THE RISE OF SOCIAL STRENGTH TRAINING
Text by Jessica Salter
7 Minute Read
Courtesy of Girl Gains
THE RISE OF SOCIAL STRENGTH TRAINING
Text by Jessica Salter
7 Minute Read
Courtesy of Girl Gains
Women-only lifting clubs are on the rise. Not just a safe space to train, they bring with them an on-demand community.
In 2020, Elisabeth Bradley, an 18-year-old freshman at San Diego State University, became curious about weightlifting. She’d seen a body transformation on Twitter, and was inspired by another girl’s journey. “She had gone from skinny, like me, to curvy and strong,” says the biology graduate from Sacramento, who now lives in San Diego. “I didn’t even realize that was possible.”
Entering the college gym, she was intimidated, though; the demographic skewed heavily male. “It didn’t feel like a space for me, and none of my friends at the time wanted to lift weights,” she says. A guy from her dorm who was into bodybuilding helped show her around. But it was only when she found an all-women weights gym off-campus—the Glute Lab—that she became truly comfortable. “Women were encouraging each other no matter how much weight they were lifting,” she says. She was soon hooked. “Women who were lifting 300+ pounds were cheering for my 50-pound lift; small milestones were treated as a big deal. It was exactly the kind of environment I had been searching for.”
“The hashtag #womenwholift has 4.25 million posts on Instagram, while #strongwomen has 3.2m posts on TikTok.”
Gyms have traditionally been a workout environment where the solo grind has reigned supreme. But women-led weightlifting groups are shifting the narrative—and are turning strength training into an opportunity for socializing. In June 2020, Bradley launched GirlGains, a college weightlifting club for students at UCLA—there are now divisions in over 100 colleges across the US. “It turned into this whole community,” she says. Other campuses have followed suit; at Columbia University in New York, there’s Girls Who Lift. And there are boots on the ground beyond campuses. In Chicago, the women's group Ladies Who Lift, which has multiple classes each day is attended by women of all ages. Across the pond in London, the newly launched kit brand Aesene debuted its first women’s weights night in September—targeting predominantly a millennial and Gen Z audience, tickets sold out within 12 minutes on Instagram. Fellow Brit, Elizabeth Davies, has nearly 150k followers on her Instagram account @thiswomanlifts—she targets the midlife crowd.
All of this reflects an increasingly voracious appetite to lift. The hashtag #womenwholift has 4.25 million posts on Instagram, while #strongwomen has 3.2m posts on TikTok, and this summer was, apparently, the Swole Girl summer—an evolution of #hotgirlsummer, taking the mindset of building self-confidence and empowerment and turning it into a built physique—according to an episode of the Vox podcast. Participation in strength training has soared from only 10% of women in 2000 to 27% last year, according to Dr. Hannah Campbell, Lecturer in Applied Physiology, at the University of Leeds in the UK.
“Strength training is finally breaking through to the mainstream,” says Rae Reichlin, the 33-year-old founder of Chicago’s Ladies Who Lift. “We now know that lifting weights is one of the most effective ways to improve bone density, hormone health, metabolism, and longevity, and that it plays a huge role in protecting women from injury and improving quality of life.” Knowledge is power, and women of all ages are harnessing their own awareness and turning it into action. In her new book, Forever Strong, physician and New York Times bestseller Dr. Gabrielle Lyon details her Muscle-Centric Medicine protocol, which aims to better educate women that muscle gain is more important than fat loss, especially in menopause. Says Reichlin: “Women are realizing they don’t have to spend hours on cardio machines to ‘earn’ food, nor do [we] have to shrink [our]selves.”
Many gyms still feel intimidating to women, though. And personal trainers are out of reach for many. Enter: the club. “What began as me just wanting gym girl friends grew into something so much bigger than I could have imagined,” says Bradley, of Girl Gains’ current roster of more than 2,000 members. From Salisbury, Massachusetts to Fayetteville, Arkansas, its branches match gym buddies and host group workouts and social events, such as vision board-making or “hot girl” walks. Girl Gains’ 20-something-year-old members are prioritizing health and wellbeing over partying. “Our generation wants to be the best versions of themselves, physically and mentally,” co-founder Karina Glaze says.
And they want like-minded friends to do it alongside. In this digital age, one in six people experience loneliness according to the World Health Organization. It becomes harder to make friends as an adult. Katie Gibbons, 44, is a lawyer originally from New Zealand who lives in New York. “I was weathering the pandemic as a single woman whose family was on the other side of the world.” In 2020, she created her own women’s cycling group, Girl Bike NYC, as a way to find comradeship. Groups offer “more than just workouts,” says Emily O’Hearn, 37, a Crossfit athlete and former director of marketing for the brand. “They create shared environments where people can show up, support one another.”
“What began as me just wanting gym girl friends grew into something so much bigger.”
The gym also removes hierarchy. That’s why many corporations, from investment firms like J.P. Morgan and Citibank to the insurance firm MetLife, create team bonding days or group initiatives based on fitness. “Fitness strips away job titles, politics, and backgrounds,” O’Hearn says. “Movement puts everyone on the same ground. You meet people as they are at that moment. They create a space where anyone can show up—on their best days or their hardest—and still be accepted.”
The biking community Gibbons built became an immense support when she was diagnosed with a serious autoimmune disease in 2020. “The Girls Bike NYC community helped sustain me, and gave me something else to focus on while I privately navigated getting a diagnosis and finding the right treatment,” she says. Strength training is proven to aid longevity through enhancing telomere length (protective DNA sequences) and reducing inflammation. Since getting well, Gibbons has found her way back to lifting, which she did in her teens. She’s now thinking about creating a New York-based lifting group.
Gibbons, like many women, has found herself unlocked in the gym. “It has translated to greater confidence outside the gym,” she says. “Lifting makes me feel untouchable, especially deadlifts. I also like trying to lift more than the guys in the gym—and sometimes succeeding.” While girls might be keen to show they can lift as much as guys, Bradley says the whole point is that women are not “in competition with each other.” Girl Gains, she says “shows that girls have each other's backs. We're all on our own journeys and when we lift each other up, we can reach new heights.”
There’s a beauty in the fact that these groups don’t take much by way of resources. Bradley advertised her initial meeting by putting up a flyer on campus. More than 100 girls showed up to the first in-person meeting, and many had to stand as there weren’t enough chairs. Later, she shared a video about the group on TikTok that amassed thousands of views; girls from all over the country asked to start a chapter. Those girls saw Bradley’s video as giving them permission to create their own network; women everywhere can be inspired by the example. What if women began putting posters up in their local gym? Imagine the communities that could be created.
There are other ways to find your huddle. Chiming with the Girl Gains model, increasingly, there are small female-only personal training or lifting groups launching, like Chicago’s Ladies Who Lift and Lioness Fitness in Fitchburg, Wisconsin. There’s also Physical Equilibrium in New York, or Her Flex Fitness in Maryland’s Forestville and Hyattsville—the latter proudly markets itself as a “safe space.”
Then there are the women-only gyms like Glute Gains in San Diego, where Bradley found her tribe, and is now a full-time coach. There’s also PWRGRLS, a hot-pink and palm tree-decorated strength training club in Los Angeles. In the UK, women’s weightlifting is similarly taking off in small, intimate gyms, with four across the capital—called StrongHer and Set LDN (both in East London), and Found! and Lift Studio (South London).
In-person isn’t the only option. Many of the gyms also have online programs, or Instagram-famous personal trainers, like Hailey Babcock—she has a lift program that’s dished out for free to her 250k followers. There’s also online-only groups, such as Women Who Lift Weights, which has over 134,000 members on Facebook, while USA Weightlifting is establishing a club for women who aren’t affiliated athletes.
Clubs are a great way to foster inter-generational connection, which can also help alleviate the loneliness pandemic. Bradley cites a woman in her seventies—who deadlifts “heavier than I can” at the San Diego gym—as her ultimate inspiration. In an era of social discord, it’s an important bridge. There are so many lessons and so much life to be shared between women. What comes across from these women-led communities is power. “Strength isn’t just in the body; it’s in showing up for yourself and for each other,” O’Hearn says. “That’s the part that keeps me coming back. Being a woman isn’t a weakness. It’s a force.”
