Latest news with #APhysicalEducation
Vogue
5 days ago
- Health
- Vogue
Scared to Start Strength Training? I Was Too
I had arrived late and was scrambling. Where were the weights, and how many did I need? Was I feeling confident enough to grab the 10-pounders or should I risk silent ridicule from my fellow Body Sculpt attendees and retrieve a 4-pound set? 'That's my spot,' another student—short, impressive muscles—snapped. It was my first class, and I needed help. After more than three decades, I wanted my body to do something new and hard, but my anxious mind was not cooperating. I had started to see it everywhere, the message that women need to be stronger. In May, the writer Casey Johnston released a memoir called A Physical Education, about trading constant diets for weight lifting and discovering herself in the process, a real-life counterpart to Miranda July's fictional narrator in All Fours, whose journey of self-actualization includes extramarital affairs and kettlebells. This summer, longtime Wall Street Journal reporter turned professional bodybuilder Anne Marie Chaker published Lift: How Women Can Reclaim Their Physical Power and Transform Their Lives, chronicling how a weight training habit pulled her out of a punishing rut. 'Psychologists who study sports behavior,' she writes, 'say that the intensity of lifting weights actually fuels a rewiring of the brain'—apparently, my mind was going to reap the benefits as well. (Working out with weights has been linked to an improved nervous system in one study and a slowdown in cognitive decline in another.) Widely different parts of the cultural conversation—from chatter on the morning shows to techy brain-science podcasts—are homing in on the benefits. I saw one amusing video where a male bystander's smirk turned to bewilderment as a woman picked up dumbbells and started shadowboxing. There are legions of viral videos of this variety. Almost three quarters of adults are trying to eat more protein—many seemingly upping their egg consumption in order to build muscle. Khloé Kardashian just released protein-dusted popcorn. (Protein supports muscle repair and growth after workouts.) And yet, like every other millennial woman whose preferred mode of exercise is Pilates and a walk through the park, I had only just begun to wonder about those intimidating objects—hand weights, dumbbells, barbells, all the bells—in the corners of the rooms where my low-impact exercise classes took place. I had long thought weight training had nothing to do with me—my goal was to become lean and flexible, not muscular and strong. And for years I had been a runner, a pastime that only felt good after I had finished, filled with endorphins and superiority. But not long ago, I gave it up, facing an awareness of my body's weak spots. Perhaps I did need to face the bells. New York is my home, but I began training in London, where I was temporarily living—it seemed I didn't have a moment to lose.
Atlantic
05-07-2025
- Lifestyle
- Atlantic
What Moving Your Body Can Mean
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning. Although exercise has clear benefits for both physical and mental health, for many people, 'those are side effects of the aesthetic goal,' Xochitl Gonzalez wrote in 2023. People who grew up equating working out with trying to lose weight may ultimately need to find a new form of movement or a new community to rewire their brain's associations. For Xochitl, it was running with her dog—and sometimes doing SoulCycle. For my colleague Julie Beck, it was weight lifting. For others, it's a group fitness class. Finding a form of movement that works for you can make you feel better in your body than you thought you could. 'It turned out that picking up something heavy for a few sets of five reps, sitting down half the workout, and then going home and eating a big sloppy burger did far more to make me feel comfortable in my body than gasping my way through endless burpees and rewarding myself with a salad ever did,' Julie writes. Today's newsletter explores movement and why we really do it. On Movement The Paradox of Hard Work By Alex Hutchinson Why do people enjoy doing difficult things? Read the article. The Feminine Pursuit of Swoleness By Julie Beck Casey Johnston's new book, A Physical Education, considers how weight lifting can help you unlearn diet culture. Read the article. In the Age of Ozempic, What's the Point of Working Out? By Xochitl Gonzalez The idea that we exercise to get thin may be more dangerous than ever. Still Curious? Inside the exclusive, obsessive, surprisingly litigious world of luxury fitness: How Tracy Anderson built an exercise empire A ridiculous, perfect way to make friends: Group fitness classes aren't just about exercise. Other Diversions Alexandra Petri on what the Founders wanted The Ciceronian secret to happiness That dropped call with customer service? It was on purpose. P.S. I asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Chris Spoeneman, 65, from Ponte Vedra, Florida, shared this photo from his and his wife's 'bucket-list trip to the South Island of New Zealand (otherworldly!!) and Australia. This was taken while hiking the Ben Lomond Track … The hike was somewhat strenuous but the views just blew me away,' he writes, including this one—'which I dubbed the most beautiful outhouse on Earth!'
Atlantic
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
A Philosophy That Sees ‘Women as Doers'
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. When a woman's clothes constrict her movement, squeezing her into unforgiving shapes, or her exercise regime is a punishing ordeal meant to winnow her down to the smallest possible size, the result is all too often an alienation from her body. This week, we published two book reviews that offer a different way to think about the physical self—one that replaces an obsession over surface appeal with an emphasis on functionality. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic 's books section: My colleague Julie Beck's essay on Casey Johnston's new ode to weight lifting argues for seeing your body as a working object, rather than an enemy to be subdued; so does Julia Turner's article about Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson's new biography of the fashion designer Claire McCardell. This philosophy might seem, to some, like wishful thinking: Narrow standards of beauty, whether they dictate body size or one's fashion sense, remain powerful in many settings. But Johnston's memoir of her journey toward strength training describes how, as she built muscle, she also began rejecting a deeply ingrained internal voice warning her against gaining a single pound. Beck, who describes trading in punishing turns on the elliptical for lifting, writes that the decision transformed her relationship to her body. As she notes, lifting 'builds up instead of whittling away; it favors function over aesthetics'; strength training has changed the way she walks, erased nagging pains, and allowed her to lift her carry-on into the overhead bin on airplanes with ease. Fashion, too, has tended to prioritize appearances over practicality—skin-baring cuts when long sleeves might be more appropriate for the weather, high heels that are impossible to walk in—to the detriment of women's well-being. In her essay on Dickinson's Claire McCardell, Turner writes that the designer 'hated being uncomfortable,' and worked to design clothes that people could actually live in. (She is credited with adding pockets to women's clothes and moving hard-to-reach zippers to the sides of dresses.) As Turner argues, McCardell 'saw women as doers, and designed accordingly.' Perhaps, Turner suggests, we should think of fashion less as an art and more as a kind of industrial design: practical and user-friendly, rather than beautiful to look at. Aesthetics aren't irrelevant—style and sartorial creativity can be freeing and self-expressive—but these books refreshingly propose that we value our bodies for what they can do, not how they appear. The Feminine Pursuit of Swoleness By Julie Beck Casey Johnston's new book, A Physical Education, considers how weight lifting can help you unlearn diet culture. What to Read Be Ready When the Luck Happens, by Ina Garten A lounge chair beside a pool in Florida, where I was vacationing with my family last winter, was the perfect place to devour Garten's celebration of luxury, good food, and togetherness. This memoir is a record of a life spent prioritizing adventure over prudence, indulgence over temperance. Garten buys a store in a town she's never visited, purchases a beautiful house she can barely afford, and wishes her husband well as he takes a job in Hong Kong while she stays behind. Her brio pays off, of course: That food shop was a success, and she went on to write more than a dozen cookbooks, become a Food Network star, and make pavlova with Taylor Swift. The book is escapist in the way that good, breezy reads often are. It was also, for me, inspiring: Be Ready When the Luck Happens gave me a bit of permission to imagine what I would do if I were the sort of person who embraces possibility the way Garten does. As I basked in the pleasant winter sunshine, I found myself thinking, What if we move to Florida, or to Southern California, or some other place where it's warm in January? I haven't followed through—vacation fantasies have a way of fading as soon as you get back to reality. But I was invigorated by imagining that I might. — Eleanor Barkhorn Out Next Week 📚 A Marriage at Sea, by Sophie Elmhirst 📚 Becoming Baba, by Aymann Ismail 📚 Bring the House Down, by Charlotte Runcie Your Weekend Read The Bad Bunny Video That Captures the Cost of Gentrification By Valerie Trapp One of the effects of gentrification, Bad Bunny proposes, is silence. Throughout the DTMF album, Bad Bunny laments how many Puerto Ricans have been forced to leave the island amid financial struggles and environmental disasters such as Hurricane Maria; this is most notable on 'Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii,' in which he notes that 'no one here wanted to leave, and those who left dream of returning.' (As of 2018, more Puerto Ricans live outside Puerto Rico than on the island; the same is true of Native Hawaiians and Palestinians in their respective lands.) The DTMF short film makes their absence palpable. 'Did you hear that? That music!' the old man says to Concho, when a red sedan drives by their front porch playing reggaeton (Bad Bunny's 'Eoo'). The old man is moved. 'You barely see that anymore,' he says of the car moseying past. 'I miss hearing the young people hanging out, the motorcycles—the sound of the neighborhood.' Señor and Concho, it seems, live in a community that has turned its volume down, now that most of its Puerto Rican inhabitants have left.
Yahoo
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Feminine Pursuit of Swoleness
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. You see it everywhere: A narrative of progress in two snapshots—before and after—that leaves the viewer to imagine what came in between. On the left, a body whose inhabitant is unhappy with it in some way. On the right, the same body but different, and—you're meant to understand—better. On diet culture's greatest-hits album, the 'before and after' is the lead single, an earworm that's hard to get out of your mind. Even when it's not being used explicitly to sell something (a meal regimen, a workout program), this diptych carries a promise that through the application of effort, you too can chisel yourself into a (supposedly) more appealing shape, which usually, but not always, means a smaller one. Casey Johnston's new book, A Physical Education, tells a before-and-after story, too—one not of shrinkage but of growth, physical and otherwise. Johnston traces her journey from a life of joyless distance running, which she saw as 'taking out bigger and bigger cardio loans to buy myself more calories,' to the revelation of weight lifting. Her book incorporates memoir, science writing, and cultural critique, offering a technical breakdown of the effects of Johnston's time in the gym, as well as condemnations of diet culture's scams and hucksters. The book is not a how-to, but more of a why-to: Strength training, in Johnston's telling, reframes both body and mind. Before lifting, 'I knew all the contours of treating myself like a deceitful degenerate, against whom I must maintain constant vigilance,' she writes. After lifting, 'all of the parts of myself that had been fighting each other' had become 'united in the holy cause of getting strong as hell.' Johnston has been evangelizing and explaining weight lifting online for years, first with her 'Ask a Swole Woman' online column and then with her independent newsletter, She's a Beast, along with a beginner's lifting-training guide, Liftoff: Couch to Barbell. Like any hobby, weight lifting generates plenty of online material, but much of it is aimed at an audience that already knows its way around a squat rack. Johnston stands out for her attunement to the needs and anxieties of true beginners—particularly those who are women, for whom pumping iron often requires a certain amount of unlearning. Even after the rise of body positivity, women are still frequently confronted with unsolicited promotion for crash diets, told that 'nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,' and sold what Johnston calls 'busywork bullshit' exercises—'Target love handles with these 10 moves'; '20 minutes to tone your arms'; etc.—designed to spot-treat so-called problem areas. Social media has supercharged the delivery of these messages; though there are plenty of supportive communities online, for every body-positive influencer, there seems to be another pushing food restriction and punishing workouts. The TikTok trend of 'girl dinner' suggests that eating nothing but a plate of cheese cubes and almonds is an adorably feminine quirk rather than a repackaged eating disorder. [Read: The body-positivity movement is over] Johnston writes that since the age of 12, she'd been worrying about her weight, having internalized the message that 'either I was small enough (and always getting smaller), or I was a disappointment.' This is the message that fueled my workouts for the longest time, too—that the point of exercise was weight loss or, at the very least, staving off weight gain. Working out was a chore or—even worse—torturous penance for failing to become the impossible ever-shrinking woman. It wasn't supposed to feel good; it definitely wasn't fun. After berating myself to go to the gym in the first place, I would pedal away on the elliptical for 30 to 40 minutes until I tasted blood in the back of my throat (seems fine and normal), and then perform a grab bag of whatever calisthenics might plausibly target my core, hating every second of it. None of this changed the fact that I would get winded walking up a flight of stairs, or nearly buckle under the weight of my carry-on while hoisting it into an airplane's overhead bin. Eventually, seeking a less resentful relationship with exercise and my body, I dove into martial arts for several years, then decided to give weight lifting a try. Johnston's writing was a guide for me; I loosely followed her Liftoff program when I was getting started, and have been a regular reader of her newsletter. It turned out that picking up something heavy for a few sets of five reps, sitting down half the workout, and then going home and eating a big sloppy burger did far more to make me feel comfortable in my body than gasping my way through endless burpees and rewarding myself with a salad ever did. Johnston's assertion that lifting 'completely changed how I think and feel about the world and myself and everything' sounds like another of the fitness industry's wild overpromises. But I know what she means. I, too, have found that lifting can transform the way you relate to your body. First and foremost, Johnston explains, it inverts what women are still too-often told about the goal of exercise. It builds up instead of whittling away; it favors function over aesthetics. Weight lifting makes you better at more than just lifting weights. Johnston writes about struggling with a 40-pound bag of cat litter before she began lifting; now she simply picks it up and carries it into her apartment. As I added weight to the barbell, I felt my muscles stabilize; the neck and back pain from my butt-sitting job faded; I stopped needing help with my overstuffed suitcases; and I even started walking differently—no longer flinging my skeleton around, but smoothly engaging actual muscles. When I do cardio, running is easier too. [Read: The Protein Madness Is Just Getting Started] Here's another thing: You gotta eat. It won't work if you don't. When Johnston crunched the numbers on how many calories her body would need to build muscle, she discovered that the 1,200-calorie diet she'd been living on for years was not going to cut it. For the lifting to do anything, she'd need to eat more. Like, a lot more. Protein, especially. Going from a mindset of restriction to making sure that she was eating enough shifted how Johnston felt in her body. She had more energy; she was no longer constantly cold. She felt like 'a big, beautiful horse.' As for me, before lifting, I had never so viscerally felt the obvious truth that food is fuel, that what and how much I eat shapes what my body can do and how it feels. Yet even these discoveries cannot always overcome the influence of diet culture. When Johnston starts to allow herself more calories, at first she fears 'the worst fate that could befall a woman who bravely ate more: gaining three, or even five, pounds.' The most heartbreaking scene in the book illustrates how difficult it can be to put your weapons down after a lifetime of treating your body like the enemy. Johnston tries to spread the good word of weight lifting to her mother, whom she describes as a perpetual dieter and a practiced commentator on any fluctuations in Johnston's weight. It doesn't go well. After they take a frustrating trip to the gym together, Johnston asks, 'What is it you're so afraid of?' Her mom replies that she doesn't want to become 'one of those fat old women' whom 'no one likes.' 'I can think of lots of fat old women that many people love,' Johnston tries. 'But they wouldn't love me.' That's the well I think so many of us are still trying to climb out of: the belief that a woman's worth always lies in her desirability, that desirability takes only one shape, and that if she doesn't live up to the impossible standard, she should at least be working apologetically toward correcting that. Even if you think you've made it out, the foot soldiers of diet culture are always looking to pull you back in. I've followed some lifting-related accounts on Instagram; the algorithm seems to have interpreted that as free rein to bombard me with reels of 'weight-loss journeys,' 'bodyweight exercises for hot girlies,' and the like. Every other celebrity seems to be on Ozempic now, and apparently, 'thin is in' again. I admit I spiraled a little when I went up a size in all my clothes, even though I'd gotten bigger on purpose. [Rebecca Johns: A diet writer's regrets] Lifting culture, too, has its trapdoors back into disordered thinking. As Lauren Michele Jackson points out in her review of A Physical Education for The New Yorker, the idea that focusing on strength frees you from being preoccupied with looks is naive. Weight lifting can come with its own set of metrics and obsessions: Eating enough protein and hitting your macros can replace calorie restriction; instead of fixating on thinness, perhaps now you want a juicy ass or rippling biceps. The practice can be fraught in a different way for men, who are told that maximal swoleness is their optimal form. The same activity can be a key or a cage, depending on your point of view. But weight lifting has stuck, for me and I think for Johnston, because it can also change the way one thinks about achievement. It serves as a pretty good metaphor for a balanced approach to striving that eschews both the Lean In–girlboss hustle and its 'I don't dream of labor' anti-ambition backlash. Not running until your tank is empty and then running some more, but rather fueling yourself enough to push just a bit further than you have before. Letting the gains accumulate slowly, a little more weight at a time. And most important, learning that rest is part of the rhythm of progress. You punctuate your workouts with full days off. You do your reps, and then you just sit there for a couple of minutes. You work, and then you recover. While I'm resting, I often eat sour candies out of a fanny pack. I saw some powerlifters on Instagram eating candy before tackling a big lift—the idea being that the quick-metabolizing sugary carbs give you a little boost of energy. I don't care if this is scientifically sound. (I'm serious, don't email me.) I'm more excited to work out when I know that it's also my candy time. The gym has morphed from a torture chamber to a place of challenge, effort, rest, and pleasure, all of which, it turns out, can coexist. And failure is part of the mix, too. As Johnston writes, 'Building strength is about pressing steadily upward on one's current limits'; if you're doing it right, your attempts will sometimes exceed your ability. That's how you know you're challenging yourself enough. Sometimes failure involves gassing out on an attempt to squat heavier than you have ever squatted, and sometimes it's more like slipping on the banana peel of an old, unhealthy thought pattern. Both will knock you on your ass for a bit. But that's part of it. 'Progress could be about going backward, letting go,' Johnston writes. 'Before and after' images are only snapshots. Outside the frame, the body, and the self, keep evolving. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Feminine Pursuit of Swoleness
You see it everywhere: A narrative of progress in two snapshots—before and after—that leaves the viewer to imagine what came in between. On the left, a body whose inhabitant is unhappy with it in some way. On the right, the same body but different, and—you're meant to understand—better. On diet culture's greatest-hits album, the 'before and after' is the lead single, an earworm that's hard to get out of your mind. Even when it's not being used explicitly to sell something (a meal regimen, a workout program), this diptych carries a promise that through the application of effort, you too can chisel yourself into a (supposedly) more appealing shape, which usually, but not always, means a smaller one. Casey Johnston's new book, A Physical Education, tells a before-and-after story, too—one not of shrinkage but of growth, physical and otherwise. Johnston traces her journey from a life of joyless distance running, which she saw as 'taking out bigger and bigger cardio loans to buy myself more calories,' to the revelation of weight lifting. Her book incorporates memoir, science writing, and cultural critique, offering a technical breakdown of the effects of Johnston's time in the gym, as well as condemnations of diet culture's scams and hucksters. The book is not a how-to, but more of a why-to: Strength training, in Johnston's telling, reframes both body and mind. Before lifting, 'I knew all the contours of treating myself like a deceitful degenerate, against whom I must maintain constant vigilance,' she writes. After lifting, 'all of the parts of myself that had been fighting each other' had become 'united in the holy cause of getting strong as hell.' Johnston has been evangelizing and explaining weight lifting online for years, first with her 'Ask a Swole Woman' online column and then with her independent newsletter, She's a Beast, along with a beginner's lifting-training guide, Liftoff: Couch to Barbell. Like any hobby, weight lifting generates plenty of online material, but much of it is aimed at an audience that already knows its way around a squat rack. Johnston stands out for her attunement to the needs and anxieties of true beginners—particularly those who are women, for whom pumping iron often requires a certain amount of unlearning. Even after the rise of body positivity, women are still frequently confronted with unsolicited promotion for crash diets, told that 'nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,' and sold what Johnston calls 'busywork bullshit' exercises—'Target love handles with these 10 moves'; '20 minutes to tone your arms'; etc.—designed to spot-treat so-called problem areas. Social media has supercharged the delivery of these messages; though there are plenty of supportive communities online, for every body-positive influencer, there seems to be another pushing food restriction and punishing workouts. The TikTok trend of 'girl dinner ' suggests that eating nothing but a plate of cheese cubes and almonds is an adorably feminine quirk rather than a repackaged eating disorder. Johnston writes that since the age of 12, she'd been worrying about her weight, having internalized the message that 'either I was small enough (and always getting smaller), or I was a disappointment.' This is the message that fueled my workouts for the longest time, too—that the point of exercise was weight loss or, at the very least, staving off weight gain. Working out was a chore or—even worse—torturous penance for failing to become the impossible ever-shrinking woman. It wasn't supposed to feel good; it definitely wasn't fun. After berating myself to go to the gym in the first place, I would pedal away on the elliptical for 30 to 40 minutes until I tasted blood in the back of my throat (seems fine and normal), and then perform a grab bag of whatever calisthenics might plausibly target my core, hating every second of it. None of this changed the fact that I would get winded walking up a flight of stairs, or nearly buckle under the weight of my carry-on while hoisting it into an airplane's overhead bin. Eventually, seeking a less resentful relationship with exercise and my body, I dove into martial arts for several years, then decided to give weight lifting a try. Johnston's writing was a guide for me; I loosely followed her Liftoff program when I was getting started, and have been a regular reader of her newsletter. It turned out that picking up something heavy for a few sets of five reps, sitting down half the workout, and then going home and eating a big sloppy burger did far more to make me feel comfortable in my body than gasping my way through endless burpees and rewarding myself with a salad ever did. Johnston's assertion that lifting 'completely changed how I think and feel about the world and myself and everything' sounds like another of the fitness industry's wild overpromises. But I know what she means. I, too, have found that lifting can transform the way you relate to your body. First and foremost, Johnston explains, it inverts what women are still too-often told about the goal of exercise. It builds up instead of whittling away; it favors function over aesthetics. Weight lifting makes you better at more than just lifting weights. Johnston writes about struggling with a 40-pound bag of cat litter before she began lifting; now she simply picks it up and carries it into her apartment. As I added weight to the barbell, I felt my muscles stabilize; the neck and back pain from my butt-sitting job faded; I stopped needing help with my overstuffed suitcases; and I even started walking differently—no longer flinging my skeleton around, but smoothly engaging actual muscles. When I do cardio, running is easier too. Here's another thing: You gotta eat. It won't work if you don't. When Johnston crunched the numbers on how many calories her body would need to build muscle, she discovered that the 1,200-calorie diet she'd been living on for years was not going to cut it. For the lifting to do anything, she'd need to eat more. Like, a lot more. Protein, especially. Going from a mindset of restriction to making sure that she was eating enough shifted how Johnston felt in her body. She had more energy; she was no longer constantly cold. She felt like 'a big, beautiful horse.' As for me, before lifting, I had never so viscerally felt the obvious truth that food is fuel, that what and how much I eat shapes what my body can do and how it feels. Yet even these discoveries cannot always overcome the influence of diet culture. When Johnston starts to allow herself more calories, at first she fears 'the worst fate that could befall a woman who bravely ate more: gaining three, or even five, pounds.' The most heartbreaking scene in the book illustrates how difficult it can be to put your weapons down after a lifetime of treating your body like the enemy. Johnston tries to spread the good word of weight lifting to her mother, whom she describes as a perpetual dieter and a practiced commentator on any fluctuations in Johnston's weight. It doesn't go well. After they take a frustrating trip to the gym together, Johnston asks, 'What is it you're so afraid of?' Her mom replies that she doesn't want to become 'one of those fat old women' whom 'no one likes.' 'I can think of lots of fat old women that many people love,' Johnston tries. 'But they wouldn't love me.' That's the well I think so many of us are still trying to climb out of: the belief that a woman's worth always lies in her desirability, that desirability takes only one shape, and that if she doesn't live up to the impossible standard, she should at least be working apologetically toward correcting that. Even if you think you've made it out, the foot soldiers of diet culture are always looking to pull you back in. I've followed some lifting-related accounts on Instagram; the algorithm seems to have interpreted that as free rein to bombard me with reels of 'weight-loss journeys,' 'bodyweight exercises for hot girlies,' and the like. Every other celebrity seems to be on Ozempic now, and apparently, ' thin is in ' again. I admit I spiraled a little when I went up a size in all my clothes, even though I'd gotten bigger on purpose. Rebecca Johns: A diet writer's regrets Lifting culture, too, has its trapdoors back into disordered thinking. As Lauren Michele Jackson points out in her review of A Physical Education for The New Yorker, the idea that focusing on strength frees you from being preoccupied with looks is naive. Weight lifting can come with its own set of metrics and obsessions: Eating enough protein and hitting your macros can replace calorie restriction; instead of fixating on thinness, perhaps now you want a juicy ass or rippling biceps. The practice can be fraught in a different way for men, who are told that maximal swoleness is their optimal form. The same activity can be a key or a cage, depending on your point of view. But weight lifting has stuck, for me and I think for Johnston, because it can also change the way one thinks about achievement. It serves as a pretty good metaphor for a balanced approach to striving that eschews both the Lean In –girlboss hustle and its ' I don't dream of labor ' anti-ambition backlash. Not running until your tank is empty and then running some more, but rather fueling yourself enough to push just a bit further than you have before. Letting the gains accumulate slowly, a little more weight at a time. And most important, learning that rest is part of the rhythm of progress. You punctuate your workouts with full days off. You do your reps, and then you just sit there for a couple of minutes. You work, and then you recover. While I'm resting, I often eat sour candies out of a fanny pack. I saw some powerlifters on Instagram eating candy before tackling a big lift—the idea being that the quick-metabolizing sugary carbs give you a little boost of energy. I don't care if this is scientifically sound. (I'm serious, don't email me.) I'm more excited to work out when I know that it's also my candy time. The gym has morphed from a torture chamber to a place of challenge, effort, rest, and pleasure, all of which, it turns out, can coexist. And failure is part of the mix, too. As Johnston writes, 'Building strength is about pressing steadily upward on one's current limits'; if you're doing it right, your attempts will sometimes exceed your ability. That's how you know you're challenging yourself enough. Sometimes failure involves gassing out on an attempt to squat heavier than you have ever squatted, and sometimes it's more like slipping on the banana peel of an old, unhealthy thought pattern. Both will knock you on your ass for a bit. But that's part of it. 'Progress could be about going backward, letting go,' Johnston writes. 'Before and after' images are only snapshots. Outside the frame, the body, and the self, keep evolving.
