Weight, what?

It took a while for me to learn to like lifting weights.  I think this might be true for a lot of people, so it might be worth looking into why.

 

For one thing, I had a lot of cultural bias to unpack.  Girls aren’t supposed to be sweaty and strong!  (Spoiler alert:  yes, yes they are, too!)  The cultural bias meant that I learned about weightlifting in a practical way later than people my age who identified as male.

 

This led to the second reason it was hard to learn to like weightlifting:  I was really bad at it.  I wasn’t bad at it because I lacked talent.  I lacked experience and practice.  I, like nearly everyone, like to do things I am good at more than things that I’m not good at.  Now that I have been lifting for a long time, it’s a lot more fun.

 

The experience/practice thing also played out as anxiety when I was first starting to lift weight.  The machines are big and scary and complicated.  There are people in the gym lifting monstrously large things.  What if I do it wrong?  What if people laugh at me?  Weightlifting, I am happy to say, is not rocket science.  A little common sense can keep any mistakes we make from being damaging.  And really, nobody in the gym is looking at us—they’re busy.

 

There are lots of ways to lift weights.  It took me some time to find the ways I preferred (for me, if I want to go light-ish, I like interval workouts, or I like to go heavy on two or three exercises and get out of there!).  I needed to figure out what to wear, how to deal with my hair, and what music was motivational.  Not every experiment is fun, but I learned.

 

The last piece, for me, was learning how weightlifting made me feel.  I like how my body works when I lift weight.  I like being able to schlepp my own stuff and open my own jars.  I’m never going to be a fast biker, but lifting has helped me be faster than I was.  (I’m glad that lifting is good for my bones and changes my body fat percentage and increases my metabolism, but none of those things makes it more fun for me—they’re just bonus points.)

 

So:  what makes weightlifting fun for YOU?