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BBC News
a day ago
- Sport
- BBC News
'I found gyms terrifying - now I'm a record holder'
Visiting new gyms was once a prospect Ella Brincat-Smith found "terrifying".The 19-year-old, who is autistic and also has ADHD, explained she "doesn't do new places", but decided to take up powerlifting to spend more time with her said she found a powerful community within the sport and she has progressed to such an extent she recently set a new British junior record after bench pressing 132.5kg (292lbs)."Through this sport I have met so many people and done things I never thought I would be able to do," said Ella. Ella, from Newark, Nottinghamshire, said she struggled with traditional sports but took up weightlifting five years ago because her father competed and coached."I have autism and ADHD so I don't do new places and I was really scared," she said."You need to go to new gyms and for me that was absolutely terrifying, but I feel like that through this sport I have met so many people and done things I never thought I would be able to do.""It's nice to be good at something," she added."It makes me so happy. You can have a bad day but then be good at this and it is 'Yes, I have achieved something, I'm happy now'."There's a really great community. You can't do this sport alone, you have to do it with other people."You see other people achieve as well as them helping you and everyone gives something back and I love that."She now trains three times a week, which, along with working as a nurse, has been "a challenge". 'Really transformative' But her dedication has brought rewards. Ella she recently set a new British record in the junior 84+ category when she bench pressed 132.5 kg (292lbs). She also came second at the World Equipped Bench Press Championships in Norway. Ella added: "I want to win as a junior girl at the world's, that would be amazing, but also to inspire more people to get involved in the sport."We need more junior females lifting and I feel that people won't realise how much they will enjoy it until they do it."Some girls are scared to start lifting because they think 'oh no I don't want to get big and bulky'."But once you start it is so fun!"Her father, James Brincat-Smith, described her progress as "mind blowing" and said he believes she has the ability to set new Jenni Sherwood added: "The change happens when you become confident, when you become excited about something, when you know you are good at something and just want to share it."I think that has been a really, really transformative thing for her."The family are all targeting taking part in the world championships next year, in the junior and masters Youth Sports Trust, is a charity which has campaigned about access for those with Oliver MBE, YST CEO, said: "Every child is unique and therefore there is no one-size-fits-all approach to engage them, but we know that with the right understanding and support, sport has the potential to be a powerful force for good. "It can help autistic young people to develop social connections and skills, increase their self-confidence, and support their emotional wellbeing, with lifelong benefits."
New York Times
26-05-2025
- Health
- New York Times
Jan Todd May Be the Reason You're Lifting Weights
On a foggy day in the summer of 1979, Jan Todd pulled on a navy tracksuit and combed her long blond hair, letting it hang loose down her back. She had flown to Scotland to attempt to lift a massive set of boulders known as the Dinnie Stones, each outfitted with an iron ring. In the 120 years since a Scottish strongman famously hoisted the stones, thousands had tried and failed the test of strength. Of the 11 who had succeeded, all were men. She was 5-foot-7 and 195 pounds; the stones together weighed 733 pounds. As she approached the boulders outside a 240-year-old inn, a crowd gathered. Finding the right stance was challenging, but eventually she straddled the rocks, adjusted her hand straps for a better grip, clasped the rings and pulled. One creaked off the ground but the other held firm. She felt her face flush. Then she reminded herself why she wanted to lift them: to show herself, and the world, that a woman could. She bent her knees, took a deep breath and yanked one boulder off the ground, then the other. The feat wouldn't be replicated by another woman until 2018. In the ensuing decades, Jan Todd went on to shatter powerlifting records, earn a Ph.D. devoted to the history of strength and exercise, create a doctoral program, launch an academic journal and open the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center, a sprawling museum, library and archive dedicated to the pursuit of physical potential. Collectively, through relentless force of will, she helped to transform strength training from a fringe activity into the cornerstone of healthy living that it is today, particularly among women. 'I do think that I have helped make it possible for more women to understand that it is actually OK to be strong, it's OK to have muscles,' Dr. Todd, now 73, said while giving me a tour of her museum on the fifth floor of the University of Texas at Austin football stadium. She had greeted me in the museum's lobby alongside a 10-and-a-half-foot replica of the ancient statue of Farnese Hercules, with its rippled abs and huge quadriceps. Wearing a billowy floral blouse and large hexagonal glasses, Dr. Todd walked with a pronounced limp and gave the impression of a proud den mother. She guided me through the museum's galleries and backrooms, all shrines to strength. The rooms were filled with artifacts of strongmen and strongwomen throughout history, including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Josephine Blatt, a turn-of-the-century weight lifter known as Minerva. The center holds more than 40,000 books, and in a back corner there's a chunky early 20th-century dumbbell ('almost unliftable,' Dr. Todd said) next to a Shake Weight. 'I need to save them,' she said of the artifacts around her. If not, she added, 'maybe nobody else will.' Once a sideshow oddity, weight lifting has seen a surge in popularity since the late 1980s, with strength training now more popular than cardio, according to some reports. Everyone today, from pregnant women to older adults with arthritic knees, is encouraged to build muscle, thanks in part to people like Dr. Todd and her students. 'Jan Todd is a legend in the world of strength,' wrote Mr. Schwarzenegger, who has known and collaborated with her for decades, in an email. 'She's a pioneer who led the way for strongwomen all over the world. She's studied it more than anyone I know, and she's also lived it.' Once known as 'the world's strongest woman,' Dr. Todd once bent bottle caps with her fingers, lifted her Ford Fiesta for fun and drove nails through wooden boards with her palms. But greater feats were still to come. Learning to flex Growing up in Western Pennsylvania, Dr. Todd, then Janice Suffolk, wasn't encouraged to flex her muscles, physically or intellectually. Her family was poor, without an indoor bathroom for a while, and her father, a steel mill worker, didn't see the point in educating women. And neither was he a fan of girls playing sports. Janice was always bigger than her friends, wider and sturdier, 'like a larger species of the same animal,' she told me. More like a 'Clydesdale than a thoroughbred,' she said. After her parents divorced, her mother encouraged Janice to join the high school swim team, but she felt ashamed when she couldn't fit into the required swimsuit. 'I didn't have any appreciation yet that the bigness of my body,' she said, would 'make it possible for me to be who I became.' As a college student at Mercer University in Macon, Ga., she met Terry Todd, a 6-foot-2 national powerlifting champion and a professor there. Terry fell in love with Jan when he saw her flip a massive log at a barbecue. 'She was a natural force. Mount Rushmore,' he told Sports Illustrated in 1977. 'There was something about the way she stepped up to that log and lifted it,' he later told People. 'No giggling, no false modesty.' According to family lore, when he told his grandmother about Jan, he opened with: 'You know, she is perfectly leveraged for the squat.' They married and Terry encouraged her to start weight lifting and then powerlifting. She was a natural. One day at the grocery store, she picked up a giant watermelon and was surprised to discover that it felt light. She began to see her strength, even her size, as an asset. 'If the watermelon is not heavy, the dog food bag is not heavy and your grocery bags aren't heavy,' she said, 'you begin to realize that so many things in your life are easier.' Still, she had few role models for what a physically strong woman could look like. After all, even Wonder Woman's muscles were relatively small. Around this time, Terry told her about a storied early-20th-century strongwoman, Katie Sandwina, also known as Lady Hercules. A star of the Barnum and Bailey circus, she was nearly six feet tall, more than 200 pounds and billed as the world's strongest and most beautiful woman. Jan was captivated. It was a whole new model of womanhood. She began looking into the histories of other strongwomen, with names like Vulcana, Athleta, and 'Pudgy.' She found that understanding the people who came before helped her embrace her own power. 'It was reassuring to me,' she said. In the mid-1970s, the couple moved to a farm in Nova Scotia, where Jan taught high school English by day and trained by night. She kept a set of barbells in the back of her classroom. Throughout this time, Dr. Todd set more than 60 national and world records and was profiled by Sports Illustrated in 1977. Coaches around the country began tearing out the article and posting it in girls' locker rooms as inspiration. Johnny Carson invited her onto 'The Tonight Show,' where she deadlifted 415 pounds for an audience of 14 million viewers. The pursuit of power In the early 1980s, Jan and Terry moved to Austin, and Jan got a job at the University of Texas teaching weight lifting and coaching the school's powerlifting teams. She realized that few people studied the history of sports, let alone strength training, and that most exercise physiologists focused on aerobic activities, like running and cycling. So she started a Ph.D. in American studies, crafting her coursework around the history of muscle and exercise, particularly among women, and became an outspoken promoter of strength. It wasn't easy. Around the department, she often felt eyes on her biceps. It seemed you could be a meathead or an egghead, but you couldn't be both. Her degree was delayed more than a year when the department chair decided that, despite her excellent grades, her work in the women's studies wasn't serious enough. 'I don't think I could ever be anybody for him other than the weight lifting lady,' she said. She kept pushing. She co-wrote the first scientific guidelines on strength training for women, helping to dispel fears about its potential danger to women's bodies. She and Terry created the first academic journal dedicated to the history of strength sports and exercise — Iron Game History — in 1990. It gave strength scholars a place to publish, and Dr. Todd still edits the journal today. In it, she has documented dozens of strongwomen lost to history — women who hoisted cannons, twirled their husbands like a rifle or lifted two men with one arm. Longtime colleagues say Dr. Todd is unrelenting, building up the people around her and lifting her field and students — many who have become leading exercise scientists, health researchers and historians. 'Jan is a really good — I won't call it a pusher, I'll call it a masher,' said Kyle Martin, a longtime colleague and curator of her museum. She is constantly mashing together people, sources and ideas, he said. Pumping the iron game Not long after they moved to Texas, Jan and Terry started trying to have children. Getting pregnant was taking longer than Dr. Todd had hoped, and in her darker moments, she wondered if the fearmongers who said lifting could wreck a woman's fertility were right. Then at 36, not long after learning that her degree would be delayed, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and was told she had less than a 25 percent chance of survival. Driving back from a doctor's appointment, Terry turned to her and asked: 'When have you not been in the top 25 percent of anything?' What followed was surgery and treatments and moments when she struggled to get out of bed (though she kept lifting). Throughout the ordeal, she called on the same drive she used as an athlete. She eventually beat the cancer, but she would never be able to have children. So she got back to work. For years, Jan and Terry had filled rooms of their home with strength memorabilia and artifacts they had collected, convinced that they might someday be of interest to scholars. The Todds knew that researchers depend on historical objects, photographs and texts. The couple threw their energy into creating a museum. 'I'm not going to have children,' she remembers thinking at the time. 'If there is a legacy for me or for Terry, for both of us hopefully, it's going to be this place.' In 2008, after decades of petitioning, lobbying and fund-raising, they opened the Stark Center in a 27,500-square-foot space inside the stadium. There are posters of Katie Sandwina, the circus strongwoman, photos of the Muscle Beach star Pudgy Stockton (one of Dr. Todd's mentors) and of Mr. Schwarzenegger posing on the cover of Iron Man magazine. There's also the four decade backlist of Shape magazine, the first dedicated to women's fitness. 'I remember clearly seeing the very first volume,' she said while thumbing though a copy. The cover featured Miss Universe in a purple catsuit promising to help readers 'bodysculpt.' 'That was a big thing.' Strong like Jan In 2018, Terry died. Then, five years ago, on her 68th birthday, Dr. Todd went for an evening drive with friends in their off-road vehicle. Suddenly, a couple wild boars darted in front of them. Her friend slammed the brakes and the vehicle skidded into a ditch, then flipped. Dr. Todd, a woman who had lifted countless cars, was trapped under one for more than an hour. The accident shattered her ribs, wrist, ankle bones and a hip but didn't damage any organs. Doctors told her that her muscles might have protected her from more serious injury, even saving her life. She moves differently since the accident — 'like a drunken penguin,' she told me, as she sipped a Diet Coke from a large tumbler with the words 'DON'T WEAKEN.' We sat in lounge chairs on her back patio, as her two 150-pound bull mastiffs played by her feet. Nowadays she lifts less, likes to garden and travels to Scotland most summers to watch others try to lift the Dinnie Stones. Dr. Todd is also finally getting wider attention for her academic work, which is featured in two new books about the science and history of weight lifting. In them she is portrayed as an almost mythic figure. 'Nobody has integrated the greatest powers of muscle and the greatest powers of mind in athletics and academics as seamlessly as she has,' said Michael Joseph Gross, author of 'Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives.' Near the end of our interviews, Dr. Todd brought me into her garage, which is bursting with overflow from the Stark Center; shelves of artifacts and keepsakes from her own life and the history of strength training. She opened boxes at random to show me medals, log books, posters, hundreds of photos and an archive documenting decades of Dinnie Stone lifts. We eventually arrived at her rack of weights, unceremoniously squeezed into a back corner. She hasn't used them much since her accident, she said. She greeted them quietly, like a relic from her own history. But she seemed OK with this. 'Even as broken down as I am,' she said, 'I can still pick up the 50-pound bag of dog food and pour it in the bowl and not have to worry too much about that. And I can carry in my firewood.' And she can still bend bottle caps with her bare hands.
Times
22-05-2025
- Times
Powerlifting blogger secures pupillage after 52 applications
A powerlifting legal blogger who is renowned for his online summaries of public law cases has finally been offered a pupillage place in chambers. It took four years of disappointment and 52 applications for Gabriel Tan to be offered a pupillage — the one-year barristers' training requirement — at Matrix Chambers. Tan, 30, will start the pupillage in October next year. He built momentum on 'legal Twitter', a network of social media profiles on X that are united by a love of pedantry about the law, where he posts as @finishedloading. Tan says the network, in which law students discuss topical legal matters with eminent silks, was 'massively' encouraging. He recalls that he became so prolific on the platform that at one stage he
BBC News
19-05-2025
- Health
- BBC News
Zumba instructor says exercise helped her cope with life events
A woman has described how exercise helped her cope in the aftermath of two major life Cromwell, from Langley, Slough, first started going to the gym after her baby was stillborn, with support from the fitness community helping her talk about what had years later, she then discovered Zumba as a way of coping with the "silence" after the death of her husband of 30 she is a qualified fitness instructor and is hosting a Zumba event on 21 June, with the hope of helping others. Ms Cromwell said her fitness went "downhill" following the stillbirth of her described how she would take her children to sports training every week, but she would just "sit in the stands" - until one day when she walked into the leisure centre and saw a boot camp going on."In my head, I thought 'I can do better'," she joined the class the following week, marking the start of her fitness started crossfit and then began lifting weights, progressing to national, and then international, competitions."I had strength that I didn't know I had," she said with support from the community she was gradually able to start talking about her stillbirth. 'My best friend is gone' But then, just after lockdown, her husband was diagnosed with colon cancer and told he had six months to begin with, she said she "pushed herself" in her final powerlifting competition because she knew it would be the last one her husband was able to made lifestyle changes for both her and her husband to maximise the time they had left when he died in January 2023, she went downhill again."My best friend is gone," she said. "For days I wasn't eating, for days I wasn't taking a shower."But then, one day, her daughter said something that changed her life."She was like 'I'm not going to lose you the way I lost dad'," she said."That was a wake up call for me." Ms Cromwell started going to the gym again, but she said it was still hard to return to the "silence" of the house afterwards - but then she walked past a Zumba class and heard the music "banging".She went to the class the following week, planning to "hide" at the back."But the music just hit something in me," she said."I shut the world off and I just started to express myself through that movement."Now, she is a Zumba instructor and is preparing to host an event celebrating "global music, movement and healing" at Slough & Langley College."We're a community to uplift each other," she said."Just come and have fun." If you have been affected by the issues raised in this article, the BBC's Action Line has details of advice and support services. You can follow BBC Berkshire on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.
The Sun
18-05-2025
- Sport
- The Sun
Who is Andrew Flynn? Meet the powerlifter competing in World's Strongest Man 2025
BRITISH strongman and powerlifter Andrew Flynn is making his debut at World's Strongest Man 2025. The qualifying round of the competition in Sacramento, California kicked off on May 15 — here's everything you need to know. 1 Who is Andrew Flynn? Andrew Flynn was born on April 12, 1992 and stands at 6ft 2in tall, weighing approximately 138–142kg. He hails from Lancing and currently lives in Peacehaven, both in East Sussex. Andrew balances his strongman career with his day job in materials control at Southern Railway. He began competing at the national level in 2021, initially placing seventh in the UK's Strongest Man. Over the next few years, he consistently improved, achieving fourth place in 2023, third in 2024 and 2025 at the same event, securing qualification for the World's Strongest Man. At Britain's Strongest Man 2025, he excelled in the medley, winning the event, placed second in the log lift, and also finished fourth in the Atlas Stones. He has also competed in Europe's Strongest Man and the Giants Live Strongman Classic, regularly placing in the top half of the field. Family man Andrew is a devoted family man, balancing his demanding strongman career with his responsibilities as a husband and father of two. He often credits his family as his greatest motivation, emphasising how their support and encouragement have fuelled his journey to the top of the strongman world. Despite the rigorous demands of training and competition, he prioritises spending quality time with his loved ones. Shock moment ex-World's Strongest Man & MMA fighter Eddie Hall chases driver screaming 'I'll rip your f***ing head off' Unconventional training Andrew's training approach is a bit different to most competitors — he trains four times a week in his garden. His sessions are intense, often lasting longer than three hours after a full day's work. Nutrition is a critical part of Andrew's regimen — he consumes between 5,200 and 8,000 calories daily, with a diet rich in protein, carbohydrates and fats. His everyday meals are substantial, with large portions of meat, vegetables and complex carbohydrates, reflecting the immense energy requirements of elite strongman athletes. Overcoming injury Andrew overcame a significant bicep injury early in his career, which sidelined him from major competitions. It's still odd. Especially now when you're meeting World's Strongest Man finalists and then I'm there like 'hi'. It's easy to put people on a pedestal and think people are larger than life Andrew Flynn But it also ultimately fuelled his determination to return stronger. Known as the 'Flying Flynn' in the strongman community, his resilience and work ethic have earned him a reputation as an underdog who consistently exceeds expectations. Andrew said: 'My nickname in strongman is Flying Flynn. When I first started, I'd been playing rugby, so I was a lot lighter, a lot more mobile. "I've still got that speed there, so I've always been good at the moving events. I don't really feel pain if I'm doing an event like that.' 2025 World's Strongest Man Andrew's debut at World's Strongest Man 2025 marks a significant milestone in his career. As he explained: 'It's still odd. Especially now when you're meeting World's Strongest Man finalists and then I'm there like 'hi'. It's easy to put people on a pedestal and think people are larger than life. "On one hand, it's hard to tell people it's attainable because it's obviously very hard to get to that level and it's taken me ten years to do it, but they're human as well. "It's about taking the veil down really. You understand the hard work that everyone's put in." He'll be facing off against the biggest names in the game, including ' Strongest Brothers in the World ' Luke and Tom Stoltman, ads well as newcomers including
