I'm keen to help shift the focus of strength training - and exercise in general - away from aesthetics and external validation.
See, it's not all about lifting heavy, getting strong, then posting it to your social media for some likes. And it's not about how much you bench or whether we can see your 6-pack.
In a society that's facing rapidly rising rates of depression, anxiety, eating disorders and other mental health concerns, we'd be well placed if we had the tools to better manage stress and cope with the inevitable hardships that life throws.
I hope this post facilitates a greater appreciation for the capacity of strength training to help us manage stress and build mental resilience. If you're completely new to strength training, then I hope it might also serve to inspire you to get started.
Let's dive in.
Mental resilience is not about avoiding hardship, and it's not necessarily about 'bouncing back', because this implies that we return to being the same person we were before.
Instead, resilience is about developing the capacity to face life’s difficulties, cope with them effectively, adapt, and emerge stronger than before.
Resilient individuals tend to have a positive outlook, a strong sense of purpose, and emotional regulation skills that help them maintain composure in the face of setbacks.
We are all born with the capacity for resilience, but our life experiences and the work we put in to navigate the challenges we face will ultimately determine how resilient we become.
Resilience can be cultivated through things like:
building strong social connections
searching for meaning and attaching purpose to our lives
facing our fears
practicing mindfulness
building cognitive flexibility
nourishing our gut microbiome with the right kind of foods
and... exercise!
Exercise is a stressor, and prompts the release of cortisol. Courtesy of some clever negative feedback loops in the body, the more cortisol released by exercise, the less released by psychosocial stress. This applies to all kinds of exercise, from cardio, to HIIT to strength training.
Being better able to regulate our stress response is a powerful starting point; but when it comes to building resilience, the magic of strength training reaches a whole lot further.
1. Strength Training Improves Self-Awareness
The awareness of the body in space is called proprioception. Proprioception is kind of like mindfulness in a totally physical sense.
Some people are really in touch with their bodies as they move, how they’re feeling, where they are positioned, what speed they’re moving at, which muscles are working. Think of a ballet dancer: They feel and have total control over every single bit of movement as they’re dancing.
Then think of the first time you ever did something new. Maybe when you picked up a tennis racket for the first time, or tried to ride a bike, or took a salsa dancing class. That clumsy, uncoordinated, and totally ungraceful-like feeling?
Well, the same goes for lifting weights. It’s kind of like an art.
To start off with we don't really know where we're feeling what, but the more we work on developing our form across a range of different movement patterns, the more we start to notice it all feels a bit more natural.
This is adaptation happening down at a neurological level. Our muscles are getting used to what’s going on, and our movements are starting to feel more familiar, more precise, and more controlled.
Developing proprioception and becoming more in tune with our bodies creates an internal sense of ownership and agency that is fundamental to self-awareness.
With greater self-awareness we're better able to recognise and manage our emotions and respond to a given situation with self-control.
2. Strength Training Promotes Self-Acceptance
We live in a world that objectifies women and it can feel as though our bodies are merely ornaments for the rest of society to judge... And for us to continually scrutinise behind closed doors. We compare our bodies to the airbrushed pictures in magazines and we’re left feeling like we’re never quite enough.
Strength training can help take the focus away from aesthetics like body weight, shape, and size, and direct it more towards how our bodies feel.
When you’re lifting, the emphasis is on form. You’re listening to the signals your body’s giving you and you’re assessing how your body’s moving in space. The focus is on how your body’s working and you’re encouraged to celebrate the awesome capacity it has for just that.
Feeling strong, feeling capable and feeling confident – sure, they’re a little less measurable than weight, skin-fold thickness or calories consumed – but they add real value to our lives.
When the focus shifts from what our bodies look like to what they can do, then we can start cutting them some slack and accept them with more warmth, compassion and gratitude.
Thank you body, what an awesome body, look what you can do!
Self-acceptance plays an important role in resilience because it makes us less vulnerable to criticism and encourages us to seek out the lessons amongst the hardships we face.
3. Strength Training Builds Self-Efficacy
Strength training offers a valuable way in to exercise for those who don’t necessarily feel comfortable with the way that more conventional types of exercise – I’m talking things like running, jumping, bootcamps – can make us feel about our bodies. All the jiggling, sweating and breathlessness that comes with leaping about can make us feel agonisingly self-conscious.
Strength training also tailor-able to pretty much anyone. With so many variables (things like exercise type, load, reps, sets and rest periods) you can simply adjust your training to meet you where you’re at and start working towards the results you want.
With minimal barriers to getting started, strength training offers a great way to learn a new skill. As I briefly mentioned right at the start, facing our fears and building cognitive flexibility (by learning something new) can help build resilience in their own right.
But, as you keep practicing, you’ll start getting good.
You might find it’s strength training in general that suits you, or perhaps it’s a specific lift or two. Whichever way, getting good, or mastery, is a sure-fire way to build up your self-belief, or self-efficacy.
Self-efficacy is the belief that we can succeed in a given situation. In other words, it's how confident we might feel when thrown a new challenge.
And the best part? The benefits that self-efficacy confers are not limited to task in which it was built; it can generalise and spread, meaning we'll experience increased self-efficacy in other aspects of our lives, too.
4. Strength Training Improves Self-Esteem
Too often, I hear of women trying to manage their weight through calorie-counting, dieting and food restriction.
While the rationale for a diet is that it helps us feel more in control by giving us rules to play by, in doing so, it takes away our autonomy and gives that power to the food (and the food manufacturer, who might not have our best interests at heart).
This can incite the notion that certain foods are 'bad', and that indulgence or overeating must be punished by periods of starvation, over-exercising, or purging.
Feeling powerless and experiencing feelings of guilt and shame around eating can lower self-esteem and lead to patterns of disordered eating.
Strength training helps foster a healthier relationship with food because it requires us to think less about restriction and more about fuelling our bodies.
In a nutshell:
Owing to the energy systems at play, strength training requires us to be in a fed, rather than a fasted, state.
Post-workout, we also need to think about obtaining adequate nutrition to facilitate muscle repair and recovery.
If we fail to consume enough of the right kind of foods pre and post workout, we compromise our training results and our body’s ability to recover, not to mention the workout itself will feel hellish.
Switching our mindset to a place that values the nutritional quality of food over counting calories or food restriction lessons any feelings of guilt or shame associated with breaking the ‘rules’ of a diet.
It also gives us the freedom and flexibility to make our own food choices - and enjoy those foods that we choose to eat.
5. Strength Training Boosts Self-Confidence
Have you ever noticed how really confident people always tend to have good posture? They’re not all hunched over with rounded shoulders; they’re standing upright with their heads tall and their chests lifted.
Give it a go right now: Stand up straight, puff your chest a little, hold your head high, and project that confidence!
It can work wonders in terms of how other people interpret our body language, but more importantly, we can start to absorb some of this confidence for ourselves.
In fact, numerous studies demonstrate a positive relationship between a more expansive (compared to a slumped) posture and increased feelings of self-worth and self-confidence.
Now imagine if we could make these temporary changes last, by strengthening the relevant muscles to create a more permanent expansive posture!
By becoming physically strong, we also help ourselves become more able and more independent. No longer do we need to rely on someone else to do all the heavy lifting, we can do it ourselves, thanks very much.
This one’s been a big one for me.
As a petite human standing at little over five feet tall, I've experienced countless times when someone's questioned my physical ability to do something. I doubt their intentions were ever ill meant, but they did little to help my confidence.
Over time, this kind of thing compounds, and you start believing you’re not a capable person.
Since I started strength training, not only have I gotten stronger, but more importantly, I now believe that I am strong.
And this has worked wonders for my confidence.
With our flagship course Learn To Lift: Strength Training for Beginners, you'll learn how to perform key exercises, how to write your own training programs, and how to optimise your results with the right nutrition, so that you can take full ownership of your strength training journey.
Our home-workout-friendly course also gives you the freedom and flexibility to train whenever and wherever suits you best, with whatever equipment you have to hand.
Sign up for access today, and see how taking ownership of your training can help you reach new heights in physical health, mental wellbeing, and resilience.
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