“LIFTING WEIGHTS CHANGED my life,” Kristina Lund tells me from a College Park coffee shop. The 48-year-old Harvard Business School grad is about as far from the stereotype of an iron-clanking musclehead as you can imagine: Once the CEO of electric service company AES, Lund spends her days as an executive in the power industry. But her off hours are spent demonstrating another sort of power in the gym. The mother of two has been a competitive weightlifter for almost three years and says the experience has been transformative. “It’s incredible how your life shifts when you go from focusing on how you look—or how small you can get—to how strong you can be,” she says.
Powerlifting, as the sport became known in the mid-1950s, focuses on excellence in three specific movements: the squat, the bench press, and the deadlift. Other movements performed by competitive powerlifters beyond the three key lifts are called accessory work; they’re typically in service of the big three. The sport has always been more welcoming to women than other strength-based pursuits, says sports history expert Conor Heffernan. In the 1940s, for example, Abbye “Pudgy” Stockton was a barbell-hoisting fixture at Santa Monica’s famous Muscle Beach, even arranging weightlifting competitions for her fellow female athletes. But as the fight for women’s equality grew more heated in the final decades of the 20th century, so did pressure for women to be slighter and slimmer. As we sought space in the halls of power, fashion, and society, folks ranging from Jane Fonda to Kate Moss suggested we should take up less.
But in recent years, something’s started to change. More women are stepping away from group exercise classes, CrossFit-style high-intensity workouts, and so-called “toning” routines, trading hours spent in the cardio zone for iron-pumping programs. Almost all of them say they’re fitter than ever—but that’s not quite the point. This isn’t a story about how these women shed that pesky baby weight, or how they stopped overeating, or even how they got a butt like J-Lo’s. This is how they learned to stop caring about all that garbage. And how I did, too.
Maria Yim is only 26, but her athletic resume would be the envy of someone twice her age. A competitive dancer in middle and high school, she was a Division I rower for the University of South Florida as an undergrad. She lifted weights as a student athlete, but it wasn’t until she moved back to Indy in 2024 that lifting became her main fitness movement. When she looks back on her early teens, she remembers facing pressure “to be the ideal shape, the ideal weight,” but rowing showed her another way to live. “A lot of that conditioning of how to view my body, how to view other women’s bodies, broke when I was surrounded by these other powerful women,” she says. The local weightlifting community has provided Yim with a similar support system. “Some of my biggest social circles started coming through at the gym. Some days, my workouts are 90 minutes of lifting and another hour of just yapping.”
That barbell-based camaraderie also brings Hannah Giere back to the gym. The 39-year-old development manager shares, “Before weightlifting, I didn’t have any sort of athletic life. I was sort of the consummate nerd.” In late 2019, she reached a pivotal point in her life: “I had moved houses, had a new job, and was really unhappy with my body.” She joined a small gym on the east side that offered group exercise classes. “I wasn’t really enjoying it, but I felt like that was what I had to do to lose weight.” One weekend, the gym hosted a class on deadlifting, “and I was immediately smitten. I felt full of strength and power. I was over the moon.”
Architect Jennifer Lofton (age 50) and IT professional Jaclyn Wall (42) were in the same deadlift class as Giere. Lofton joined the gym “because I knew I needed to do something. I couldn’t really keep up with the cardio classes, but I did what I could do,” including calorie counting and other dietary changes. “But I was still the same size, which frustrated me at the time.” Meanwhile, Wall was taking high-intensity interval training classes after a life playing intramural team sports. “I was trying to lose weight and get my health in check,” she says. All three remember that when the deadlift instructor, Melissa Gustafson, entered the room, they suddenly saw another way to live, a life in which they could switch focus from burning calories or dropping pounds to getting as strong as possible. The trio started working out together soon after, a tradition that continues to this day.
“I love the effort and process of weightlifting,” Wall says. “But what makes me accountable and keeps me coming back are these women, my friends and teammates.” In 2021, they entered their first powerlifting competition together; in the years since, the three of them have amassed a slew of medals. “In just a few years,” Lofton says, “I went from sitting on the couch and feeling not so great to state and national records in powerlifting. I’m pretty proud of myself for that.”
As the weight they lifted ticked up, the societally imposed noise about their weight on the scale turned way down, Lofton, Wall, Giere, and many of the other women I spoke to for this story told me. I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t experienced that phenomenon myself.
I suspect I’m not alone when I tell you I was raised in a world that emphasized aesthetics over performance. “Your body takes after your father’s side of the family,” I remember my mom telling me as she gestured at a photo of my sweetly round Swedish grandmother. “So you’re always going to have to watch out.” I wanted to be thin to please my mom, to satisfy the world, to fit into the clothes I saw in magazines. Sometimes it was easier to be thin than others. The pandemic, which coincided with my first job as a food journalist, was definitely one of those “other” times.
As the world reopened and an expectation to occasionally don something other than sweatpants returned, I started running endless miles on the treadmill and eating one meal a day (typically an elaborate restaurant experience tied to my reporting) to get what I thought of as “back into shape.” One day, the owner of my gym told me he’d been watching me—but he didn’t offer the praise for my speedy decrease I expected. “I’ve seen you take your body back down to the studs,” he said, gesturing at what I imagined to be an admirably ever-widening thigh gap. “It’s not my place to tell you what to do next. But you should think about it.” A few days later, I took an imaging test for a story in this very magazine, and the results floored me: My body fat percentage put me in the “obese” category because my muscle mass was so very low. I was still spinning from the interaction with my gym owner and the body scan chaser when I heard about Casey Johnston.
Like me, Johnston was a journalist who’d counteracted her sedentary profession with running and food restriction. A little more than a decade ago, she started strength training after hearing that it might help her change her body composition; like everyone else in this story, she swiftly fell in love with lifting as a sport—and the pursuit of power goals (aka more plates on the bar) superseded her interest in being smaller or thinner. She’s since written a beginner weight training book called Liftoff: Couch to Barbell and a memoir called A Physical Education (find both, as well as her newsletter, at shesabeast.co).
“My personal background primed me to be especially vulnerable to the media ecosystem, which is very focused on losing weight, only eating 1,200 calories a day, and doing your cardio,” Johnston tells me over video chat from her Southern California home. “Like so many women, that shaped my entire understanding of what my relationship with my body, food, and exercise should be.”
“I found this new way of seeing myself and my body in lifting weights,” she says. “I realized that the relationship between food, exercise, and rest could be a constructive feedback loop instead of a destructive one” built around punishing workouts and eating less, always less.
“I love food. I can’t imagine a life where I just say no to it,” says Naz Salman, an award-winning powerlifter and the general manager at Indy City Barbell, arguably the area’s most
popular strength training gym. “We have a lot of women who come in here; it’s the standard thing: ‘I want to be a size 2.’ But then they get a barbell in their hand, and everything changes. They forget about being small. They want to be strong.”
Emma Manns (25) has been a personal trainer for five years, and says she went through that transition herself. “I wanted to be skinny my whole life. In fact, I was told I needed to be skinny, between societal norms and self-imposed pressure.” In 2019, she started lifting. “And I felt this confidence that I’ve never had before. I felt like I could take up space in an area without feeling like I have to, you know, not take up space. It was incredible.”
I know, it’s hard to believe. How can trading a sweaty spin class or an hour on the elliptical for the squat, deadlift, or bench undo generations of societal conditioning? Admittedly, it’s not that simple. Photographer and graphic artist Rachel Giese started powerlifting in 2012 as a high school athlete, co-founding a weightlifting club and competing in local meets. But when she went to college, she says, “I stopped doing it because I was afraid I’d just be known as ‘that powerlifter girl.’ I didn’t want to be seen as strong. And as I got older, I thought, ‘What the eff was that? I am that powerlifter girl.’”
“It seems so juvenile now, as a 32-year-old woman,” she says. “But there are these voices in the world, and inside us, that want to keep us weaker. It’s hard to drown them out sometimes. But when you get in the gym, and that weight is moving and those endorphins are flowing … you can’t hear them at all.”
For me, that voice also said, “They’re all going to laugh at you.” After following Johnston’s Liftoff program, I was pulling my old body weight or more in most lifts—and I’d gained 25 pounds, which for the first time in my life thrilled me instead of filling me with despair. I was ready to transition from my lovable but limited gym to somewhere more serious, but looking at the social media activity of my nearest iron spot, I was terrified. Most gyms’ weightlifting content involves someone pulling a bar packed with the plate equivalent of a Volkswagen bug, while I was just happy to hoist the bar, forget the plates. I have a near-pathological fear of looking stupid, and based on the evidence provided to me on Instagram, my weak, 54-year-old self has no business in those hallowed halls of iron.
Wall can relate to my fears. “I was intimidated by the gym before I started lifting in this group,” she says, “I didn’t know what to do, if I had the right form, or if I was going to hurt myself.” But what she found at the gym surprised her. “People who are passionate about lifting respect anyone who’s putting in the work and trying,” she says. “I’ve seen less misogyny and men posturing around women at the gym than I have in most other spaces.”
Eventually, Lund promises, those worries will fall by the wayside, where many female lifters’ anxieties about body image and eating have also fallen. “One day, you realize no one is looking at you. They’re too busy with their own stuff,” she says.
“The more women that can take up space in the sport, the more women who’ll [turn] their backs on disordered eating, ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,’ being tiny—all that brainwashing,” Giere says. “We can take that energy we spent on feeling bad about our bodies and put it toward things that really matter.”
