28. Complete a weight lifting program

Everyday, I grow stronger than my enemies.

CW: Body stuff, weight loss stuff

I hesitated to write about this, partly because I’ve clearly abandoned this project for a few months and partly because it wasn’t an action I completed until AFTER I turned 40. But I think the before 40 conceit is out the window at this point. I will not admit to failing to do 39 new things. I will admit that I remain the same sluggish, casual person I was at 39 and 29 and 19 now that I’m in my 40th decade. I’ve always loved to put things off, to quit, to lounge, and to dreamily stare into nothing more than I like doing just about anything. Everything I’ve ever accomplished has been done by pushing relentlessly against my fundamental nature, so in a way I am the hardest working lazy person alive. A Sisyphus shoving against my own personality. When I end up back at the bottom, failing to do what I’ve set out to do because I’d rather sit in a hammock and think about bugs, I must start the process of writing or whatever all over again. Accepting this is good. Learning to begin again is the basis of every morning

And that’s why I am proud of this one—I actually finished a weight lifting program. Unfortunately, I look almost exactly the same and everyone I try to talk to about lifting is visibly unimpressed by my mid physique. I say unfortunately because I know we’re living in a Time where Ozempic face is de rigueur. It’s quite a trip being 40 and a woman right now, because the horrific heroin chic of the nineties and low slung jeans of the early aughts is back in such full force it’s like the decades of body positivity messaging were never even conceived of as a possibility. Celebs just keep showing up looking “stunning” according to Pop Base, magically 40 pounds lighter from eating turkey sandwiches and going on long walks. The lying is insane, not only because it’s so transparent, but because it’s so cowardly.  And yeah, it’s bad for society. There, I said it.

If you don’t spend time on TikTok or social media, you may not be aware of what a trend weight lifting has been for women the past few years and what a hard turn the algorithm recently took away from heavy lifting for functional muscle mass towards degenerative childlike slimness once again. Exercise and weight loss are so inextricably linked in our culture that most people can’t think about one without the other and not to sound paranoid, but it’s an evil conspiracy. Because exercise can make us strong and not thin, it can build muscle that protects from cancer and osteoporosis and not make us thin, it can increase your stamina, lift brain fog, prevent dementia, help your hormonal balance, improve your mood by decreasing depression and anxiety, prepare you for survival in a zombie apocalypse—and STILL not make you thin. And yet, right now, if a form of exercise isn’t making people thin no one wants to hear about it. Instead, we’re asked to chase a body composition mostly only available to people just out of puberty or on drugs, a shape that will make us more tired, deteriorate our strength, and exhaust our minds. 

Okay, you’ve heard it all before. We all know, even though we are currently pretending we don’t and it’s actually so cunt that every pop star is gaunt again. So, what about that weight lifting program?

Over the years, I’ve exercised on and off and from like 2020 through 2023 it was mostly off. That sounds like a long time, but with a Pandemic and releasing a book and then wandering aimlessly, my physical self was not my priority. It probably would have been better for me if I had made it one, but I didn’t. Oh well. Start again. Especially when it comes to exercise, because it does add up. Years of biking have made my thighs strong in a way that doesn’t match the rest of me, for example. The cumulative effect of what we do for ourselves can be lifelong. In September, the cumulative effect of fucking up my left knee took me down and one morning I just woke up unable to walk on it. That’s what made me return to the gym after a few weeks of icing and elevating it back to semi-normalcy. Because the cumulative effect of neglect can also be very powerful. You can do nothing and your body will find a way to do something to wake you the fuck up. 

After three months or so of just doing random stuff with dumbbells and weight machines, I followed a fitness influencer named Jessica Bickling who is a body builder. Her goal is to put on lots of muscle, which is not the same thing as strength necessarily. That’s the most confusing part about weight lifting that I don’t think most people know. You can lift weights in a range that will build muscle size and you can lift in a range that will build muscle strength and someone with smaller muscles can be stronger. I don’t really understand why, but if you pay attention to the variable body shapes of different athletes it becomes more comprehensible. Our bodies adapt to what we ask them to do regularly which is why a guy training to do shot put can throw a heavy weight much farther than a guy training to make his arms look big. So lifting extremely heavy amounts briefly and regularly will make you stronger to support that movement, but won’t necessarily stretch your muscles fibres in a way that dramatically increases size.

I’m only saying this because my goals with my body are not to look like Jessica Bickling, who is a beautiful woman dedicating her life to getting big and selling weight lifting programs to people who admire her. Understanding a little more about weight lifting now, I can see she has planned her program for women like me, not women like her, who already know what they’re doing. It was five days a week, two days for upper body, two days for lower, and one full. Some of her exercises were really satisfying and some felt like they did nothing, which was interesting for me as well. I liked discovering what felt good to do and what felt like a challenge I could meet. She also structured the program to increase progressive overload, which is what the experts will tell you builds muscle. Lifts got heavier and more intense. More challenging. They have to, because if you are consistent you will get stronger before you know it.

Five days a week is a lot and I didn’t really think I would do it, but on afternoons where I felt like a massive loser who can’t accomplish anything I could at least toddle over to the gymnasium and pick up something heavy and put it down again. Some types of exercise stress me out mentally, but lifting doesn’t. It’s just so methodical. You lift an object a certain number of times and then you’re done. There’s no one screaming, “faster! harder! get it girls!” At the top of a classroom. You don’t have to be particularly great at anything, graceful or flexible or capable of great endurance, just to get started. Having a program someone else designed makes the number and type of exercises you do their problem, not yours. When you get through the list, you are done. 

My mother has two sisters and all three of them have various maladies related to very thin bodies and bones and terrible balance and destroyed cartilage. One of them was on medication for her osteoporosis that made her bones even harder, which then made them less flexible and prone to breaking. Over the last ten years she’s broken her wrist, her femur, and her back just by slipping and falling. I think young people imagine you go go go through life and then suddenly you’re done and lay down in your bed and smile and slip away. No! It is far more likely that you will start to break down and potentially face years and years in and out of rehab centers, increasingly less mobile. And this is supposed to be a normal price to pay in exchange for looking gutless in Calvin Klein. Don’t let them take your bones. Don’t let them take your muscles. 

Anyway, now, I actually love going to the gym and reading about what people do there and their goals. I think it’s so interesting and I know I am boring the hell of of people when I talk about it, especially because as I said I look exactly the same and they clearly think I’m a fraud. Why would anyone do anything that no one else can see?? Aren’t we all on this earth to be perceived?? I am stronger, even if only I will ever know it. My knee is vastly improved. And I stopped taking Wellbutrin. Something has happened, something so transformative that even I, a 40-year-old quitter, finished a 12-week written exercise program for the first time and then continued on my own to go to the gym and lift weights—though I now only do it 3-4 days a week. I’m not Hercules. But I am going to head over there right now as soon as I’m done typing this and looking at my phone a bit and then watching these little sparrows roll in the dirt by my picnic table where I’m typing. You can’t change too quickly, but you will change inevitably. 

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• If you are interested in weight lifting there is a lot to learn, but it’s not complicated. Fitness influencers simply make money off of complicating it a lot of the time. SO the learning is just understanding the basics through all the noise. Happy to answer any questions people have if I can, I am always learning more, too.

• Some people I follow:

-Jeff Nippard: he is a for real body builder and takes steroids, but he breaks down basic aspects of lifting in a very simple and science based way. I’d look him up on YouTube for more long form explanations.

jeffnippard

A post shared by @jeffnippard

-Ariel Yu: She does very simple videos on Instagram explaining form and what part of the body you’re working out which is helpful.

arielyu.fit

A post shared by @arielyu.fit

• I didn’t talk about mobility in this because it’s something I am working on building a better routine about. I stretch before every lift, but I could do a lot more mobility exercises. Don’t neglect your joints and flexibility. Treating your body holistically is beautiful and I am trying to every day.

• From Shari Dworkin and Michael A. Messner, explaining that fitness magazines tend to work as a salve on individualistic concerns: “The kinds of individual empowerment that can be purchased through consumerism seriously reduce women’s abilities even to identify their collective interests, [leading to] a radical turning inward of agency toward the goal of transformation of one’s own body, in contrast to a turning outward to mobilize for collective action.”
  

  Is my lifting diatribe falling under this same condemnation as weight loss consumerism? Yes. But I will stand by the idea that if you are going to spend a lot of time on physical self-transformation over societal transformation, it better be something that actually benefits your mind and health instead of hurting them both.

• What do you think? How’s the gym? How are your hips?