In Praise of Moving Weight

you rest the weight on your body & then you push it away

Winter makes me want to move weight. This past week has brought a string of snow days, sleet days, cancelled travel, cancelled drives to the Berkshires for boxing training. There’s a good strength gym down the street from my house, and I can get there in pretty much any weather. So I’ve been doing a little more lifting than usual and was reminded of how good it could feel to throw some weight on a bar and fly.

[just look at all this winter]

Lifting heavy is a fairly recent development for me (last couple of years), though I’d been trying to get strong for a long time before that. I can remember my old boxing coach in Florida telling me, at a certain point, that my technique had improved but there was nothing behind the punches. Translation: you’re kind of a weakling and you need to build strength. So I turned to what I knew: light dumbbells, bodyweight exercises. I realized I’d never gotten any meaningful instruction in how to get stronger. I had never learned how to pick up a barbell or clip weights or adjust a j-hook or swing a kettlebell. Possibly because I grew up in the nineties, when a good part of the culture was pickled in the heroin chic aesthetic and I had been socialized to take up as little space as possible. I called upon dim memories of doing Tracy Anderson workout videos where you danced around with tiny dumbbells (this was supposed to make a person become “toned”), but I was pretty sure Tracy Anderson was not what my coach had in mind.

In my last year in Florida, a new strength training gym opened up in my neighborhood and I decided to give it a go. At one class, I picked up a pair of tens for floor presses, which were promptly snatched from my hands by the coach. “Here,” he said. “Try these.” He handed me a pair of twenties which looked enormous. “I don’t think I can lift these,” I said. “I’m pretty sure you can,” the coach said. “And if not we’ll lower the weight.” He showed me how to position the weights and how to control my breath. The last few reps burned like hell, but I was able to do the sets. Apparently I could move more weight than I thought.

A lot has been written about the psychological component of moving weight, of literally resting a heavy weight on your body and then pushing it away. There is a lightness that comes with that pushing away. A relief. I felt a little panicked the first time I front-racked a barbell with some weight on it. I could feel the heaviness on my chest. I did not like that feeling. I had to remind myself to breathe and then to push that heaviness away. Or to figure out how to carry it. Or to move it to another place.

One thing that’s really satisfying about lifting is the prospect of steady progress. My growth as a fighter always feels more slippery: the triumph of a good sparring day; the setback of a bad sparring day; periods of stasis; sudden attacks of nerves; a win; a loss; breakthroughs that arrive in unexpected moments. With my lifts, though, the progression has felt a little clearer. Before long those twenties were twenty-fives and then they were thirties. You can see the numbers tick up.

[somewhere at the very start of my strength training journey]

When I moved to New York, I got more into barbell work and Olympic lifting. I appreciate how technical this kind of lifting is. As with boxing the smallest things–the position of your hands on the bar, the width of your feet, where you place your gaze–can make an enormous difference. For a while I worked with a PVC and then an empty bar as I got a feel for how to clean and snatch. [note: I would have surely killed myself trying to learn barbell snatches without a skilled coach–good instruction is key!]

With Olympic lifting a lot of different micro-movements have to pull together; there’s a good bit of coordination involved. At the same time, you have to relax certain parts of your body so you can move smoothly and explosively. You have to relax your mind. You can’t hold your breath. In boxing, too much tension in the shoulders accelerates fatigue, and you have to control your breathing. It’s been useful for me to practice “focused relaxation” in a different setting, one that feels more low-stakes for me personally since I don’t lift competitively (it’s fun to see the numbers tick up but I’m not attached to reaching a specific PR). This makes me think about how I wrote the most personal, difficult parts of State of Paradise on scraps of paper as a way to lower the stakes. I could say what was on my mind and then I could type those words up or not.

Over time, lifting heavy and then heavier has improved my strength and coordination. I hit harder than I used to. And I can move my own bodyweight (push-ups, pull-ups) in a way that I was never able to before. Still, building strength for boxing is a complicated equation. The kind of power that allows a person to deadlift three hundred pounds will not necessarily translate into solid punches. Sharp technique generates power. Speed generates power. Good conditioning (one of the absolute most important things in the amateurs) generates power. Nothing like fatigue to make your punches land like pillows.

These days I do more heavy lifting between fights and open sparring days and back way off when I have a bout on the horizon (I speak from personal experience when I say that you do not want to walk into a hard sparring session with DOMS). But the solidness of the bar, the solidness of the ground beneath my feet: it’s an anchor, it’s a space to slow down and take a long breath, it’s a space to practice self-belief through the act of laying the weight on your body and then moving that weight however you need to. Lifting also gets me to slow down. If you’re going heavy you’ve got to rest between sets. In boxing we do a lot of high-intensity strength and conditioning sessions, where you’re bounding from one movement to the next, so that is the kind of hell that is most familiar to me. But heavy lifts move at a slower pace. Built-in to that pace is an argument for solid rest. Let yourself recover so you can move that weight again. Let rest be a source of strength.

A funny thing: more people have expressed concern about lifting vs. fighting. I’m talking relatives, acquaintances, random people I end up in conversations with about athletic endeavors. Lifting is dangerous! Don’t get hurt! Careful of your back! To be clear, people can and do get hurt lifting. I could also get hurt walking my dog on ice-thickened sidewalks. Of course, we’re all in different bodies, with different possibilities and limitations. We have different goals; nothing is right for everyone. There are so many ways to “move weight.” Redirecting our thoughts certainly counts (and is arguably harder than any front squat). But I do wonder if there’s still a little stigma against women moving heavy weight, in some circles at least. Like this is not something our bodies should be doing. Like this is not something our bodies were meant to be doing. Like strength should not be visible.

“It feels good to be strong,” my friend Kayla (amazing writer + tennis star!) said at dinner at the start of the year. I agreed. Moving weight helps me to know that the heaviness does not have to stay against my body. I can move it at any time. I can put it down and walk away. I will not be crushed. It does not have to pin me to the earth. It helps me to know that I can rely on myself.