Strength In Numbers

Weightlifting used to be the domain of bulky blokes hogging the barbells – but, as Lauren Sams discovers, now women are lifting the game

I’VE BECOME A BUTT WOMAN. As with most new obsessions – Korean sheet masks, Mari Andrew illustrations and turmeric lattes – I blame Instagram. There are 21 million posts tagged #girlswholift on the platform, and I reckon I’ve scrolled through at least two million of them. These posts show – mainly – women in their twenties and thirties, heavy barbells atop their shoulders, squatting, dead lifting, hefting the barbell towards the roof. Sometimes they’ll bench press a weight heavier than me. They look majestic. As confident as a Silicon Valley tech bro with an idea for an app that’s “the Uber of libraries” or something like that. As tough as a toddler being sleep-trained. They look like complete bad-asses. They look, in short, like the woman I want to be. Plus, they have – as we used to say in the ’90s – buns of steel, which is, incidentally, the kind of butt I’d like to have.

Weightlifting is generally associated with big, beefy blokes – the kind of guys with muscles to spare and necks last seen in 2002. Historically, weightlifting hasn’t been a woman’s sport – in fact, women only started to compete in Olympic weightlifting in 2000. But increasingly, women are discovering the benefits of lifting. Emma Stone “became a meathead” for her role as Billie Jean King in Battle Of The Sexes (her trainer’s words, not ours), pushing around 90kg sleds and dead lifting 85kg. Female-only strength gyms, like Base Body Babes’ studios in Sydney, are gaining traction. Ask A Swole Woman, a column about women and weightlifting that once ran on the now-defunct website The Hairpin, has been picked up again by Self. And of course, you can’t argue with 21 million hashtags.