I used to be what I’ve heard guys in the weight room call, always with a teensy bit of derision, a “cardio queen.” For 15 years, I’d been taking spin classes, running on treadmills, and on my low-energy days, hopping on an elliptical machine for 40 minutes at a pace easy enough to watch a rerun of 30 Rock without bouncing too much. Exercise to me meant cardio. Jacking up my heart rate.
This is not to say I’d never touched a dumbbell. I went through a brief Tracy Anderson phase, dancing around with tiny little arm weights for 15 minutes. I took the occasional Pilates class, sometimes even a hybrid cardio/lifting class. Better, I carried my 40-pound toddler around when she got too tired to walk at Santa Monica Pier. But I’d never dedicated any real time to strength training. I treated strength as something that would happen along the way—like, say, at the end of a boxing class when you hit the floor for three minutes of abs.
That is, until this spring, when I decided to try weightlifting. It was TikTok’s fault. A video had sneaked into my algorithm of a woman posting pictures of her behind that she’d taken three months apart. Her derrière had gone from what I call “road kill butt” to something almost Kardashian-esque. The moral of the story was that women shouldn’t be afraid of the squat rack. The photos of her ass appeared in my life at just the right time—late at night, during a period of under-employment.
As it happened, I was reading Miranda July’s All Fours, the narrator of which goes through her own ass-istential life crisis after realizing, in her mid-40s, that her butt is no longer defying gravity. The combined TikTok (lowbrow) and novel (highbrow) felt like some sort of sign. I looked at my own ass in the mirror. The next day I walked into a training gym and announced that I would like to “build a butt,” like kids do with bears at a mall.
I got paired with a trainer—his name was Max, and, well, he liked pushing me “to the max” (his words). There was no tiptoeing in with baby weights and little lunges. Right away, I was on the equipment that looked like medieval torture devices to the uninitiated (i.e., me). Doing 70-pound barbell deadlifts at the power rack. Driving the push sled across the gym floor like a dog at the Iditarod. Everything felt animalistic. Primal. At the end of just 10 reps I felt like I was going to pass out.
Then the wooziness would pass, my heart rate would come down, and I’d do another 10. It was exhilarating—each set required every ounce of energy I had in my body plus the entirety of my mental focus. There was no thinking about an upcoming Zoom meeting. No half-watching reality-show reruns on the gym TV. I was fully present—a state I’d tried to achieve using various free mediation apps for years.
Max, sadly, turned out to be a ’roided-out MAGA guy who raged against my obsession with “free sex” (again, his words) when I told him I was pro-choice. As a friend said, you can’t expect liberalism from men who wear muscle tanks and obsessively track macros. So I left Max—but not the trap bar. I joined a gym and started doing it myself. (Social media may be ruining the world, but TikTok is really good for finding a great-butt day workout.)
I’m seven months in now, and every few weeks I achieve a new P.R. (that’s weightlifting for “personal record”). I’ve lost weight, but more importantly my muscle mass has increased by five percentage points and my body fat has dipped correspondingly. My cholesterol has dropped 70 points.
But the best part is the way weightlifting has focused me outside the gym. Somehow the Sisyphean task of pushing (and pulling—both are important!) a near-impossible load has made the rest of existence feel lighter. Errands are less burdensome. Deadlines more doable. And I think Miranda July would be very envious of my peri-menopausal ass.
Lauren Bans is a Los Angeles–based television writer
