Heather looked from the stage over the crowd of unfamiliar faces, wishing she could be somewhere else. At fifteen, skinny and bespectacled, she could be as sassy as the next teenager, but she didn’t want this kind of limelight. Between her and those expectant faces was an Olympic bar with plates as big as manhole covers at each end, one hundred and thirty-five pounds, more than she weighed and certainly not part of her everyday world; she wasn’t an athlete, she didn’t even play any sports! How had she gotten herself into this? Closing her eyes briefly, she ducked under the bar, feeling it almost immovable against her shoulders.
The road to this situation had come half a year earlier, when a soccer mom told me that her daughter Amanda, a seventeen-year-old senior at a nearby high school, had given up her off-season efforts to improve her strength in the school. Gym. As Amanda says, “many times” we found that the weight room was closed to everyone except the football or wrestling teams. When we could get in, the machines were never free because after using a machine, the guys would stay there until one of the other guys came to use it. They also didn’t like the fact that us girls could lift more with our legs than they could using proper techniques. So they would use higher weights and do it incorrectly. They would tell us that us we were doing it wrong, that’s why we used more than them. Also, the guys covered their legs with sweatpants since the girls who went to the weight room were soccer and lacrosse players, and had bigger legs than some of the guys.”
I was hardly surprised: the much heralded advances in women’s sports have yet to change society’s attitudes towards girls and strength. In my opinion, teenage boys, held to the same attitudes and dealing with their own physical identities, were less to blame than parents and coaches. Many parents give less than stellar examples of fitness (how many moms and dads do you know who can do ten good push-ups?) and very few girls’ coaches (most of whom are men, right? what interesting?) really add more than lip service to serious off-season strength training for their athletes. But here was a mother and a daughter who have that. “I’ll train her two nights a week for free,” I told the mom, “but here’s the problem: you I have to come train with her.” Mom thought about this. “Okay. Can her sister Heather hers come too?”
A week before Thanksgiving 2006, the girls and their moms (Heather: “Can my friend Tina come over?” Charles: “As long as her mom comes and trains too”) began their training. We initially focused on free weight exercises; I always do this with new clients because dumbbells are basic, versatile, and available everywhere. The girls learned proper form, how to identify each other and how to improvise. I was asking them about the mechanics, the “body logic” of what they were doing, and some of it took me a while to sink in. But finally I was able to step back, get out of the way and watch them work with each other. And what I saw was extraordinary.
Once they got going, a synergy began to emerge, a combination of support and competition, with Mom as the catalyst. Gloria is lean and sinewy, always humble and optimistic, and as we all learned, strong. Within a few months, despite some physical limitations, she was able to squat one hundred and thirty-five pounds and even more incredible, bench dips (triceps) with a forty-five pound plate in her lap. Amanda and Heather were not on leave this unanswered (“if mom can do it…”) and soon all three girls were doing it themselves. As she had predicted, their leg strength blossomed; Tina, a year younger than Heather but stockier, especially enjoyed having heavy chains dangling from the bar when And the calf raise (a first for anyone outside of the bodybuilding world) was a favorite of all three.
Later she would ask Gloria how the girls Really felt about all of this. “At first they weren’t that interested, but after three or four weeks they felt comfortable with what they were doing: no one was looking, they associated with each other, they watched the weight gain, they even entered a little competition. They had never been addicted fast foods, but now they even began to forgo Friday night dinners as their food choices changed.That included snacks, with a couple of hard-boiled eggs and a block of cheese replacing the bags of Pringles.” A difficulty arose at her school: no snacks of any kind are allowed between 7:30 when school starts and lunch after 11:00. Amanda took some protein powder and it was confiscated. I find it hard to understand how school administrators expect growing and active teenagers to go nearly four hours without eating. something and stay tuned.
In February, what I had seen encouraged me enough to set a goal for the girls: “I’m calling this project ‘MoDa’ – MotherDaughter. And I want to share it with others. In May I’d like you to come with me to the PhillyFIT Bash and it shows what you’ve accomplished performing squats on stage. Amanda nodded, Tina shrugged, but Heather looked at me in horror. “We make have you?”
There were differences in the Bash place that none of us had considered. Unlike the Olympic weights the girls had been using in the study, the ones provided by Velocity Sports were rubber-coated. These tend to slip if the bar is tilted even slightly, which of course it did, as instead of a solid floor, we were on a makeshift stage that flexed under the weight. There were no barbell necks available at this time, so even with observers, the girls experienced a slight “Bongo-Board” effect with that weight shifting off their shoulders. More significantly, they forever trained in front of a mirror, which provided visual guidance to the proprioceptive senses; now they were looking from a stage at an audience. The weights that were easy to do in my gym suddenly seemed so much heavier.
So little Heather, who had lifted much more in training, lost less than 135 pounds and was unable to get back up without assistance. Tina would initially do the same thing with her 185. Amanda would have problems with her 225. This was a blank moment. It could have been humiliating, a complete defeat, negating the confidence they’d gained over the past few months, undoing my safeguards against stage fright that had nearly prevented them, especially Heather, from participating. But Heather, fearing an audience that had just seen her fail and a bar that still wanted to bury her, she reached inside herself and found something new that had grown along with her sinew over the last few months. Settling under the bar once more, she pumped out a confident half-dozen reps, her example leading Tina and Amanda to similarly redeem their initial attempts.
I saw that something big happened that day, much bigger than I expected. Even though I told you this, I’m still not sure you understood. These girls had no experience or aspirations towards weightlifting. Even Amanda, although a soccer player, was not an athlete. No high-end sports leagues or fan athletic scholarship searches here… just ordinary schoolgirls who took a few minutes in the middle of their busy teenage lives to do something few schoolgirls would attempt, and grew up in a way they never expected. This does not happen in a vacuum. It took a mother, an unusually independent-minded one, to help make this happen. Is it too much to hope that there are others out there?