The video begins with an instructor and a barbell, like so many
others on Instagram. But then, as Casey Johnston, the instructor, dead-lifts
the barbell — 20kg, plus 72 more kg worth of weights — to her waist, an
annotation appears in the corner: “Things we have to pick up regularly that
weigh 25+ lbs.” It then lists examples like suitcases, coolers, furniture, and
so forth.اضافة اعلان
Taking ownership of one’s bodyJohnston, 36, has built an online community around both
championing the functional benefits of strength training and demystifying a
form of exercise that can be intimidating to those on the outside. For
Johnston, lifting is about taking ownership of one’s body.
She does not promise the secret to washboard abs or a slimmer
waist, as many fitness influencers do. Johnston, instead, provides her
34,000-plus Instagram followers and nearly 25,000 subscribers to her She’s a
Beast newsletter with the tools to build a body that can more seamlessly move
through everyday life. And she writes sharp, incisive takes on modern discourse
surrounding fitness, eating, and other related subjects.
Guilt, guilt, guilt, and never doing enough“It is often guilt, guilt, guilt. You are never doing enough,”
Johnston said of the mainstream fitness climate. For her, gym sessions are “not
about experiencing the most pain you can tolerate. They’re about building a
basic skill that is accessible to everybody.”
Better emotional and mental health
In Johnston’s experience, that difference, in turn, can lead to
better emotional and mental health. “This becomes a gratifying feedback loop,
where it’s like, oh, ‘I can get stronger, and my body doesn’t just exist to
either be a meat sack that holds my brain in, or to look attractive to other
people,’” she said.
Johnston, who was an editor at Wirecutter, a New York Times
company that reviews products, from 2014 to 2018, began writing her Ask a Swole
Woman column for the site Hairpin in 2016 (“swole” means very muscular). She
found that her writing resonated with readers hungry for more accessible
fitness writing, and after the site shut down in early 2018, her column bounced
around before becoming part of the paid version of her newsletter. She has also
written an e-book, “LIFTOFF: Couch to Barbell,” which is marketed as a “weight
lifting guide for the rest of us” (it has sold more than 10,000 copies), and
she has a channel on the social app Discord, where she directly connects with
readers.
Before she started lifting, Johnston focused on running and
limiting calories as a way to pursue the kind of body that had been glorified
when she was growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That pursuit was
laced with negativity.
“I think people who are about my age grew up in an extremely
difficult time in terms of the way the media acted toward women and ridiculed
them for the tiniest flaws,” Johnston said. “There was such entitlement in the
media to police how women looked, or the way they conducted themselves in
public. Britney Spears is probably our most canonical example of this, where
there were constant headlines about if her weight fluctuated.”
Ready for a change
In 2013, Johnston stumbled upon a Reddit post featuring a female
bodybuilder that piqued her interest. She was ready for a change: She was not
eating much, and her hands and feet were often cold. Through lifting, she
realized, she could more smartly balance her food intake and exercise. But
she’s not here to judge other approaches.
“I am radically accepting of whatever it is that people want to
do. I’m not here to argue with them about what they think works,” Johnston said
of those who prefer other forms of exercise to weightlifting. “My only position
is that I think strength training gets a bad rap.”
The first time she went to the gym — an “intimidating place,”
she said — she pushed aside her feelings of insecurity and performed three
exercises: squats, benches and rows, three sets each of five “reps,” or
repetitions.
Then, she said, she made a beeline for the bodega. “I became so
hungry,” Johnston said. “My body is, like, demanding its feast after going to
battle.”
Johnston soon began structuring meals around her lifting, eating
more protein and carbohydrates. She delighted in her newfound strength.
“She’s constantly thinking about her body as this system,”
Seamus McKiernan, her partner, said. “What’s going into it? And what you can
make it do? And how it can make you feel better and do more?”
Functionality and sustainability
Her platforms give “people a place where they know they are with
other people who are on the same page that they are, where they’re oriented toward
more functionality and a sustainable practice,” Johnston said.
Her friend Choire Sicha, an editor-at-large at New York magazine
and the former editor of the Styles section at The New York Times, bought
Johnston’s e-book in 2021. After sitting at his desk for long hours during the
pandemic, he realized his body was on the verge of “deteriorating” and
challenged himself to do something that made him “profoundly uncomfortable,” as
Sicha put it. He became a volunteer firefighter, but realized that he needed to
build strength.
He turned to Johnston’s guide to lifting and found that the
philosophy that undergirded her work resonated.
“She knows that we’re not all going to be champion
weightlifters, and she knows that we’re not all going to look pretty when we do
it,” Sicha said. “It’s just very anti-Instagram-aesthetic. It is very
pro-human.”
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