Witches who lift!!

Last year I noticed more of my peers on Instagram posting videos of themselves lifting big ass weights. This wasn’t a workout trend you buy a cute li'l branded outfit to do: this was old fashioned Mandelbaum! type lifting. I wanted to learn more about what got these moms lifting big ass weights, how they learned to do it right and what keeps them going. It may or may not surprise you how many cool interesting details crop up in here about the lives they lead around their strength training. Special shout-out to Casey Johnston, who spoke with me for this piece and who inspired many of the women I interviewed.

I got so much feedback from lifting witches (the below issue is extremely condensed) that I'm going to publish a follow up issue for paid subscribers only on what these and other witches eat and listen to/watch while they lift. If you'd like to get that issue I recommend you become a paid subscriber if you're not already!

How I got into this

Sarah in Vermont: I didn't have sports or athletics in my life. Then I started reading Ask A Swole Woman by Casey Johnston.

I just liked the way she talked about things. It started to seep in that, like, "Oh, this is really important for caring for my health over the long run.”

I got her Couch to Barbell program, which I recommend to anyone who's interested. It's very easy to follow, very affordable. I joined the local gym, and then you move up to barbells. You're just consistently adding weight. I took to it right away. She also made it sound easy and fun. Part of her take is like, you don't have to spend that many hours, you don't have to suffer.

I started noticing right away I was feeling much more present in my body in a way that was really cool that I hadn't experienced doing any other types of exercise that I've done through the years. 

Abby in Washington DC: We moved to a new neighborhood in 2022. Before that, my exercise was all over the place. I would go years without doing regular exercise, and then I would start running. I hate running.

I ran by this CrossFit gym. I popped in, and I was like, “What is this all about? Can I do this instead of running? Please, anything." There were a couple of coaches in there, and they were super cool, and they were like, "Come check it out." It's like the friendliest, nicest, healthiest cult. Those stereotypes are all true. That was my first introduction to weightlifting.

For the first year, I was just so terrible. You have to suck, it's just part of being a beginner. After a while, you get awareness, like, "Oh, I know what I should be doing, but I don't know how to do it." I was like, "Okay, I have to find some other solution if I want to figure out how to do these lifts properly." I Googled "Olympic weightlifting DC" and I found a weightlifting club, and I just cold emailed the guy, and we ended up chatting, and I started showing up to this barbell club.

C. in Utah: I started lifting when I was a teenager because I was told I had to by team sports coaches. This was the early 2000s, and I had no reference point for anything, and it was terrifying 'cause I was one of zero women in the gym. I played volleyball at Arizona State, and then I played professionally in Europe for four years for the national team in Canada.

I realized that there were benefits to being stronger in functional ways. I was like, I can carry things; I can pick up a lot of groceries. 

Danielle: Moving from L.A. to Iowa, I suddenly had more time in my day because I wasn't driving two and a half hours a day for kids and a job. The gym is very close because the town is so small, and I didn't know anybody. So when Lauren [Haldeman] invited me to join her, I was like, "Oh, okay, this is a way to talk to somebody." And then my mom has osteoporosis and she had a vertebrae collapse and that terrified me.

I knew I wanted to start a weightlifting group because Garrett Bucks asked the question, "What's the group you wish existed?" I was like, "I want perimenopausal women to make me weight lift." He was like, "Okay, do it unless it already exists."

I found Casey Johnston's website, and then her newsletter, and then her program Liftoff was just so accessible. When Lauren and I would go to the gym, I'd be like, "I could write on a note card, this is what we're doing today." Lauren was really good at acknowledging, "It is weird, and there are all these bros there, but honestly, they're thinking about themselves."

Casey has this whole thing about like, "It's totally legitimate to just go to the gym and walk around and look at stuff. You could literally just walk around and be like, 'That is where the rack is. That is where the dumbbells are.'" Those baby steps really helped.

The other person I'll say who got me going was Tressie McMillan Cottom's Instagram. She just lifts big ass weights, and I respect everything else she does.

Sarah: Julia Turshen, who writes mostly about cooking, but also sometimes about lifting, has a side interest in lifting and has competed and stuff. She writes about that sometimes. She did a miniseries on her podcast that I listened to, interviewing different people about lifting.

My routine

Megan Boshuyzen in Connecticut: I have a lifting coach. He lives relatively close by, but we do everything virtually. We talk almost every day, and he sets my programming, and I'll record sets of my main lifts or anything I have questions about and send it to him for feedback. I've been working with him for four years.

I pretty much only lift and do karate. When I look at some of the other adults that I do karate with who don't lift versus myself, you can definitely see a difference in strength and movement, mobility. I can hold lower stances much more easily. I can explode off the ground. It just overall helps a lot.

I usually lift four times a week, two leg days, two arm days. Workouts go for about an hour unless something happens, and I have to go take care of something. Part of the reason why I got a weightlifting shed was so that I could separate myself from the house, so no one could just pop into the garage and say that they needed me.

Casey Johnston: I have a bare-bones weight setup in my carport outdoor area: just a squat rack, bench, and barbell. I have a set of adjustable dumbbells, plates. Once a week, I do squats, bench, rows, some variation of those, pause squats, incline bench. The second day, I do deadlifts and overhead press. Then sometimes rows, sometimes pull-ups, and some other vertical pulling movement.

The last time I deadlifted, I deadlifted 155 pounds. I haven't been squatting around 95 pounds doing pause squats because I'm trying to help my pelvic alignment. When I'm benching or rowing, it's usually like 60 pounds.

I’m usually in there 30 depending on how quickly I'm going. Sometimes I'll tack a couple more movements on. I'm supposed to be doing planks for my pelvic floor physical therapy, and I hate doing planks, but if I bring myself to do them, then it's closer to 40 minutes.

Sarah: I lifted at the gym for a couple of years. Just a few months ago, we got a weight set up here in my home, bought used online. But I'm just doing two days a week now, because I started taking a circus class.

C.: I warm up for a couple of minutes just to get my legs moving, and then I do core as part of my warm-up. I hate core, and that way, I get it done first, and it warms me up for what I'm doing next. Then everything I do, I always try to super-set because, again, efficiency, and so I'm usually doing 4 x 8 of the two heavier lifts every day.

I have two different lower body days, two different upper body days. So for lower body I usually do front squat, straight lift, deadlift, super-set it with lunges and some type of calf work. For upper body days, I usually do bench and deadlift, super-set barbell bench or a dumbbell bench and then I'll do single-arm bench and rows, and then pull-ups and tricep dips one day and overhead press and lat pull-down super-set it. I'm squatting, I don't know, 135 to 155.

I've continued with what I've been doing for several decades. I'm very lazy. How can I make this the most efficient use of time so I can go do other stuff I want to do? I know what I do here. I'm a working dog. I do these things, I get it done, and then I go plug back into life. I do think every so often, I could really shake this up, and then I'm like, nah.

Lifting while pregnant and postpartum

C.:  I lifted up to the day my first child was born, which is not a thing I did with my second child at all. That involved having an intact pelvic floor. Before I had kids, I used to lift probably three, four times a week, and now it's twice a week as just pure maintenance, as I'm moving to middle age, and I've got to try to keep up.

I used to be able to draw from this reserve. It's coming back, but it's just wild how slow it is to get back to recovering. Like in my twenties, you just bounce back way faster, where I just felt like I could normally dig deep. That was just not there at all after having a kid. This feeling of, "Oh, I am running with an emptier tank at just baseline than I was before," that's not my favorite.

Casey: I had a tough first trimester. I did not have the energy to lift or work out in any way, and I think that's very normal. Then, probably even in week 10, I started to lift. By week 15, I was back in a two days a week routine, maybe even three here and there. I stopped lifting around week 33. Then I didn't resume lifting until about eight weeks out from when I gave birth

Since my son was born, it's been twice a week, I'm basically doing my program. My program is the simplest version of this stuff. I made it the way that it is because it's the simplest way you can put these things together, and I like that.

Some of it has been physical therapy, trying to get my form back together. I'm using much lighter weights than I could be using just to get my body back in realignment, because you can develop a particular stance from being pregnant, supporting yourself in a certain way, and you want to realign your pelvis underneath you and stuff. It changed my squat form.

I had pelvic floor issues emerge five months out from giving birth. I developed pubis symphysis pain. It's at the very front of your pelvis. I exacerbated it by doing too much single-leg. I would be kicking soccer balls when I was eight months pregnant for my dog, and that would make it worse. Or squatting full depth was something that I probably should have stopped doing earlier on.

It was not [hard to get back, mentally] because I've done that in so many different ways in different situations. I've been lifting for 11 years. The same thing happens when you get sick, if you go on a vacation, or you have to take an extended break because work is really busy. It's more the norm than not that you're ebbing and flowing toward the gym.  It feels really bad the first couple of times that it happens because you're like "I've lost everything." But then you realize you're going to do so much more of that than you are in constant upward progress.

What I like about being a strong woman

C.: I know that I'm strong and that does something for me as a woman. I can go into this space that's extremely male-dominated and represents a lot of douchey aspects of the way men can be. I can be here too, and I know my way around this place, and I can hold my own as far as when I know I'm lifting and what I know is shitty form, and you're trying to just show off.

Danielle: I had zero muscles before and didn't realize how weak I was. When I started lifting regularly, one thing I noticed was that there was a new curve in my quad where I was like, "Oh, I've never seen definition there."

My pelvic floor symptoms got a lot better. My 5-year-old's 40-something pounds, and I wasn't getting wiped out getting him dressed or having to wrestle him when he threw a tantrum or whatever. I haven't lived in a house with stairs in a really long time. So now we have two flights of stairs, and I'm slightly terrified of falling on them. I just felt like, "Oh, if I fall, I'll be okay." My body wasn't going to shatter if I fell.

Sarah: My thighs and butt feel really strong. I'm carrying my kid, who is seven years old, up the stairs and feeling like, "I can do this."

My lifting crew

Danielle: We call ourselves The Beasties. We do a weekly group class with a trainer. His wife is a pelvic floor therapist, so he's very comfortable with women talking about prolapses and things.

The big thing for the group class is that it's just so much better to have a bunch of women telling you you look awesome when you lift something over your head. I get really high from it. I thought it was going to be a little too Pollyannish and groupy, and we all left being like, "Whoa, that was really good."

The wellness center here has a sauna, which I was excited about until I saw it. It's like a public sauna where all the sweaty bros go. They go in there in their gym shorts and their sneakers, and they're on their phones. We go in there, and it's really tight, and it's all these guys. Lauren just goes into a 30-minute monologue about her upcoming hysterectomy and talks about the cervical cuff and what they're going to do. It was just amazing to have 19-year-old dudes having to sit and listen to two over-40 women.

When we're with the trainer, one of the funniest things we end up talking about is the distribution of labor in our marriages, and it's great because he's like a 38-year-old guy with a 1-year-old, and he has to listen to all of us be like, "No, you have to do the whole task."

Abby:  I've been badgering the owner of my Crossfit Gym two years plus to start a barbell club, because I wanted to get better at lifting. Understandably, she was like, "I don't do that. I'm a CrossFit gym." So I was like, "Fine, I'll do it myself." I finally got her blessing to start my own club.

We had our inaugural session today. It went well. Three people came, which was fine. A few more people were like, "I'm totally coming next time." We'll see. It's a pretty small box to begin with, a small class is not a bad thing, especially when you have giant barbells and weight plates and stuff banging around.

I just got my coaching certification this summer and didn't have any grand plans to become a coach. I'm not getting paid, but also, I don't have to pay; usually, you have to pay extra or for a different tier of membership to get off-hours access to the gym. I'm getting free off-hours access for now. 

Whether the kids are proud of having a strong mom

Megan: I think my daughter's seeing it as a very normal thing, which I really like. She's like, "Of course my mommy lifts because my mommy is strong." A couple of years ago, I was outside with some neighborhood kids my daughter is friends with, and one looked at me, and she literally grabbed my side, because I have always had a little bit of tummy fat, whatever. I'm a woman. It's the way it goes. She was like, "It looks like you need to do some more cardio." I looked at her, and I was like, "Number one, we don't talk about bodies here. Number two, weightlifting is what gets rid of fat, not cardio."

Danielle:  My 5-year-old likes that I throw him around on the bed.

Abby: For the competition I did, my kids were definitely excited about it and impressed/bemused to see me doing that. I mean, that was part of the point with my kids, especially my son, who is 10. There have been times where he's really nervous before a game, or a talent show at school, with the idea being it's good to put yourself out there to work towards a goal, put yourself out of your comfort zone. Usually you are nervous beforehand, but then you are glad you did it afterwards. I wanted to model that behavior directly in front of them.

But typically when I get home in the morning after my workout and they're in the kitchen eating breakfast and I'm talking about how much I jerked that morning they’re like, "Whatever, mom, blah, blah, blah."

My goals for the future

Megan: I ended up getting elected to the Board of Education in my town, so now that's a whole other aspect of my life I have to work in. As I get close to 40, I want to sure I don't start losing more muscle mass. I don't want my strength to be a limiting factor of what I can do in my life. Fingers crossed nothing horrendous happens outside of my control. Because when you get older, a lot of times it's those falls and lack of strength that hurt you more than anything else.

Danielle: I guess my big goals are really just to get this group jiving regularly enough that it's not dependent on me reminding people and everybody's enjoying it. Then, to get it politicized, that's the next step. I want us to be a group of angry, strong women who do shit for all the problems. We're just trying to make it a good enough time that people keep coming back.

Casey:  I just want to keep maintaining. My real goal, honestly, with almost all my physical activity, is oriented toward sleeping better. I don't really see myself going back to building back up to really heavy weights. I like this relationship that I have with it now. I'm very fortunate to have just the equipment at home and that I can fit it in easily into my life. I'm glad that my son gets to see me do this stuff and will grow up with a mom who participates in lifting.

Lifting competitively

Megan: I do have trophies from powerlifting. Those are in the garage. It's very easy to get a trophy when you're a submaster and the only one in your age and weight class. I always say it doesn't matter how you get the trophy, as long as you get it. I try to do a meet a year. I was going to do one this year, but I ended up nixing it because I had a medically hard summer that put a stall on all my progress, and I was dealing with extreme fatigue. 

Casey: I did a handful of power lifting competitions several years ago, much closer to when I started lifting than to now, which was very fun, and I really encourage people to do. I would compare it to doing a 5K, just for giving some structure to your pursuits. You don't have to be good at it, you don't have to expect to win. You can just go in with like, I want to do this for myself, see what I can do.

Abby: I did an open meet, meaning anybody could enter; you didn't have to have a prerequisite number of pounds that you could lift in order to qualify. They had all different age categories combined.

The first session is just snatch, and the second session is clean and jerk. For each session, you get three attempts, and they go up with each attempt. If you make your first attempt, typically you'll go up however many kilos you want to go up. If you miss an attempt, you can either stay there and try it again or you can go up. Even if you miss it, you can try to go up, but you can't go back down.

My husband and kids were in the front row. They made a sign. I'm sure they were really bored for most of it.

Claire Zulkey (to Abby): Well, I bet you've been to a few things that are boring of theirs in your life.

Abby: Mm-hmm.

End credits

Thanks for reading Evil Witches, a newsletter for people who happen to be mothers. Here’s what this newsletter is all about if you are new! I encourage you to share this issue with anyone and everyone who would find this interesting or inspiring.

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