Latest news with #strength
CTV News
a day ago
- Health
- CTV News
Sask. researchers evaluate effects of breast reconstruction surgery on cancer survivors
WATCH: Researchers in Saskatchewan are studying the impacts of reconstruction surgery for breast cancer patients, and how it impacts their strength and mobility later in life.
Fox News
4 days ago
- Health
- Fox News
Doctor gets to the 'meat' of a long and healthy life
Dr. Gabrielle Lyon is on a mission to bring attention to the importance of strength. The "health of skeletal muscle" is the "focal point" of health and wellness, Dr. Lyon said during an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital. Dr. Lyon is a board-certified physician and bestselling author of "Forever Strong," and she promotes the importance of a high-protein diet and resistance training through social media and on her podcast, "The Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Show." Dr. Lyon is a fellowship-trained physician, and did additional education on nutrition when she completed a post-doc at Washington University in Saint Louis, "a combined nutritional science with geriatric training." Dr. Lyon explained that she was frustrated with the misinformation online, especially around protein, which sparked her mission. "I opened up my Instagram and there were individuals talking about how red meat was causing cancer and killing the planet. And as someone who has studied protein metabolism for years and also worked as a physician at the bedside of individuals and in nursing homes, I knew that the message that they were giving was... It's a matter of life or death." As a result, she felt a "responsibility" to start her medical podcast, "The Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Show," where she discusses a variety of health topics with experts. "My desire is to have transparent conversations with world-class experts. Who are actually doing the job of moving the science. They are not influencers. They are qualified professionals and that's what we need to hear more of," Dr. Lyon said. Dr. Lyon argued that there is a "global mistrust" of healthcare providers and science, and she hopes to improve that through the conversations she has on her podcast. "We have to bring it back to the science," Dr. Lyon said of the importance of having experts on her show. "Here are a lot of good scientists and there is a lot of good science. People just have to learn how to integrate that and understand it." Dr. Lyon believes strength is the key to longevity. "If you want to live long, be strong. If you want to die early, plan on being weak," she said. Dr. Lyon describes muscle as "the organ of longevity," and to maintain muscle, it must be trained through resistance training. "We don't have an obesity problem. What we really have is a muscle problem," Dr. Lyon claimed. Additionally, she said that muscle is not a luxury but rather a responsibility, and concluded that the way we age is "up to us." How to improve your chances of living to 100? The secret is being strong, according to Dr. Lyon. "Weakness kills," she said. "Both physical and mental weakness." Dr. Lyon will be on Fox & Friends on Tuesday at 6:50 am ET.
The Guardian
25-05-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
‘If dieting works, where's the evidence?' How weightlifting helped Casey Johnston love her body again
Before Casey Johnston started weightlifting, she had assumed it was the preserve of 'people who already had some sort of talent or need for it – like you're a football player, a firefighter or in the military, and you need to be physically capable in that specific way'. Getting started seemed intimidating: the technique, the gym environment. Cardio, however, had always felt intuitive. 'You go out the door and you run until you can't run any more, and that's it,' she says. As was the idea that it should be punishing. As a younger woman always obsessively trying to lose weight, she ran half-marathons in sub-zero temperatures and feared eating even the calories burned by any run in case it 'undid' her hard work – never mind how cold her extremities and faint her head. After years on the exertion/deprivation treadmill, Johnston felt like a failure: 'Like I'm doing this wrong, or my body is especially difficult to wrangle.' But as a science fiend and engineering graduate, something had started to smell off about the eternal glittering promise of diet and exercise. 'If dieting works, where's the evidence? That was a bit of a watershed moment for me. We're all so used to taking out a lot of guilt [on ourselves] like, I'm not doing it right.' Then, in 2014, Johnston came across a Reddit post by a woman sharing how weightlifting had changed her life: that she felt strong – despite 'only' doing five reps each of a few movements per gym session – and rested heaps and ate tons. Johnston was doubtful but, sick of the relentless misery of endless runs, found her local spit-and-sawdust gym and had a go. Hunger overwhelmed her: how much she immediately needed to eat to replenish her energy and repair her muscles, and how excited she was to do it all again. 'I really did feel different very quickly,' she says. Johnston, who's now 38 and lives in Los Angeles, is my equivalent of her Reddit woman. I also started lifting around then, so badly that I soon slipped a disc from rubbish form. When Johnston started writing a column in 2016, for a now defunct website called the Hairpin, she was the font of good sense I needed, not just about technique, but also the importance of eating 'like a big beautiful horse', of disregarding wellness bullshit, self-punishment and pointless gym machines that only target one muscle at a time. She had a captivatingly funny, no-more-nonsense approach and a talent for accessibly interpreting scientific research. (Her canonical investigation on running without a sports bra convinced me to ditch mine, and I've never looked back.) Like many women who grew up in the 2000s, I'd had a purely poisonous relationship with my body since childhood: I have tried every restriction, had a destructive relationship with the MyFitnessPal food-monitoring app, exercised through injury. No one has had a more positive impact on that relationship than Johnston. So I feel a bit starstruck when she appears on my screen from her home office. In 2021 Johnston's columns became a twice-weekly email newsletter, She's a Beast. She self-published Liftoff, a pdf intro to lifting. Now her first proper book, A Physical Education, is a memoir of how lifting undid a lifetime not just of restrictive diet and exercise, but of her tendency towards self-diminishment from growing up with an alcoholic father and a mother who prized thinness: 'Handling all these weights had taught me to know when I was handling too much,' she writes. Having read her authoritative, disruptive work for years, I was surprised to learn of her self-doubt, and that she had felt confident to start writing about her discoveries in spite of it. 'I developed this compulsion to tell everyone about this thing I had found that changed so fast how I saw myself,' she says. 'That working out could be totally different from how everyone talked about it as this horrible chore. While I was not super-confident in myself, I was very confident in the process.' Johnston grew up in upstate New York, and studied at Columbia University. She graduated in 2010, into the recession. She couldn't get an engineering job and wound up in the media, writing about technology. Her affinity with 'knowing how everything actually works' prompted her to investigate the mechanics behind the muscle. 'There is so much beautiful science here that is not leveraged at all,' she says. 'I felt like everything I'd heard [about my body] was about shame and guilt and reinforced the mystery of this destructive relationship. When I found out there could be something different, I was like, I gotta understand how all of this works.' The most immediate discovery was that the cravings Johnston had always thought were normal – and normal to suppress – disappeared once she started eating 50% more to fuel her workouts and recovery. 'I could spend an entire day thinking: I want cookies, or I can't have cookies. When can I have cookies? How will I acquire them? Which cookies will I get?' she says. 'I thought that was a normal part of being an adult, to deny your cravings as a way of managing your weight, only to find out that it was a medical symptom of being malnourished from dieting for too long, and not even in a way that's putting you on death's door. There's this middle ground where you're substantially mentally and emotionally affected – rigid about rules, hyper-vigilant. Once I started eating more, those things went away without me having to be on my toes all the time. Everything about my mental state changed.' Johnston's writing about the relative peace to be found in weightlifting hits hard because it was so hard won. In one painful chapter, she tries to introduce it to her mum, a 'staunch exerciser' and 'dedicated dieter'. She is resistant, especially to eating more than her minuscule calorific intake: 'No one likes fat old women.' Johnston tells her there are plenty of fat old women that people love. Her mum replies: 'But they wouldn't love me.' Even in the face of hard evidence to the contrary, it's easy to perceive your unruly body as the exception to healthier approaches: that you alone must overexercise and undereat to avoid some perceived disaster. Johnston has been there. 'When I was at a certain point with dieting, and I wanted to do whatever it takes to be not even hot, but physically acceptable, I didn't care what anyone said I should or shouldn't do,' she says. 'As a woman, I felt that people judged my appearance before anything else, and I didn't want that to be the main, valuable thing about myself. To get credit for anything else, I had to manage that first. So I completely understand this mentality of not feeling like you can trust anyone to appreciate you if you don't manage your appearance. All we can do is help people understand they are worth caring for, which I didn't understand about myself for a long time. I had no foundation other than suffering in this way, because that was my mom's relationship to herself. It's not a moral failing to struggle with this stuff, because so many of us do.' In a culture that remains fixated on women's bodies, it's barely possible not to. For a heartbeat around the turn of the 2020s, it looked as though strong might replace skinny as the new ideal; that body positivity or at least neutrality might become the norm. Then GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro swept in and once-buff celebs reverted to waif-like type, and denied that the drugs had anything to do with it. Will the body ideal always arc back towards skinniness? 'If you look back through history, our aesthetic ideals have oscillated a lot,' says Johnston. 'And a lot of times, tellingly, things switch up as soon as everyone gets comfortable or has stuff figured out.' The democratisation of strength training via Instagram and YouTube showed Johnston how happy thousands of people were eschewing thinness as an ideal: 'They just didn't, and still don't, get the same visibility as the people who sow shame and guilt.' And she's sceptical about appetite-suppressing drugs. 'We have yet to see any pharmaceutical or medical 'weight-loss' method reliably bear out as effective, sustainable and lasting. I will be surprised if GLP-1s are the exception.' A Physical Education is a manifesto for learning to reconnect brain and body, to reclaim that relationship from the billion-dollar diet industry that profits from breaking it, keeping us hungry and insecure. 'Lifting was constructive for me because of the atomic unit of it,' says Johnston. 'You're doing a rep or a set, you pause and go, how did that feel? Was that too heavy? Too light? How was my form? The practice of noticing how I felt was something I never had before, and learning to do that within lifting radiated outward into the rest of my life.' Writing the book allowed Johnston to examine why it's so easy to lose body awareness to external forces. 'The stew of our upbringings and cultural messaging can be very overwhelming, and the feedback loops between them are very difficult to see and challenge,' she says. 'It requires having, or building, an immense amount of trust in yourself and in people who actually love and appreciate you, which is exactly what those forces work to destroy. But they wouldn't be working to destroy it if it weren't an immensely powerful thing to have. If there is anything that animates me, it's defiance, so the idea that I'm taking something that many forces don't want me to have only inspires me to fight harder.' Johnston's newsletter readers witnessed her defiance recently when she wrote about weightlifting through her first pregnancy, something women have historically been – incorrectly – uniformly advised against. 'As someone who enjoys bullshit detection, cannot stand being talked down to and generally enjoys being angry and indignant, pregnancy is acres of rich, fertile soil to till,' she wrote at the outset. Her son is now five months old. 'I heard from readers on both ends of the spectrum,' she says. ''Good for you that you're lifting', and others who are like, 'You're actively killing your baby.' I was excited to write about it and assert my experience, for people to know that I'm not speaking to this in an abstract way.' Johnston's work feels to me of a piece with Miranda July's All Fours (her protagonist also takes up weightlifting) and Lucy Jones's radical book on pregnancy and motherhood, Matrescence – startling prompts that have allowed many women to escape traditional gender scripts. At the same time, particularly in the US, there's growing traditionalism around gender and aesthetic norms. It's a striking schism. Johnston makes sense of it by not trying to make sense of it. 'You don't need everyone to be doing the same thing for you to be doing what's right for you,' she says firmly. 'So many people suffer for wanting coherence from these disparate groups who are never going to want the same things, but we're still looking outward for the right answer. That answer is actually to look ye inward. I really suffered for needing to make sense of what everyone is telling me and apply it all, without regard for myself. What I really needed was to develop that regard.' Johnston's regard is powerful, and radiates outward. In A Physical Education, she writes about the importance of rest and that limits aren't 'something to be ashamed of': her evangelism convinced me that I was still wildly overexercising – often 10 times a week – and prompted me to seriously pare back. She never does sponsored content and barely does social media – practically terminal for 'building a brand'. After decades of having my brain scrambled by body positivity, Kayla Itsines and protein mania, Johnston's work feels reassuringly steady, sound – and on your side. 'There's a lot of opportunities to pivot into courting virality,' she says. 'But I understand the much less quantifiable if not more important aspect of feeling like you can trust somebody. I have built credibility by continuing to stay in this lane and say what I'm saying. I think my sheer stubbornness has won people over.' A Physical Education is published by Grand Central on 29 May.
Fast Company
25-05-2025
- Health
- Fast Company
This lesson I learned in the Marines will help you succeed at work
BY 'Embrace the suck.' One of the first things you learn as a Marine is to 'embrace the suck.' Not because it sounds tough—but because it's how strength is forged. In today's world, where ease is glorified, we need to remember this truth: real strength comes from struggle. Before I became a leadership coach and positive psychology expert, I was a United States Marine Corps officer. I learned quickly that discomfort isn't a barrier to success—it's the path to it. And that truth still guides everything I do. You don't build strength by avoiding discomfort. You build it by seeking it. We live in a world where ease is glorified—but that pursuit is costing us our edge. Discomfort might feel inconvenient in the moment, but it's the only thing that builds real confidence, grit, and growth. Earning the Title of United States Marine At 18, I flew from Minnesota to San Diego to begin Naval ROTC—excited, nervous, and wearing an outfit I thought would impress: hot pink polka-dot shorts, matching pumps, and a fresh manicure. Within hours, a senior candidate looked me over and said: 'You'll never make it as a Marine.' Part of me believed him. I struggled. I couldn't keep up on the runs. I felt out of place. The only other female candidate quit. I was alone—and barely hanging on. But I didn't quit. I showed up, failed, kept going. And three years later, I graduated from Officer Candidate School as my university's top finisher. That experience taught me something that's more relevant today than ever—especially in a world of uncertainty, pressure, and burnout: seek discomfort day after day, and it will transform you. You don't feel strong at the start. But with each mile, each decision, and each refusal to quit—you build it. That's what grit looks like. And eventually, it changes who you are. What the Science Says About Discomfort Positive psychology research backs this up. Studies show that well-being doesn't come from avoiding struggle—but from pursuing meaning, engagement, and accomplishment, all of which require effort and discomfort. Research also confirms that grit—not talent—is what sets high achievers apart. And neuroscience reveals that repeated effort under challenge helps the brain adapt and grow stronger. The Marine Corps taught me that long before I had the science to prove it. Everyday Acts of Discomfort You don't need a battlefield to build strength. Some of the most powerful moments of growth happen in everyday life: Telling the truth when silence feels safer Asking for help when you'd rather pretend you've got it handled Speaking up when your heart is pounding Applying for that stretch assignment even though it's scary These aren't dramatic, but they are defining. They might not earn you medals—but they build something more important: A life you respect. A mind that doesn't fold under pressure. The kind of grit that's becoming far too rare. Each time you lean into discomfort instead of away from it, you expand what you believe you're capable of. You sharpen your edge. You build mental muscle. The Power of Reps Marines don't build confidence from motivational speeches. We build it through reps. Cold. Muddy. Repetitive. Uncomfortable. But that's exactly the point: strength isn't forged in a single defining moment. It's built through small, repeated acts—day after day, rep after rep. It's just like building a muscle. You don't get stronger by doing what's easy. You get stronger by lifting a little more weight, pushing through one more rep, and showing up when it would be easier not to. If you can't do something today, that doesn't mean you never will. It just means you haven't put in enough reps—yet. Each time you choose discomfort instead of ease, you're training your mind like you'd train your body. That's how growth works—physically, mentally, and emotionally. This is what Marines mean when we say, 'Embrace the suck.' You don't avoid the hard stuff. You face it, over and over again—until one day, what used to feel impossible starts to feel like strength. That's also what grit is. Psychologist Angela Duckworth defines grit as 'passion and perseverance for long-term goals.' Not talent. Not luck. Just the ability to keep going—especially when it's hard, especially when it's slow. And that's good news. Because it means anyone can build it. You just have to do the reps. Four Ways to Start Building Strength Today Choose a Meaningful Challenge: What's one uncomfortable thing you've been avoiding—but know could lead to something great? Don't wait for fear to vanish. Let it guide you. Start Small, Start Now: Don't wait until you feel ready. Take one action today—send the email, speak up, take the first step. Confidence grows from action. Expect Discomfort: Growth comes with struggle. When it feels hard, that's not failure—it's progress. That discomfort is where strength is built. Celebrate the Effort: Don't wait for a finish line to feel proud. Acknowledge your consistency and courage. Most people stop when it's hard. You won't. A Final Thought The Marine Corps taught me to run toward the hard things—not because I was fearless, but because growth lives on the other side of challenge. So the next time you're tempted to take the easy route, ask yourself: Is this my rep today? Is this where I get stronger? If the answer is yes—lean in. Do the hard thing.
Daily Mail
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Award-winning Aussie footy star Maddison Levi reveals why she took the brave step of baring all in a nude photo shoot
Australian rugby sevens sensation Maddison Levi has revealed the powerful motivation behind a striking nude photo shoot that stunned fans and celebrated the strength of elite female athletes. The 22-year-old, one of the country's most decorated and dynamic rugby players, posted three images to Instagram. They include a tasteful full-body nude portrait captured in black and white. It's a bold move from an athlete best known for her record-breaking performances on the rugby field, but Levi says this shoot was about far more than the aesthetic. In the caption accompanying the post, she wrote: 'Unreleased but something I can't wait to share with you guys. 'I took part in a shoot with @circlezeroeight to showcase how strong our bodies have to be as athletes to carry us through triumphs, tackles and everything in between. She took part in a nude photo shoot for UK magazine CircleZeroEight to show the strength female athletes need to make it a the top level 'A little out of my comfort zone but could not be more proud of the results.' She ended the post with a simple message to her fans: 'Can't wait to show you all the full story soon.' The photo shoot was created in partnership with CircleZeroEight, a UK-based multimedia platform that blends sport with style and culture. Founded in 2021 by former GQ Style editor Elgar Johnson, the platform aims to inspire and educate through stories that highlight the global influence of sport and the physical and mental strength behind athletic success. Levi's post quickly drew praise from across the sporting world. Brisbane Broncos NRLW star Bridget Hoy commented: 'I'm speechless! What a strong woman.' Australian boxer Kate McLaren added: 'This is so powerful! Amazing work Sis x' Followers flooded the post with messages of praise. Levi posing with the World Rugby Women's Sevens Player of the Year trophy that she won in 2024 'What a body! I love this kind of athlete photo and you are magnificent!' wrote one. Another posted: 'What real, strong, talented women look like.' 'You're absolutely incredible,' another added. Born on the Gold Coast in 2002, Levi first made her name playing for the Gold Coast Suns in the AFLW before switching codes to pursue rugby sevens. She made her Olympic debut in Tokyo in 2021 and never looked back. Her breakout came in the 2023–24 World Rugby Sevens Series, where she scored a record 69 tries - the highest total ever in a single season. That performance earned her the 2024 World Rugby Women's Sevens Player of the Year award. She also became the fastest Australian woman to score 100 career tries in the series, doing so in just 15 events. At the 2024 Paris Olympics, she broke the Australian record for most tries in a single Games with 14. Though Australia fell short of a medal, Levi's impact was undeniable. In March 2025, she overtook Charlotte Caslick to become Australia's all-time leading women's sevens try-scorer, with over 200 tries. Despite growing interest from other sporting codes, including the NRLW, Levi has pledged her loyalty to rugby sevens.
