THE JOURNAL
Illustration by Mr Calum Heath
I’ve been going to the gym a lot recently (I know, thank you). For the first time in my long relationship with it, I’ve been in the weights area, lifting heavy things. And one thing I’ve noticed, aside from how much I’ve enjoyed doing something that I previously thought the preserve of meatheads, is how lots of other types of people seem to be at it, too. The powerlifters in my gym are a diverse bunch. There’s the Gen Z crew, who look like extras from Industry; solo guys, with noise-cancelling headphones and no sign of a six-pack; the one young woman who is always there when I go, chalking up.
While strength training has been around since ancient times, and an Olympic sport since 1896, the signs are that new kinds of bodies might be coming to bench press, squat and powerlift. I read about people like the woman who took up powerlifting at 71, to be “bigger and stronger and able to look after myself”. I noticed guys who bulked to lift, not to simply look good in thirst traps posted on socials.
I also knew about Ms Poorna Bell, a journalist and writer, who has written about her experience in her book, Stronger. When she started lifting, it wasn’t seen as something for a body like hers. “Strength training for women is more common now,” she says. “Even as recently as five years ago, it wasn’t. I thought I would hate it. The idea of lifting the heaviest weights you can possibly handle – it seemed beyond me.”
Life-altering tragedy brought Bell to the mat. When her husband, Rob, passed away in May 2015, she quit her corporate job and went travelling. When she returned home, she joined a new gym. She wanted to become strong, she realised, because when her husband was alive, the couple had fallen into old-fashioned gender roles at home. “Realising I had almost no physical strength was a wake-up call and a necessity,” she says.
Bell’s new personal trainer encouraged her to powerlift. Besides the physical strength that she gained, certain narratives started to lose their grip. She thought of food as fuel rather than the enemy. She felt less intimidated in the weights section. Over time, her wellbeing improved. “Lifting a weight is only something you can give to yourself,” she says. “You don’t have an opponent apart from yourself. The knowledge of that sense of achievement can do incredible things for self-belief and self-worth.”
Like Bell, I started lifting weights in the gym to get stronger physically. I assumed weightlifting goals amounted to broad shoulders and big bums. I didn’t think there was any true mental wellbeing component; not in the way a 10km run or Vinyasa yoga eased an anxious mind. Now, going deep into a lift, I discovered what poet, lecturer and powerlifter Professor Andrew McMillan describes as the “the emptiness” of the action.
“There’s a mind-emptying quality to it that I haven’t ever felt with anything else”
“There’s nothing to think about beyond the fact that you can’t let this thing break your neck, so you have to keep your form until you’ve finished,” says McMillan, whose award-winning poetry often explores the relationship with our physical selves. “There’s a mind-emptying quality to it that I haven’t ever felt with anything else. It’s like an hour or two of a day where there’s no room in a mind for anything else, and for someone whose mind is often full and anxious I find that to be a great help.”
McMillan also came to powerlifting on the advice of a personal trainer. Until then, he’d spend time in the gym, navigating complex feelings about himself through what he saw in the mirror. He went to control his weight; getting strong was not on his check list. This dialogue with himself didn’t necessarily stop when he started strength training, but it brought something new to the conversation. “What seemed impossible became easier,” he says. “Then the next thing becomes seemingly impossible, until that’s easy as well.”
McMillan is currently preparing for the publication of his debut novel, Pity, next spring. For someone whose vocation involves lifting little heavier than a pen, strength work offered a different outlet. “Like any kind of physical work, there’s a demonstrable outcome, a success or failure at the end of each moment, which, oftentimes, in more intellectually based pursuits, there isn’t,” he says.
Lifting feels primal, which perhaps accounts for the resurgence of its wilder side. Strength stone lifting sees participants raise rocks from the ground. Historically, stone lifting has been used in local rituals the world over as a test of manhood, in celebrations and commemorations or to demonstrate ability for physically demanding labour. Currently, there’s a strong culture in Scotland and Iceland. Mr David Keohan, who leads the revival in Ireland, says the desire to lift something rawer than a weight plate speaks to something essential in him. “It feels deeply rooted in the DNA. It’s the oldest form of strength training in the world, before gyms, before barbells, there was stone.”
“It’s like a switch was flicked in me”
A former world kettlebells champion, Keohan, who goes by the handle @indiana_stones, discovered stone lifting in lockdown. With gyms closed, he raised a 61kg ornamental rock in his garden. “I became enamoured with the primal feeling of lifting an awkward heavy, natural object from the ground,” he says of the experience. “It’s like a switch was flicked in me.”
Interest piqued, he searched for Irish strength stones, the location and history of which had been lost to time. Keohan pieced together the whereabouts using a national folklore database, with help from academic Dr Conor Heffernan and local knowledge. An early discovery saw him trace a strength stone on the small island of Inishmore, off the Irish west coast, using “The Stone” by Mr Liam O’Flaherty, a short story from the early 20th century, as evidence of its existence. After a journey across water, bog and barren limestone rock, Keohan found, and lifted, the 171kg solid lump of pink granite. He has unearthed, and lifted, 30 lost lifting stones; he reckons there may be another 30 out there in the wild waiting for him.
The physicality appeals to Keohan. You need strong posterior muscles, good grip strength and a towel to dry the stone (“It really helps,” he says). But he also loves the romance of stories like “The Stone”, which describes lifting the rock just off the ground to “give it wind”. “It’s so poetic and evocative,” Keohan says. “To get it to your knees you were ‘a champion, the equal of the best’. But to get it to your chest and kiss it three times, you were ‘a phenomenon, a legend of strength’.”
There can be a certain poetry to lifting. And like poetry, it can offer respite and perspective, however temporary, from heavy things. After many years avoiding the weights area, this time around, I instinctively understood I needed to lift my way out of things. It has helped lighten my load. It’s a chance to lift a burden, McMillan says, even as your knees wobble and you wonder if you can take the weight. “There is, for a moment – however fleeting – a chance to lift your own weights from yourself,” he says, “and feel lighter, and freer, and stronger.”
