prevent a default. (Defaults were worse than losses because of how the leagues were run.) So if you ever do want to try rec-league sports, I highly recommend desparate teams.
Except I don’t know if they exist in adult rec leagues, where the teams aren’t trying to recruit from a specific sub-group of potential players. I was lucky enough to be in engineering, where most of the women’s and co-ed teams needed female players.
Yes yes, in college women’s flag football, I was diligent at wiping the mud off the ball, and that and my presence and the very very occasional surprise short yardage due to my being completely open was my contribution.
I play adult rec soccer and I can confirm that desperate teams will appreciate you! The only people I ever wish wouldn’t show up are the ones who are dicks and try to start fights with the other team (WHY).
Ah this is cool, I am a bit put off by all the doughy boys standing round holding whey drinks at my gym to go near the weights-I’d be fine about it if I knew what to do with them! I used to work at a grocers slinging 25kg sacks of potatoes about the place and I loved how strong I got from that. You’ve reminded me I want to do some strength work, thanks!
P.S. In what I hope is a non-belittling way, your face in the 2nd pic is very cute.
Fling the doughy men aside and stride right up to an interesting looking machine. I started on machines and I’m about to move to free weights now that I have a little more confidence and a few higher numbers built up.
Fling the doughy men aside —> best gym advice EVER.
😀
Thank you! Also, in addition to what Onymous said, if you go in like you know what you’re doing that goes a long way in helping. Some people may try to “help” you anyway, but yeah, take what they say with a grain of salt.
[I’ve seen some baaaaad power cleans and bench presses when I had a six month stint at my neighborhood YMCA]
Any of my face-to-face friends would be surprised to hear how thoroughly I identified with this, since I am the least athletically-inclined, until-recently conventionally-abled person you’re likely to meet, but here’s the key:
I just thought I was bad at it, and like other kids who find themselves excelling in other parts of their life with minimal effort, I just resigned myself to being terrible at athletics forever
YUP. When a handful of things come easily, and especially when that handful of things includes the things your parents and teachers encourage and praise, it’s way too easy to think that things are supposed to be easy, and to skip the things that aren’t. And so I never tried harder to engage in sports or structured physical activity, and I never thought until recently about what a giant chunk of pleasure and accomplishment and personal development I’d left out of my life.
I really admire you for pushing through that barrier to see what you could do with harder work, and for finding a sport that suited your temperament and abilities, and for sticking with it. This is… I wish I could be articulate about it, but all I can say is a gushing “This is so cool.”
Thank you so much! I feel like pushing through those hesitations has helped me grow a lot. My husband has been really helpful in this regard as well; he (says*) that he’s never been good at anything right away, so working at something was really normal for him, and he came to really value that growth in ability after putting in the hard work. I always feel a bit lazy in comparison. 😉
*he’s naturally pretty strong, but he didn’t really come into his own until college
P.S. Thank you for all of your encouraging words re. writing last week in the open thread–I’m sorry I never responded, but I really appreciated them!
I would really like to know more about how it feels — like how it feels physically in the moment and for the rest of the day. Everybody is so violently anti-cardio these days but it was pretty amazing for me to discover after 30-odd years of being a book-reading sloth that I can make myself feel good by flailing on an elliptical for an hour – I suppose this is the same thing as the “runner’s high” but of course I do not run outside, in shorts and such, I am not an animal.
anyway, I am dedicating this decade of my life to finding sensual pleasures besides food, sex and sleep, so I would love to know if barbell sports feel good like taking drugs or falling asleep, or only feel good like a sense of inner power or accomplishment. I am a specialist so I am only interested in chasing that first dragon.
I don’t get a runner’s high so I can’t really compare, but I think it’s quite different. My understanding is that a runner’s high is kind of like your body starts doing its own thing and takes you along? When I lift it’s more than I becomemore intensely IN my body, feeling each muscle group engage and disengage as the motion progresses, like when you’re watching a muscley horse jump and you see all the muscles slide under the coat only it’s in your own body. I know some people who find it a turn-on to be that present in your body, and while I wouldn’t say it’s like that for me exactly, I can see the similarity in focusing so intently on your own body, almost to the point of ignoring everything else.
This description REALLY makes me want to try lifting, wow. I WANNA BE A MUSCLEY HORSE PLEASE.
Also, I run a bunch and have never (to my knowledge?) gotten a runner’s high, which is some bullshit.
I do not believe runners’ highs exist. Let us stand united against this nonsense.
For real. LIES.
Do we get t-shirts?
Interesting! The thing about running/flailing is that it feels worse before it feels better, and this hasn’t changed for me even after a couple years of consistent practice — sometime around 20-30 minutes in it’s like a gear changes and my legs stop hurting and I feel generally lighter and floatier. & around about an hour in it changes again and feels even better, and I generally end up stopping not because I have to but just because it feels unnatural and dangerous to basically feel fine and good after that much extended exertion. whereas if I am exhausted and can’t make myself do more than 20 minutes I just feel tired and terrible the whole time. I believe this is something to do with heart rate and glycogen and who cares, not me, I like to pretend it is magic.
anyway, I do a very tiny amount of strength work too, but all upper body work so as to make my shoulders look like the shoulders of a Greek god (the internet tells me leg presses are bad for my back problems but also all my running around is done with my legs so why bother) and I had been wondering if the reason it felt so wearisome and generally unpleasant was because I just wasn’t doing it for long enough in a row — like maybe there was a magic changeover point for weight lifting just like there is for running around. I do sometimes feel full of raw power after a bunch of push-ups but it’s not very reliable.
Maybe it’s the difference between the compound movements (squat, deadlift, bench press, overhead press, push ups etc.) and isolation movements? I really only get that feeling on the big ones where I have to engage pretty much my entire body with a fair amount of focus on form. Or maybe it’s like a runner’s high, in that only some people are likely to get into that headspace. “Wearisome and generally umpleasant” is pretty much my reaction to aerobic activity, so I definitely understand the drag of doing exercise that doesn’t suit you.
I like your description of being really in yourself when lifting. That nails it pretty well. I think it depends on how much you have to focus on the lift. When I am doing a very heavy lift, most especially squats, I find that my focus sharpens so much that I no longer notice anything other than proprioception (the feeling of where my body is and how it is moving). I don’t go blind, or deaf, or anything, but I just don’t *notice* those senses, really. I can recall things heard or seen during a lift afterwards (most of the time), but the focus on my body and its movement is so intense that I notice little else during a tough lift. It is pretty neat. Also, it took me a long time to even notice this was happening. As the weights got heavier, and I got stronger, things just came more and more into focus as I lifted. It is hard to explain, I guess.
I will say this: hitting a long-sought-after PR (personal record) in a strength competition gives me a feeling of satisfaction and emotional release stronger than what I felt when I finished my first marathon years ago.
I think there are changeover points, but I characterize them in the following ways:
1) I figure out a mobility issue that has been holding me back in my lift. Right now my present issue (there is an issue) is working on becoming more flexible in my adductors/inner thighs so I can stay more upright at the bottom of a squat.
2) getting my brain/body to understand how to move my body the way it’s supposed to for a lift.
Once I figure either of those things out for a lift, it’s amazing! Sometimes it means that my numbers move up, or it means that a weight I’ve been struggling with gets a lot easier.
Also, and this is something slightly different: there are times with lifts when you get everything just right, and moving a heavy weight feels easy. I’ve spent so much time trying to chase those moments, especially for olympic weightlifting, and I know other olympic weightlifters do too.
I would say I’ve 1) had the runner’s high 2) Felt very like this. Possibly because I’m doing a kind of interval training, jumping back on the elliptical, to keep heart rate up and sweat pouring. It’s blissful.
I feel you. As someone who is now power lifting in conjunction with a new appreciation of running (who knew!?), I can describe some of my feelings around it in, I suppose, a sensual way. There’s something about the relief of finishing my presses and slamming the bar back in, about how I can feel my chest and shoulders almost rippling. I tend to feel a little more generally swoll/at ease on heavy lifting days but I also chase it with ten minutes of a quick jog/elliptical.
All honesty sometimes what I love most is like today, two days after my lifts, where I’m a little sore and rolling my legs/shoulders around. Something about it. I try not to equate it to sexytimes, but there might be a little cross over for me, so. Plus I do straight up feel stronger and that is dope.
I don’t get the same endorphin rush off lifting that I do off endurance sports – bike, swim, run, that kind of thing. I actually tend to feel bone-deep tired. But it’s a relaxing, satisfying feeling, so I enjoy it. I always start and finish lifting sessions with aerobic work – usually a treadmill run at the end – so I get all the feelings. Because why not.
It feels good like taking drugs that give you a sense of inner power.
When I first started lifting I was deadlifting the bar, adding 2.5 lbs every week. Then I read some chart that indicated I could start at a much higher weight, so I tried it and ended up deadlifting 80 pounds for 3 sets of 5, and I was like I FEEL FUCKING AMAZING for a couple months. MONTHS, I’m not joking. And I kept adding weight until I got to my body weight (and then I injured my knee doing something unrelated, but I’m working the weight back up again).
I’d never felt physically strong before– it wasn’t a macho feeling, it was a sense that I was using my body and being present in my body.
Words like strong and powerful are usually applied to manly things, masculine activities, so some of the great feeling I had about being strong and powerful may have been due to it being a new feeling for me. I wouldn’t say weightlifting transcended gender or whatever, but yeah, actually, I just felt human and alive.
I looooooove the way I feel when lifting and after lifting. I do almost exclusively powerlifting, so squats, deadlifts, bench press, all free weights because that’s what I have access to. Warm up sets and work sets feel good just in a “here I am, doing something with my body, I worked hard to learn to do this right” kind of way, but lifting heavy feels AWESOME. I feel fierce and powerful and strong and capable of everything. I growl through the lift and then feel like CRUSHING ALL THE THINGS WITH MY AMAZING MUSCLES. I also get that intensity of focus that DaveN and MilesofMountains talked about – feeling intensely in touch with and present in my body, sometimes to the exclusion of all else (I have also finished a lift and not been able to remember what I was looking at or heard while I was doing it), which makes me feel alive and…embodied, I guess, even if that sounds weird.
I also love how I feel right after I’ve done a serious workout – bone tired, heavy, and slow – actually, sort of how I feel when falling asleep sometimes. And I love how I feel the next day when I’m pleasantly sore. I like feeling all the muscles I worked and stretching them a bit just to feel them move and know I worked hard.
Of course, this is how I feel when a workout goes right. Sometimes it feels like shit – tiring, slow, hard in a bad way, sluggish. And sometimes I get debilitatingly sore, like “take the stairs one at a time, dread coughing, laughing, and breathing because everything hurts” sore, which I personally find to be No Fun At All. But still, the way lifting weights feels to me when it’s going right is awesome and makes me want to lift forever.
I kind of focused on your later comments on this thread versus your first sentence. It’s a really interesting question! I think I might want to explore that more in a later post, but in short: it’s kind of a meditative thign when I just focus on my body, like Miles of Mountain and others explain. However, I do try to fixate on a couple of things (usulaly called cues) to help me keep my form in check. Lastly, most people–and I’m not exception–develop a routine over time that they go through before they perform the lift. I usually step up to the bar decisive,ly, close my eyes, take a deep breath and tighten my abs (not what it sounds), tighten my weight belt, tighten my back and get under/take hold of the bar.
As for the rest of the day, my body just feels relaxed and like it’s been in use. It’s really pleasant. It’s how I would feel after running/conditioning too.
FUCK YES WOMEN LIFTERS! I love lifting so so so much and I love seeing other women get into it. I spent my whole life thinking I wasn’t athletic when it wasn’t that at all. I simply hadn’t ever been offered alternatives to competitive sports. I don’t go to meets, but I’m pretty proud of and serious about my strength progress.
Hurray for this article and hurray for you, article writer!
Can you pick up a man and throw him? A light man, maybe. What is the best exercise to do for that? I do want to be strong, and that’s my (totally naive and wishful) benchmark.
Honestly, though, I want to start strength training but a) I am lazy, and b) I don’t have a gym and can’t afford/make time for one right now. Are bodyweight exercises applicable to this? Would anyone else just starting out want to cheer each other on?
Haha, I don’t think I’m at man lifting and throwing yet but I guess it depends on the size and weight of the man. I would think cleans and push jerks are the way to go, but I don’t know. I would look up “aneta strongwoman throwing men” and take cues from her.
Yes! There are lots of really good bodyweight exercises that will make you crazy strong. I realize that Reddit comes loaded with lots and lots of baggage, but the r/bodyweightfitness subreddit has a great beginner bodyweight program, as well as lots of lists of other bodyweight programs. The one downside to bodyweight training is that it’s hard to make your legs substantially stronger. You can build muscle endurance (that’s what those “eleventy billion squats!1!” programs that float around develop), but it’s difficult to build pure strength without heavier weights, because your legs are naturally huge muscle groups that do lots of work.
Judo! We will give you a man and let you throw him within your first few classes, promise 😛
(The throws with the picking up come with technique/ practice/ strength, but if you think you might find the throwing part satisfying, judo can definitely do that…) I have left an extensive sales pitch higher up in the comments, but I’m happy to expand…
Edit: I found you an inspirational image for encouragement 😀
sigh, where did my comment go… This overlaps into self-defense land. Throwing someone is more about knowing how bodies move, and being willing to engage. The element of surprise gives you first advantage. I’ve read a self-defense book called “Defend Yourself” written by Matt Thomas and Denise Loveday, which I learned a lot from and can recommend. It’s written for ordinary non-crossfit people.
hi hello people who are interested in this but don’t have a gym consider rosstraining.com goodbye
You are my new hero, I fantasize about competing the way you do ALL THE TIME. I would love to hear the details of how you got started in competition and actually just in the sport itself!
I realized that I never responded to you last week, which I’m sorry about! How I got started in competition is perhaps a little boringly simple: some of my coaches suggested I do it, not because I was particularly strong, but because they were/continue to encourage everyone to so it. (If you see the picture of me snatching in the post above, I opened up my first olympic weightlifting meet snatching 20kgs/44lbs. People joke that you can pretty much just lift the bar and still “complete” a meet as long as you successfully do it. My coaches were apparently comfortable with me just doing that!)
I have just kept it up over the years because I find that it’s easier for me to stay motivate with the ins and outs of training if I know I’ll be lifting for an event than otherwise. I know some people really don’t like competing though.. everyone is different. I still really enjoy following the sport, particularly oly, just because there’s a certain amount of awe in it, particularly at the international level. “That 20 year old woman lifted how much?” etc. 🙂
Great article! Can you contact me? I am editing a book on women of color and fitness and would like to see if you are interested in contributing. This is the call for papers: http://decolonizingfitness.wordpress.com/ . My email is [email protected]. If you are not interested, that is fine, too 🙂 Thanks!
I am interested but would love to talk to you more about what you’re interested in! I have a couple of ideas that might work but I’d like to run them by you before submitting something.
I’m so glad for this, and to find so many great lifting stories in the comments! I just started lifting last week and have been obsessing over it. Thanks for sharing a story that doesn’t belong on a pinterest fitspo board. A couple resources that I’ve found helpful, for those interested, have been: nerdfitness.com, girlsgonestrong.com, and stronglifts.com.
Awesome post Hieu!!!! So proud you are one of our strong members!!! 😉 Keep up the incredible work!!
I do hope that above comment is a family comment, those are always the best.
I’d always been interested in exercise but I’d maintained a strange sort of (false?) cognizance of how fragile my body was. It took me years to even consider core strength training because I was never well coordinated when I was young and I could never figure out how to lift with my legs when carrying heavy things. Moving objects in and out of my house always caused backaches, and I was convinced that my weak back would throw itself out trying to deadlift or squat and I’d be really up shit creek. Olympic weightlifting looked to be about the most dangerous and terrifying thing.
I did get to it eventually, after some time doing dumbbell and body weight exercises, but I’m always so ginger over it, and use a smith machine because I don’t make friends in the weightroom and thus don’t have spotters. It feels like I’m always lifting below my threshold but (1) scary and (2) I’ve had some nagging knee and ankle injuries, the worst of which were caused by overestimating the amount of weight I could lift. I tend to avoid those compound lifts (save pushups, I suppose) when I can. So I’ve basically relegated myself to dumbbells. A bit sad, but I just can’t risk it. I run a circuit of ground-based body weight exercises (leg lifts, plank jacks, etc.) to build up my core instead.
The above comment is from my current coach! She is like family. 🙂
So, there’s so many things I want to say in response! Coordination is a really tricky thing (and I actually wrote a lot about it in response to another commenter here) but generally speaking, coaching is crucial for me. Having another set of eyes really can help you figure out what you should or shouldn’t be doing, and, and is immensely helpful for pretty much everyone. A good coach can help a lifter work through and deal with their mobility issues, whether it’s “I don’t know how to ‘engage my lats’ ” or “I am using my core, right?” [For reference, I have said both of those things in the past four years.] That being said, I think dumbbells are a good place for you to be at if you’re doing stuff on your own. However, if you ever want to do more, you may want to look for a powerlifting or weightlifting gym. Your typical Planet Fitness trainers probably won’t cut it.
Re. oly lifting: I used to think it was about the back too but it’s all about hip extensions. Just think of the power you generate when jumping off the ground!
Re. lifting too much weight: generally speaking, if you try to deadlift something and it doesn’t feel right, you should just drop it. Squats are trickier, but there are ways to get rid of the weight if you feel like you can’t finish the movement. You pretty much jump forward and let the weight fall backwards. It is definitely something to practice though!
Thanks! Sage advice.
Thanks–I hope it responded to what you were saying! I always want to encourage people to lift if they’re interested but I never want to encourage them to do anything that could be detrimental to their body. That being said, lifting regularly (and all of the attendant flexibility work that’s needed to get better) might be the way to help with some of those issues, so it becomes a weird balance..
Heavy walkouts (loading a lot of weight on the bar *on a squat rack*) are a good way to build confidence and work on stability. Just dump a lot of weight on the bar (typically much more than you are confident you can squat, I’ve got a 205lb max, and I did a 310 lb walkout last time), pick it up like you are planning to squat it, step out and hold it for 15-30 seconds. You’ll use your core to stabilize the bar (it starts wobbling pretty quickly) and it makes the weight you can actually squat feel much less intimidating. You don’t even need to step back, you can just stand up, and if the weight feels like too much, put the bar back on the rack.
I hadn’t heard of this! I will try this out.
Shiiiit.. I need to start doing that. Thanks for this tip!
This is all the rad. I think more people should follow their contrarian side more often. Also, your numbers omigod. I’m an endurance athlete. I love to lift. But zomg, my weights are so teeny. It’s so rad to see women who can lift heavy!
Thanks Toast for running this. 🙂
Hieu, this was fantastic to read! I’ve been lifting for over 10 years now, since I started dating my now-spouse in college, and I love reading about other women who lift. Also/especially, other women who do powerlifting and olympic lifting and lift heavy, which is what I do. I rarely meet other women who are into free weights and lifting heavy. Thanks for the story and best of luck on moving your numbers!
Thank you!! I always love reading other women’s stories too.. I love that it’s growing, and I’m glad I can share my experiences. 🙂
Awhile back my spouse tried to help me learn to lift, and the part that we just couldn’t seem to get past was my lack of understanding of my own body. At least the way she was teaching me, there are very specific forms for each lift, and your body needs to align in proper ways at each step of the lift.
Sometimes I couldn’t manage to simultaneously, say, keep my feet aligned with my shoulders while keeping my knees bent at a specific angle while my lower back was at another specific angle, etc. Or sometimes she’d tell me to move body parts that I couldn’t find or had no idea how to control. Eventually trying to teach me became frustrating for her and took too much time away from her workout, so we stopped (for the record, I think she was perfectly reasonable about this).
My question for Hieu and any other lifters: was proper form difficult for you to achieve? To me it sounds like this may not have been an issue for Hieu, given that the issue of form doesn’t come up and the super-simplistic descriptions of lifts like “Can you pick something heavy off the floor?” I feel like I’m just crap at that part, and I wonder if it’s some sort of innate inability, or if, like Hieu described for herself, that I didn’t play enough sports when I was younger and hence haven’t developed accordingly. I’m curious to hear others’ experiences.
Understanding your body, where it is in space, and how body parts connect is actually pretty complex. Don’t feel bad about struggling with this!
Start here: Balance on one foot. Close your eyes.
Do this every single day, moving your free leg around, see how that affects the rest of your body.
That, more than just about anything else, has taught me proprioception–makes a HUGE difference.
A beginning yoga class is also a great way to learn your body and adaptations for it–we are all unique beasties, and it’s important to figure out that your squat will look different than someone else’s.
More than that? Take a circus class–especially if you will be learning hand balancing/handstands. Being upside down and figuring out how to hinge your hips and back into a straddle? Holy crap, is it ever a good way to learn your own anatomy!
Also, chances are that there is someone else on the internet who has a similar struggle with form, and has developed an adaptation for it–go hunting! 🙂
Oh man, there’s so much to go into here! Long story short: proper form is tricky, and everyone struggles with it. I was being fairly brief in order to explain the exercises and the general mechanics of it, but I’ve spent months working on tweaking one specific thing, and then move on to another thing.
There’s some complicated stuff at play here, namely:
1) your body shape and proportions, e.g. length of limbs, length of torso
This can really impact how easily you’ll be able to get into the proper form for particular lifts. I mentioned earlier that generally I’ve had a relatively easy time with the back squat because of my build and length of proportions. My husband, who is stronger than the average person (he’s deadlifting 650 lbs here) had a dreadful back squat form because of his long legs/short torso combo. His form in the olympic lifts is also iffy because of his proportions. I mean, he gets brought up at the gyms we go to as an example of extreme proportions. However, those proportions are also part of the reason why he can deadlift so much! There are trade offs.
2) your flexibility/mobillity (do you spend a lot of time at the computer? do you have a tendency to roll your ankles a lot?)
So remember how I just said that I have a relatively easy time in back squats? Well, it’s still true, but lately I’ve realized that one of the things that has been holding be back is that my inner thigh muscles (adductors, I think, I tend to confuse them) are really tight. Super tight. so much so that when I drop into a squat, I have trouble keep my balance because I can’t push my knees out as much as I need to in order to stay balanced. Weirdly enough I’m okay with weight on my back, but I am about embark on what is probably going to be 6 months of just working on getting those loose enough that my back squats get better.
3) as cheekypinky explains a lot, understanding how to move parts of your body is really complicated.
I do think that this where my lack of athletic experience comes to play, and I think this gets to what you’re asking: I have definitely struggled to figure out how to use certain muscles in my body in order to get into the right form. My back is primarily the issue: it’s taken me a while to learn how to engage my traps in order to help keep a barbell in place, I’m still learning on how to use my lats for my other lifts. It’s just an ongoing process. Again, my husband, Mr. I’ve been playing sports since I was 5 or so, is really good at understanding how to move his body. On the flipside, his sports experiences means that he has also experiences quite a few injuries and so it’s affected my earlier point: mobility.
On a related note to this: olympic lifts are incredibly technique-oriented. It’s less about brute strength and more about having the flexibility and coordination to move aorund the bar quickly enough to catch it in a stable position. I seem to have mostly brute strength (such as it is) and it took me at least a year to even figure out how to do a squat clean properly. Form is always, always a struggle.
The flipside (and I think I will write more about this to another commenter) is that once you figure out one thing, it’s wonderful. Suddenly the movement gets easier, and then it’s onto another issue. 😉 We’re humans living in a modernwestern society. Our mobility is just inherently fucked up, IMHO.
One last thing: do not be coached by your spouse unless it’s what they do for a living! Even then it’s tricky. I’ve know some people who do it well but overall we all just joke about it and avoid it.. especially when you’re new to it. 😉
I hope this helps! If you can, talk to a trainer and have them work with you on your squat!
ETA: OMG I wrote another post.
OMG indeed! Thank you for putting so much thought into replying! Between your post and cheekypink’s, I feel like I’ve got some legitimate avenues to attempt further exploration of my own body. I wasn’t expecting to end up inspired, but here I am. 🙂
Awesome! I’m really glad to hear that. 🙂 There was just so much more I could’ve and wanted to say, but I didn’t really know where to begin–your question was just a really good question that I’ve heard elsewhere, and I definitely want to address it thoughtfully because there’s just so much understandable anxiety that everyone has tied up into lifting.
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSS
Your article is so well-written and fully packs the awesomeness of weightlifting punch. Is there anything more empowering than watching yourself pick heavy shit up in a gym full of meatheads when you are a woman? Oh my lord. I have chills. EVERY TIME I BEAT MY BOYFRIEND AT ARM WRESTLING MY SOUL SINGS
Toastie lifters meet up pero YA!
I CAN PERSONALLY VOUCH FOR HIEU’S BADASSERY!!!!!!!!!!!! She is the best and so is this post (and so is this blog, for that matter). The end.
i’m bummed I’m catching up on this after the discussion is mostly over. I lifted like a maniac in high school, and learned cleans in college to help my lineout lifting. I haven’t done anything substantial in a gym for years now, though.
It’s never too late! Seriously. The nice thing about lifting (if you want to do it, or even if you want to do it competitively) is that you can do it for a very long time. It’s much easier on your body than field sports. I’m going to be competing in a 50 person meet in June and there’s a couple of ladies in their 40s and three men who are 60+ years old.
I hate all bodily motion that is not food/sex/sleep related, but this piece was SO SATISFYING. THOSE PICTURES. Amazing.
Hieu you are such a badass and this was such an awesome post!
Im sad I got here a day late. If youre still looking at comments, do you have any tips for someone who wants to get stronger? I keep getting told to do more pull ups which sucks as i cant do one.
Sorry for the super late reply. I do have some tips though, but what are your goals? What do you mean by “stronger”? Pull ups are one way to gauge strength but like many other things, body proportions and bodyweight come into play, e.g. little kids can do that ish allll day long.
ETA: I’m not sure if this is what you are asking, but if I had to choose a few lifts to do all day, I would just do barbell squats/deadlifts/shoulder presses. The deadlifts are kind of optional, but most people can lift the most weight with them and so they’re more gratifying. Squats/shoulder presses transfer into a lot of other strength related stuff though, so those are the two go to lifts in my book.
Hello! Im so excited that you replied. Stronger sounds a bit weird but if it helps I’m a climber who struggles to hold her own body weight so what Im asking is how to make my arms pick heavier things up. They are so weak, so so weak!
I hadn't heard of this! I will try this out.
Shiiiit.. I need to start doing that. Thanks for this tip!
This is so well written, really personal, so cool and awesomely fun to read. I’m so proud to be your sister!
By the way, thanks for being super supportive and encouraging of my athletic attempts in Crossfit. Love you!
Sorry for the super late reply. I do have some tips though, but what are your goals? What do you mean by "stronger"? Pull ups are one way to gauge strength but like many other things, body proportions and bodyweight come into play, e.g. little kids can do that ish allll day long.
ETA: I'm not sure if this is what you are asking, but if I had to choose a few lifts to do all day, I would just do barbell squats/deadlifts/shoulder presses. The deadlifts are kind of optional, but most people can lift the most weight with them and so they're more gratifying. Squats/shoulder presses transfer into a lot of other strength related stuff though, so those are the two go to lifts in my book.
I realized that I never responded to you last week, which I'm sorry about! How I got started in competition is perhaps a little boringly simple: some of my coaches suggested I do it, not because I was particularly strong, but because they were/continue to encourage everyone to so it. (If you see the picture of me snatching in the post above, I opened up my first olympic weightlifting meet snatching 20kgs/44lbs. People joke that you can pretty much just lift the bar and still "complete" a meet as long as you successfully do it. My coaches were apparently comfortable with me just doing that!)
I have just kept it up over the years because I find that it's easier for me to stay motivate with the ins and outs of training if I know I'll be lifting for an event than otherwise. I know some people really don't like competing though.. everyone is different. I still really enjoy following the sport, particularly oly, just because there's a certain amount of awe in it, particularly at the international level. "That 20 year old woman lifted how much?" etc. 🙂
This is one of my favorite ever pieces on The Toast. 🙂 I was also a bookish-as-heck child, and I picked up rugby in college for reasons much like the ones you listed:
“I picked up rugby in college though, for five basic reasons:
1. As a self-identified (and helpfully identified by my peers) small Asian female nerd, no one would expect me to do this and this delighted my contrarian side.
2. Rugby is not big in the US, so hopefully the playing field would be a little more level than if I decided to try, say, club soccer or lacrosse.
3. I am not afraid of being hit–I have not ever been in a fight–but I wanted to see if I could pick myself up from being knocked down.
4. I wanted to see if I could knock other people down. Why? See reason 1.
5. Maybe secretly it was what I was always meant to do, and I would have fame and stardom forever.”
I’m not tallish, largeish, and white, but otherwise, that was it, and my favorite part of the experience was probably this effect: “It also kicked off this current phase of my life where I’ve gone from being ‘that nerdy girl who reads a lot of books’ to ‘Hieu reads a lot of books and does, like, sports or something.'”
I was a couple years past rugby when I first read this, but I’d been itching for a new sport, and reading this piece and the comment thread made me feel brave enough to try Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, despite being super intimidated. I didn’t stick with it long because I moved, but it was such a great experience! Now, a couple years later, I’m thinking I’d like to try powerlifting. Thanks so much for sharing this piece at The Toast!