Powerlifting taught me what magical potential the human body has—mine, everyone’s. It also taught me what a profoundly meditative experience it is, trying to shift something really bloody heavy.
It started as a thing to share with my boyfriend, and as part of the later stages of recovery from anorexia: making myself stronger not weaker, bigger not smaller, by eating more not less. (You can read more on this here.)
It continued as a competitive thing, taking part in British Drug-Free Powerlifting Association meets in 2013-15, and then as a social thing, with my happily expanding crew of Oxford Platemates.
It gradually became importantly about feminism, about not subscribing to the ideal of female diminishment. And it remains that, however many women and men try to ruin lifting by promoting it as just one more way to lose fat and get ripped or toned.
Some of this is nicely summed up in Oxford University Powerlifting Club’s video Lift Like a Girl:
If you’d like to find out more about how to get started, take a look at this fact sheet I put together for the taster sessions I ran at the 2018 Women’s Festival at St John’s College, Oxford. (A slight female slant, but fairly general-purpose.)
You can also watch a few of my old competition and training lifts here, including the squat that won me first place in the women’s 63 kg squat category at the World Drug-Free Powerlifting Federation Single Lift Championships 2015, in glamorous Telford, England. (Though my crown was wrested from me the morning after, teaching me some slow lessons about what I want this sport to be in my life—and some quicker ones about the merits of reading the rule book. Read more here.)
Here is my winning lift:
But in the end, it’s not about how much you lift, it’s about how much you lift relative to what you could lift last week. Or just about how you feel when you lift however much.
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In the years since I stopped competing, lifting has become a quieter though still intense part of my life.
I continue to introduce other people to the basics, and when I do, I’m struck by two important things that it helps teach:
- how to focus (it makes an instant difference, giving someone permission to focus on a single spot and stop looking at me or anywhere else around them);
- how to struggle (it’s so natural to many individuals, especially women, to laugh and get scared and look for help and give up when they feel the resistance, and it’s lovely watching someone learn how to feel the “this is hard” as the whole point).
The combination of the two helps create a centred calm that carries over unmistakeably into the rest of life.
Commercial gyms often aren’t conducive to learning these skills—though on the plus side, if you can learn them there, you can practise them anywhere.
I’ve been lucky to do most of my lifting in gyms that have not been full of mirrors and posers. And mid-pandemic, I got my hands on a secondhand bar and plates, nicked a couple of oil drums, asked my stepfather for a bit of basic woodwork help, and built myself a little platform next to my boat.
Lifting indoors feels slightly odd these days; I like being under the sky looking at a river as I squat. And there’s no better antidote to too much laptop.
In this phase of my lifting life—long after the day in March 2009 when I tried my first ever deadlift (32.5 kg!)—that is what I’m most grateful to it for: the wake-me-up or calm-me-down texture it brings into my days; the way it’s intertwined itself with so much about who I am and what I value, but also steadfastly refuses to be anything other than the brief simplicity of bar plus body.
Emily T. Troscianko 