Asked a Swole Woman
Vol. 3, Issue 49
An interview with Casey Johnston
What's your definition of strength?
It has evolved a lot over the years. For a very long time – I hate to say "as a woman” – but as a woman, it was entirely symbolic and emotional and mostly a grace-under-fire kind of thing, a supposed ability to take whatever the world threw at me and cope. Eventually, I realized that was actually "having a poor sense of boundaries/low self-esteem/willingness to please at any personal expense/lack of a sense of self that allowed me to identify and advocate for what I wanted." I didn't know other kinds of strength, and physical strength is a reasonably separate thing, but that also felt mostly alien and inaccessible for most of my life.
Then I tried out strength training (lifting heavy weights), and of course, that taught me about physical strength, which is about a measured sense of capability and personal achievement (even if it's just, I trained today!). And that became this big honking metaphor for me for a lot of reasons.
It felt like one of the first times I proactively identified a thing I wanted that I was also terrified of, for a lot of reasons: gyms are intimidating; "lifting weights makes you bulky"; if I were even capable of being physically strong wouldn't I know that by now and aren't I just setting myself for embarrassment and torture? It was something where I did not have any gifts or knowledge base at all, so it was humbling to my very tightly held perfectionism. And in my most generous interpretation, I held that perfectionism not because I think I'm better than everyone else, but because admitting fault felt extremely high-risk, because here I would have to hand-wave and say "my upbringing."
But failure is built into the very core of how strength training works; if I'm not failing ever — for instance trying to squat a particular weight and not completing it, letting the weight fall to the safety bars — I'm probably shortchanging myself. I also have to accept that, right out of the box, my "form" for lifts is not good, and all I can do is incrementally chip away at getting better and never expecting or requiring perfection to get my workout done. If I don't do this, I'm not facing, as a startup would say, my "growth opportunities." And why – because my sense of self can't be someone who fucks up sometimes because I don't already know everything?
So in the specific context of strength training, but also now in my life, strength means having enough generosity to say, "I want this." And my efforts to succeed are not going to work 100 or 80 or even 40 percent of the time. I might not even ever get what I want, ultimately! But the costs of learning to fail are so vastly outweighed by what I gain from trying.
I think we have a meritocracy-oriented understanding of strength. Strong people become football players or The Mountain, and the rest of us are what we are. But my definition evolved: I have my capacity for personal strength, by every definition, that is worth cultivating. You don't have to be the strongest guy in the room – just become strong relative to yourself. And I've found I have gotten so much out of doing this thing, and lots of other things, that I am ostensibly not good at. You gain much more going from bad to mediocre than going from "already very good" to "even more good." This process is VERY literal in strength training and completely accessible; it unlocked so much for me, and I'm very grateful to it.
When was your self-esteem at its lowest? What was happening in your life at the time?
Wow, tough to pick just one, but it was probably right after I started college. I was not having a good time, my program (engineering) was demanding, and my dad died suddenly right at the end of the semester. I tried to drop out of school, and the school begged me not to. I was struggling in every possible way. I think I was supposed to have this thing that I've never seen anyone describe as ably as Choire did that one time – a "sophisticated sense of privilege." I could have used that being in New York, being in an entirely new environment with no built-in friends, being at a fairly sink-or-swim school on a lot of financial aid, and I didn't have it. I wasn't ready to deal with Real Life in the first place, and that was before that rapid sequence of events gave my life an extreme sense of "everything can fall apart fast at any moment, and nothing is ever really okay."
Instead, I felt terrible all the time for not being able to do everything easily. And I didn't stop feeling bad in this way or get out of this snowballing emotional decline for a really, really long time!
I'm afraid to enter a gym again because I feel like it will only enhance all my faults and insecurities. How do I get over that?
Haha, well, per my answer above, it may well do that! But look: we are all a pile of faults and insecurities. And while I'm the big strength training advocate, I don't think life is about understanding every slight imperfection and grinding it into the ground. You're allowed to live with some things. But the way I see it, at least for myself, is that you at least start to overcome those insecurities when you accept that you have them. You can be generous enough to yourself to take the painful process of chipping away at them and decide that whatever it is that you want is more important to you than not facing those imperfections.
Like, for most of my life, I've been afraid to talk to people, and I had a mortal fear of the phone. But what am I going to do, not be a journalist? Never talk to anyone ever? I can have some other job where I never have to be on the phone, but as long as I'm still a journalist, I have to call some people and take their calls. That said, it's, of course, never as bad as I feared. And it doesn't have to be the best part of my day! But at the end of the day, I can do it and want the things that "being on the phone" allows, and until I manage to repair that broken part of my brain, I might have to physically swallow fear. And the more I've done it, the easier it gets.
Your faults and insecurities might not come from the capability side of things, but just body embarrassment, i.e. “I'm not hot enough” or “I'm visibly not good at this.” But strength training is the perfect antidote for this because it will teach you that a) your very biology supports and desires to get stronger; and b) your body can do something other than "be hot and/or cause you inconvenient pain as you grow older." You can pick up a 40-pound box of cat litter like nothing! Your back won’t hurt! There is a more functional version of you.
And then probably some of this comes from feeling like you're the biggest newb in the world and have no right to be at a real gym, which is not valid: everyone is there "to get better at [insert goal]," so you're doing the same thing as everyone else. You pay the same gym membership fee.
It was also tough for me to internalize ideas like "everyone in the gym started where you are," which didn't feel true; it felt like at least some, if not most, people there began from that pre-ordained "strong person" background. But the longer I've been doing strength training, the more times I've personally witnessed people start from where I was and get even stronger than me! It is literally accurate and true, and it might not be everyone, but it happens daily; it is not as abnormal as it feels when you first step into a gym.
Many people have a lot going o: they were mocked in gym class, their dad was in the military, their mom was debilitatingly fatphobic – there are many hangups to go around as far as our bodies that tend to fall in the category of "who do you think you are?". But I'm here to tell you you deserve what you want, whatever that is, especially if it stands on the other side of some of your worst fears, and especially if it's something as basic as "a limited amount of ownership over what it's like to be in your body physically." Anyone in your head who tells you you don't deserve to simply go to a gym and lift some weights, to have some basic ownership of your physical self is wrong as hell and can go fuck themselves. We're not asking much here! Those voices can feel loud, but hopefully, I can be louder and meaner to them on your behalf.
I don't want to get jacked anymore. All I want is to be strong enough to scoop up my three kids and dog and run a mile with them if/when there's a big earthquake or other natural disaster. Altogether they weigh about 120 pounds. So, what type of workouts would you recommend for me?
Hahahaha, I mean, this is exactly the kind of strength I support! A lot of people believe that all lifting is 5-6 days-a-week bro-style lifting where your number one priority is to have massive pecs, and nothing could be further from the truth. We also tend to over-specifically locate "strength" to the body part in question: "I want more abs, so I should only do crunches"; "I want to be able to pick things up, so I will do lots of curls."
A great type of workout for developing good functional strength is a beginner full-body program built around fundamental compound lifts (squat, bench, deadlift, row, overhead press, pull-up). These are the building blocks of many free starter programs oriented toward strength and functionality, including the ones below. I have a couch-to-barbell starter program, LIFTOFF, in beta and available to my paid subscribers right now that I'm hoping to release entirely really soon (I'm keeping the link in our subscribers-only community Discord until then). To build strength, you'd want to do something like this three days a week. If you do two days a week, it's more like "exercise" than "building strength and making progress," but it's not nothing. Try these:
Caroline Girvan Day 4 of EPIC full-body dumbbell workout (Previously rec'd in this column)
You could also look through more programs in my At-Home Workout Compendiums Part One and Part Two.
And let me know how it goes!! We need all the hands we can get to carry everyone away from the floods and fires.
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