05/28/2025
Muscle on women: admired, judged, celebrated, policed. This article highlights the cultural discomfort that still surrounds female strength and why it’s time to challenge the narrative.
As a coach, I see the emotional tension many women carry when pursuing strength. We want to feel powerful, but we’re often taught to make that power more “palatable.” To shrink, soften, or explain ourselves when we get strong.
Strength isn’t just about aesthetics- it’s about agency, confidence, and the ability to live fully in your body. We shouldn’t have to apologize for that.
💪 Let’s keep lifting and rewriting the script.
What if you could spend fewer hours in the gym, stop restricting what you eat, and untether fat loss from the number on the scale? In recent decades, gym culture has seen a change in the winds: more and more women are taking up weight lifting, shattering the previously segregated ready image of “men sweating in the weight room, women glistening in the aerobics studio,” Lauren Michele Jackson writes. Emerging internet forums such as Reddit’s r/fitness—where women post snapshots of their weight-training progress and generous caloric intakes—were replacing the vacant perfection of editorial spreads with crowdsourced examples and instruction. The author Casey Johnston, a chronic dieter and reluctant long-distance runner, writes about this phenomenon in her new book, “A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting.” Lifting “toppled everything I knew about my body,” Johnston reports, ushering a physiological, as well as psychological, transformation that reads as nothing short of a revelation. But a preoccupation with strength can take many forms, Jackson suggests. Read Jackson’s full review. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/lBxW8H
