Powerlifting, Three Years In

Even though powerlifting has been a significant part of my hobby life for the past three years, I hadn’t yet managed to write about it on here. It’s come up tangentially, like when I tried to problem solve through the Apple Health/Strong connection or gave context for my first steps with ffmpeg. But even though I’ve wanted to write about powerlifting itself, why I started and why I’ve kept doing it, what I’ve learned and felt, a lot of little inner things stopped me.

Part of it’s an internal gatekeeper, a voice that said I had to show up and do it long enough to earn the right. I wouldn’t want to gatekeep others, but I’m quite good at gatekeeping myself. Perhaps it’s my armor against Dunning-Kruger. Part is a fear of jinx. What if I wrote about how much I enjoy it and then something terrible happened in the gym? I already had one injury, though like many gym injuries, it was caused by something between lifts, not a lift itself.¹ Maybe it’s that I knew how long this would get.

How It Started

Prologue: In 2019, after my father died, I spent several months just floating outside my body. I had been ellipticalling 3x a week in my basement for years,² but I couldn’t bring myself to move fast. I wanted to get back into my body. Trying something with weights, which don’t require speed and do require breaks, seemed like the next best thing. I got a virtual coach and started lifting free weights 2-3x a week. Just 10-25lb dumbbells in my basement. I liked getting a little stronger and it did help me ground myself. But even though I kept it up for years, eventually 2x a week between 3x a week on the elliptical, it wasn’t something that sparked joy.

Jump forward to spring of 2023. It was a rough year for our family with several serious illnesses including our dog’s terminal cancer. Several friends and coworkers died in quick succession. On top of everything else, stress was making me physically ill. Some days I was so sick that I was worried about leaving the house safely. The elliptical wasn’t cutting it. One day, my blood pressure spiked high enough that I had to get checked out at the ER.

A couple friends of mine, one of whom had been struggling with high blood pressure and stress as well, shared that they’d recently started powerlifting. They got me connected with Toya Wigfield, a local powerlifting coach. I’ve been working with Toya ever since.

Before we go any further, let me define powerlifting. It’s a specific sport, comprised of three big lifts: squat, bench, and deadlift. Olympic weightlifting, by contrast, is a different sport with two big lifts: the snatch and the clean & jerk. If the barbell goes overhead, it’s probably weightlifting, not powerlifting. I don’t really weightlift. I do sometimes do strongman (third sport) for fun.

This video is from May 2023, about 2 months in and my first time deadlifting 135lbs, colloquially known as “a plate” because I have a full-size 45lb plate on each side. The strength is already there in my body so I can take it for 5 reps, but you can see I’m slowly working through all the moving pieces of my form and it’s challenging my grip.

I take time to set up each lift and shake my hands out between the second and third reps.

How It’s Going

First, it’s amazing stress management. The weight and volume regulate my nervous system. But I think I also get something from the act of going and lifting a lot. My job has me sitting or sit-standing at a desk in front of screen almost all the time. My hobbies are all embodied but the others don’t push my body’s capacity. Lifting makes me feel like a more fully capable person in the world.

Second, I’m continuing to build strength. Like most people, I’m not seeing the same growth 3 years in as I did up front. There was a lot of strength already in my body that I could just unlock via good form and practice. Nowadays, I’m doing a lot more work at similar weights. And because working weight is lower than top weight and strength building requires working at both higher and lower difficulties, I’ll see the same number a lot of times. But the trajectory is good and I feel like I have a very strong base.

I recently tested my bench press: 128lbs. I couldn’t do 132, but I don’t know how much of that came from just having done 128 and how much of it was indimidation from switching plates.³ 128 moved well and it’s been a ton of work to get this far.

Single bench press of a bar with yellow plates and a bunch of little plates on it. My coach is hovering to be sure I'm safe, but I move the weight up without much struggle.

I haven’t truly tested my deadlift in a year but Toya and I were recently trying to figure out what my “relative perceived effort 7/10” deadlift was. When it was the same weight as last year’s top deadlift, I asked if I could try one more weight jump to get a little personal record as a treat. I was thinking 275lbs, she was thinking 280. And while it was a challenge, I know I can go higher. At this point, my limit is probably based on my grip. I put together a little medley⁴ from that day’s workout, 264lbs, 280lbs, 219lbs for 4 reps. You can see an enormous difference in my confidence, capacity, and energy (little dance before 280) compared with the 135s:

A medley of three video clips. In the first, I deadlift 2 red plates on each side with decent flow. In the second, I am working hard to pull it up but it goes up in 3-4 seconds. In the third, I'm easily moving up and down doing touch-and-go style deadlifts.

I haven’t tested my squat max in almost a year and the video from that is kind of a weird angle, so I’ll just say it’s over 225lbs at this point and – we’ll find out in June!

While I take any online table with a grain of salt, if I take my bodyweight and total weight lifted and put them into a table, even without taking age into account, I come out between “Intermediate” and “Advanced.” Interestingly, my bodyweight now is the same as it was in May 2023 (it went up in 2024 as I intentionally ate more to put on muscle, then back down in 2025 when I did a “cut” to get back to my baseline). It’s been my body’s “defended weight” for the past 7 or 8 years, but now a much higher % is muscle. I’ve had to give up a few things that got too tight on the shoulders, but the rest of my clothes still fit fine.

Why I Love It

After all that backstory and current numbers, the real reason I’m writing about powerlifting is because I love doing it. Ultimately, I think the reason I love it is because I’m good at it, but I’ll try to get more specific.

I have never been particularly “athletic.” I am not great with things that move fast at me, like balls or swords. I am not great with moving my body fast. If I move my body faster than a run, I’m in actual danger due to some issues with balance and sensory processing (doesn’t affect driving, perhaps because I’m not relying on my muscles to adapt in the same way). I got two concussions before I was 15–one from rollerskating and one from skiing…during the lesson. I had a minor bike accident when I was 16 and realized I didn’t want a third concussion, so I gave that up. I did love ballet, which I did from 5-15, but it was also always a struggle for my body/coordination and I was near the bottom of my class. I’ve ellipticalled for 17 years (and on and off before that) to keep up my cardio health, but I don’t feel any particular love for it.

But powerlifting? I don’t just feel like an athlete, I am a motivated and engaged athlete. (Is this what the rest of you were feeling all along?)

Powerlifting challenges me to think about how my muscles are working together but gives me the space to do it. It’s one of the few sports that’s done better with time, thought, and care. It doesn’t ask me to push to do something as fast as possible. It’s done entirely in place. I love that I can bring all the skills and interior self-perception I developed in ballet but from an adult perspective. I’ve done years of yoga and body scans, not regularly enough to be called a real practice, but enough that I feel I know my body so much more than I did as a youth. I enjoy the sensory experience of challenging my body as I did in ballet, but it’s more focused, perhaps more like yoga than ballet.

I am also pretty good at (and generally enjoy) “grinding.” That’s how I’ve gotten most things in my life done – showing up to them over and over – whether it’s a quilt or my pollinator yard or the original EADiva website or every RPG scenario and keynote I’ve written.

It’s incremental, but I can see progress and I love that. When so much of life consists of care tasks and that regularly require doing a thing over and over again with no clear advancement – cooking, cleaning, walking the dog, even gardening – it’s awesome to realize I now have enough grip strength to do 8 dumbbell RDLs with 55lb dumbells! Last fall I was using a wrist strap to help with 45lb dumbbells! I know that I’m also better at cooking or quilting than I was when I started (I am not better at pulling weeds, alas), but it’s harder to see that clear progress. New weeds come back every year. There are going to be limits to my progress, but I think I’ll continue to enjoy it.

I’ve also had to learn things that were real challenges. For example, I now film myself regularly. Powerlifting form is not always flattering. Bracing pushes your abdomen out a bit. But it’s important to see how your body is moving if you want to get better at it. Where did I struggle? Was it harder in my head than it looks? Did I slow down at some point? I’ve also had to learn to ask for help from strangers. It used to be that if I failed a bench press, I could easily roll it down my body. But I’m lifting higher weights and that means higher risk if I fail. I could probably still roll it down my body, but I don’t want to. As someone who’s often (though less so lately!) the only woman in the room in the commercial gym where I regularly work out, it’s not always comfortable to ask. But besides all the reasons to do it for safety, the confidence easily adds 5lbs to my bench. I’ve actually needed the help, but maybe only twice. And I’ve met a few regulars I might not have otherwise spoken to. Many gym dudes are lovely.⁵

Finally, I get a real kick out of being strong. There’s a joke in lifting circles: “I lift because it’s really funny to be jacked in a profession where you don’t need to be jacked.” I don’t need to be this strong, but it’s really handy and pretty fun.

You’re Moving All That Weight! What About Injury?

This is the scariest part to write because of that half-fear in my head of jinxing myself. But one concern I sometimes hear from friends and family is their worry about injury. It would feel incomplete not to address that here along with all the things I love.

First, I’ll say that that this may happen. If it’s a small injury, I’ll do PT and get back to it as I’m able. If it’s a larger injury, then I’ll do what makes sense. But I spent too much of my life battling a devastating anxiety disorder to cut out something that brings me joy and isn’t inherently more dangerous than the rest of life. I only have so many years and if this is something that can bring me joy in my body and I can do well, then I am going to do it.

Second, every form of exercise comes with risk. Ballet had all kinds of risk. Besides the bunions it exacerbated, a teacher injured my back during a ballet class. Walking carries risk. In my mid-20s I tore a ligament in my ankle while walking from the metro to work due to an uneven brick sidewalk.⁶ I injured myself crocheting. I got a concussion during the ski lesson. Running carries risk to your knees and back. Yoga carries risks of injuries. Pickleball injury rates are rising due to its popularity and accessibility. Being sedentary carries huge risk. And that’s just exercise, I have a higher risk of being injured during the drive to and from gym.

Third, when you’re a 40-year-old woman lifting weights you can still make poor choices but you have much less capacity to do so than a 21-year-old. Similarly, my mindset is that of someone who’s deeply aware that she will have to live in her body for the rest of her life.⁷ That’s part of the motivation – I want to build strong bones so I can age better. I want to move well in my body. But even if I self-describe as a bit of a “gym rat” right now, that’s … gym rat for a 40-year-old Mennonite librarian who was never athletic as a young person. People ask me what kind of pre-workout I use and the answer is “a cup of tea and an English muffin.”⁸