Swole Girl Summer

2025 marks 50 years since a trailblazer named Jan Todd decided to go to the gym with her little boyfriend.

I had started going with Terry to the gym just because, you know, he's your cute boyfriend and you love him and like you want to spend all your time together, not thinking about being an athlete at all.

Jan told WHYY in Philadelphia there were no other women at that gym.

It wasn't considered appropriate for ladies to lift weights.

Some gyms even banned it.

The idea of a woman having muscles was seen as somehow being somewhat transgressive.

There must be something wrong with you if you want to have muscles.

Anyway, feeling spicy that day, Jan squatted down and deadlifted 225 pounds, which is a lot of pounds.

She went on to lift more weights, set a bunch of records, model in magazines, and inspire other women to lift weights.

More recently, millions of women have started, but why now?

Swole Girl Summer is ahead on Today Explained.

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My name is Constance Grady and I'm a senior correspondent on the culture team at Vox.

You recently wrote about a trend that has emerged that involves women and weightlifting.

What's happening in women's fitness?

The fastest growing sport among women in 2024 was weightlifting.

My whole life, I thought that it was all about cardio.

Like if you want to lose fat, you have to do cardio.

But I saw actual real results when I started lifting weights.

Now I do know cardio.

I'm trying to put muscle mass on.

So I do, I lift weights now.

Stop being scared of lifting weights, girls, because you are not going to look manly.

Two, you're not going to go bulky.

And three, if you don't, you're going to look exactly the same as you do right now.

You deserve to take up space.

Whether you're pushing plates or just the bar, you belong here.

If you read women's magazines, they're all telling you you need to start strength training.

There's a bunch of recent research that says strength training is really important for everyone's health as they grow old, but actually, especially for women.

You know, when I was growing up in the 90s and 2000s, women really only worked out to be skinny.

You know, that was the whole thing.

Come on, here on the floor.

Have you noticed that lately, every tom dick and Fabio is telling you how to lose your love handle?

And everyone from Estelle Getty to Barbie has got their own workout videos.

Oh, the stomach stays in, the back is straight.

And you're smiling, aren't you?

You think I look good?

Nick, come down those steps.

There was no pretense that you're just trying to be healthy.

There was nothing about wellness or how you just really love the way salads taste.

You know, what you were really taught to aspire to in mainstream media at that time was just to be as skinny as possible and everything in your exercise regimen and the way you ate was really supposed to be in service to that goal.

Do you remember heroin chic?

Oh boy, do I.

Do you remember Kate Moss, what she said?

Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.

It didn't feel like a particularly bold statement at the time.

Right, right.

It just sort of felt like that's probably true.

If you're as skinny as Kate Moss, it seems to be really fun for her.

Sure, I believe that.

That's sort of what it felt like at the time.

There also were moments where a celebrity was suddenly put on the cover of magazines and it was to show us how much weight she'd gained and how big she'd gotten.

Jessica Simpson had that happen to her very famously.

Absolutely.

This, the image of Jessica Simpson that lives rent-free in my mind is she was wearing a pair of high-waisted jeans.

She looks incredible.

And the magazine has like circled her belly in yellow ink and is like, what is she trying to hide under those mom jeans?

These pictures, that outfit, this woman, Jessica Simpson, people can't stop talking about it, saying she looks fat.

Do you feel sorry for Jessica Simpson or did she bring it on herself by talking about pies and macaroni and cheese and everything else?

That was just the way that we talked about women and their bodies at the time.

There was always this sense that

your natural default state is to be fat and disgusting and you constantly had to be disciplining yourself into being as thin and flat and untextured as possible.

And any deviation from that norm had to be sort of sniffed out and punished.

So the late 90s and early 2000s, there is clearly an ideal female body type.

And then something changed in a big way.

Can you walk us through what happened here?

Yeah, so I think there are three central factors that we have to look at in this transition from the heroin chic moment to where we are now, where strength training is really trending up.

First of all, there's the advent of the Kardashians.

How are you, Shuddy?

I'm good.

I just have anxiety.

Are you sure it's safe here?

And there's people that are dying.

They start to get famous in the late 2000s, early 2010s, and they really popularize a body ideal that has a lot more emphasis on curves than the heroin chic look of the 1990s.

And then as I got a little bit older, I realized that, you know, no matter what size you are, as long as you're confident and you're, you know,

you feel comfortable in your skin that it was okay to be who I was.

So I love it now and I'm very proud of my curves and my body now, but it definitely did take me a little while to get there.

It is still very much an unrealistic look for the vast majority of women, but it's a little bit more allowing of flesh to exist than the previous body ideal had been.

The second thing we start seeing in the 2010s is the work of body positivity activists starts making its way into the mainstream.

Right, so people start getting introduced to this idea that it's possible to maybe like your body and feel good about it, even if it doesn't look like the cultural ideal.

Starting this month, Women's Health Magazine has decided to ban all body shaming language.

It's part of the body positive movement, which promotes being happy with your body at any size.

If you take this phrase, women are more than bodies, and you put it as the lens of your life through everything you see, through all the messages, through the ways you talk to other women, you can become really cognizant to the things that are actually keeping you fixated on your body and other women's bodies as the most important thing about them.

And there's been a lot of criticism about the way that body positivity got watered down as it went mainstream and how it's not really revolutionary anymore.

But it does have this effect where we start seeing marketers update their language as they target women to fit this new paradigm, right?

They stop telling you that it is important to be as skinny as possible and they start telling you that it's all about being strong and healthy, even though they're still selling you the exact same products, but the language changes, right?

And then that brings us to the third factor, which is the rise of wellness as kind of this like

hobby slash lifestyle imperative for women.

So we started seeing a lot of these really elaborate skincare regimes emerge.

People start talking a lot about the idea of self-care.

And then after the pandemic hits, the concept of wellness gets really, really entrenched in the culture as it's very clear that we're living in an unstable time that is going to put our bodies in jeopardy.

So the idea of finding ways to try to take control of the health of our bodies becomes really seductive.

So all these factors really come together in a way that starts to push women away from focusing on being as small as possible when it comes to exercise.

And the new paradigm that emerges is strength.

Who are the ambassadors of the new paradigm?

Like once upon a time, we looked at Kate Moss and we were like, what does she eat or not eat?

Today, who are we looking at?

In the media world, I know that Casey Johnston is personally responsible for this shift among like half of the women that I know.

So just by lifting weights, you can build the skills and strength that you can bring into your everyday activities.

Your body is where you live 100% of the time.

She is a science journalist and also a power lifter.

In the 2010s, she had a lifting advice column on the hairpin.

Now, she has a sub stack that's called She's a Beast.

And her new memoir just came out.

It's called A Physical Education.

It's sort of about her strength training journey.

And for people in the sort of feminist media ecosystem, including me, she was just hugely influential at getting women to start lifting.

But there's also, you know, a ton of more mainstream influencers who have really made strength training their niche.

There's this sort of genre of like hot girls on the internet who are telling you how to get their body.

And there's a lot of options in that space who are ready to tell you about their strength training.

This feels a lot healthier than the position we were in, than the ultra thin ideal of 20 years ago.

But building muscle, it also is difficult.

You also have to think a lot about, am I in the gym three to five days a week?

Am I eating, oh my God, the protein, am I eating enough protein?

There still is, and I will cop to this, a lot of thought going into the way that I look.

Do you think that that old time negative relationship that we had with fitness, do you think that it's just replicated itself in something that maybe feels more healthy but isn't?

Yeah, this is one of the things that also gives me pause about strength training and the ecosystem that's getting built up around it right now.

I think that our culture has,

you know, a lot of structures in place that really exist to just force women's attention onto policing their bodies in whatever way seems like the correct way at a specific moment.

It's a system where whatever exercise you're doing, whatever diet you're following, it is never enough.

It can always be better.

Your body can always be better.

You know, that idea is just, it's grooved really deeply into the brain.

So I think that our culture is good at taking practices that we try to create in order to subvert these systems, like the idea of trying to get strong instead of small,

and then turning them to its own purposes.

It's really hard to escape.

So, at the end of the day, what do you think?

Progress, no progress?

I do think there's progress here, you know, even if it's not perfect.

The thing is, strength training isn't the only fitness trend we're seeing right now when it comes to women's bodies.

The other big news of the past year or so is the rise of skinny talk.

That's a community on TikTok that is devoted to getting skinny at all all costs in this very sort of old school throwback 90s, 2000s way.

And it's promoting a lot of pretty disordered and unhealthy paths to skinniness.

So the strength training space isn't perfect by any means, but I think it's going to mess with people's minds a lot less than skinny talk will.

Vox is Constance Grady coming up.

Constance, we got the swole lady.

We got Casey Johnston.

Hell yes.

Hell yes.

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Sonny, get a job.

It's the way you love me.

It's a feeling like this.

It's centrifugal motion.

It's Today Explained.

My name is Casey Johnston and I am a writer and author.

My book is called A Physical Education.

I started lifting weights about 18 months ago because I had stopped drinking and I was like, I want to do a pull-up.

That's what's going to make me feel good about my life.

You have been doing this though much longer than 18 months.

Tell me about how you got started and when.

Yeah, I've been lifting now for

a little over 10 years, 11 years as of May.

I

was into running, got into running when I was in college.

mostly out of a sense of obligation of like always losing weight and being on a diet.

And I always hated running, but felt like I had to be doing something

and I started getting injuries.

I felt like the pieces were not clicking together of like the dieting I was doing and all of I was running more and more and eating less and less and like not getting the effects that I felt like I was promised.

So I at one point stumbled across a post on Reddit where a woman described her six months of weightlifting experience and it sounded like she was getting all of the things that I wanted wanted from diet and exercise, but was doing everything the complete opposite.

She was like working out half as much as I was.

She was eating twice as much.

And

she seemed really happy, like she was really enjoying the process, which was not something I felt like exercise could even be about.

So I, from that point, had to know more about what she was doing.

Before you came across that post, how did you think about lifting and women who did it?

I think I thought of it as something that mainly men did, like Jim Bros and people in the military and just meatheads.

And I didn't think it had anything to offer me.

The thing that I always heard from the ether of talking about women and working out was like, you don't want.

to lift weights.

It'll make you bulky.

It sounded really hard and really intense.

And it was like, cardio is easier.

Cardio burns calories and that's what you want.

So just stick, stick with the sort of cardio rivers and lakes, if you will,

and

don't complicate it too much.

And this new format of lifting that I saw in this Reddit post was like, it's just three movements a day and three sets of five reps.

And I was like, that's so, that sounds so simple and very compelling to me.

And then there, there was also sort of a blossoming of resources around that time where there were starting to be more fitness YouTubers.

Instagram had only added video maybe a year before that.

So there was like a sort of onslaught of information and formats that were really conducive to learning lifting at that time.

This was about like 2014.

When did you hit the moment where you were like, I really love this in a way that I definitely did not like running, and I'm probably going to do this for a very long time?

I think it was once I

was able to that

I really liked the workouts.

I loved the sort of alternating between

doing a, you do a set of reps and then you rest for a minute and you're basically asking yourself, how did that feel?

Was that too light, too heavy?

Am I really tired?

Could I, could I go again immediately?

Should I up the weight?

And that practice of

checking in with myself was really, really

became really, really compelling.

At first, it was a bit confusing.

So I was like, I don't know.

I don't know how I feel.

Like, indexing for how I felt in any way was always very difficult for me.

But

as I got into the practice, I really liked a style of workout and I was eating more, and it was all sort of fitting together.

And once those pieces started coming together, I was like, why doesn't, why didn't I know about this?

Like, there's no, I had no one telling me about this stuff at the time.

Not to overstate, but there is something revolutionary in that thought that you are,

many of us are not primed to think about, how do I feel about this?

We're primed to just like do it and then like, let's not think about it, especially when things are difficult.

And then you decided that the value was in figuring out what you were thinking and what you could handle right there in the moment.

You recently did something else that I believe to be revolutionary.

You wrote a piece for New York Magazine, a viral piece, about deliberately gaining weight, about bulking so that you could lift more.

It was a beyond the pale concept, the idea that you would intentionally gain weight for really any purpose.

Everything I had ever done about my body had been oriented around losing weight and making myself smaller.

I sort of had a conversation with myself of like, okay, I want to keep getting stronger, but in order to do that, I will need to

eat a little bit more and be consistent about that for three months.

And in that process, I'll gain some body fat and gain some muscle and gain some strength.

And

I decided that I did want to be stronger more than I was afraid of gaining weight.

So I

started out and almost immediately I felt just the feeling you get in the gym when you are sort of, you have that additional calories that come with bulking.

You feel

like you have wings.

It's, it's just the most incredible feeling when you're used to sort of

finding your struggle point pretty easily, and suddenly your struggle point is so much farther down the line than you think, and everything just feels really good.

You feel really powerful.

You even sweat less, I found.

Huh.

And it was, it was like, I wish I could just give this experience to everybody because it was the most incredible feeling.

We talked in the first half of the show about, you know, 20 years ago, the obsession was with women being very, very, very tiny, very, very, very thin.

How do you strike a balance between lifting is important to me and I want to do it and I spend time doing it, but I'm not going to become obsessive about it.

These things are tools.

Lifting weights is a tool.

Even running, which I had a problematic relationship with, is a tool.

They're neutral.

The thing about lifting that made it atomically different from running for me was that, was this practice I developed, or the practice I described a little earlier, of

the self-inquiry.

And as someone who grew up in a family, my father was an alcoholic abusive, and my mother had her own struggles.

And

it was very, very tense and very difficult.

And there was a real dynamic of

needing to disconnect from my own feelings and needing to stay focused outwardly in order to be responsive, in order to try.

And I was trying to create safety for myself, really.

And that led to a huge disconnect between myself and my feelings, both physical and emotional.

And

that meant that certain relationships with exercise that were pushed out there in the world, whereas there are a lot of like, no pain, no gain, and like ignore your pain, your sweat is your fat crying, and all of these things that are sort of intense and about deprivation and denial resonated with me, but for a problematic reason.

And when I came to lifting, it's the practice of asking how things felt in this really focused and contained way

really helped me,

what it turned out to do.

I didn't even know I I was doing it at the time, but now looking back,

it started to help me learn to rebuild that connection to how I was feeling and that practice of monitoring myself,

asking myself how I felt, I was able to bring out into the rest of the world.

So I think that's the main thing for me that stands between having this turn into

another vicious cycle of trying to be enough and never becoming enough.

It's about building that, rebuilding that connection with myself.

How much do you bench?

The most I've ever benched in the gym,

so not in a meet, but it was 142 pounds.

Holy shit.

I mean, how much do you bench?

Now you have to pay the tax.

Okay, 65.

Okay.

I've never gotten above 65.

And like, I want to.

I think I squat better than I bench.

I think you're being way too hard for your time, way too hard on yourself, especially for someone who's only been doing this for less than two years.

I wouldn't even think about that, you know?

Thank you, Casey.

Casey Johnston is author of A Physical Education.

Gabrielle Bourbay produced today's show and how.

Jolie Myers edited.

Andrea Christen's daughter is our engineer.

Today's episode was inspired by a great piece that Constance Grady wrote for Vox.

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