My Power Workout Has Transformed My Life

Stress-relief, weight loss, self-confidence. More and more women are taking up power sports and finding they bring a new inner as well as outer strength. We talk to three women who've discovered the life-changing benefits of wrestling,MuayThai and weight training

- Aman Da Khouv

"Wrestling has empowered me and given me confidence"

‘Fitness was introduced to me when I was a child through swimming and trampolining.

I wasn't aware I had mental health issues until I was 24 but, in hindsight, I had obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). What I really liked about swimming was it helped me with my thinking – I felt really calm in the water because I was concentrating on how many lengths I was doing so I didn’t get to spiral out of control. I didn’t really enjoy any sports at school – a lot of the time as a teenage girl, I just felt too self-conscious.

‘I didn’t get into fitness properly until I did my first personal training session when I was about 24, and I loved it. But it was really GLOW [the popular Netflix series that follows a group of diverse women who make up a pretty badass group of wrestlers in ʼ80s LA] that changed my relationship with fitness, because I was going to be learning how to wrestle. I’d never done anything like that before and I didn’t know what to expect. It was terrifying – all of us [actresses] were really scared.

‘We had a month of three hours a day of wrestling training, plus more training ’while filming. It was such a rush the first time I hit the mat – adrenaline and fear and pain. But the more I’ve done it and the stronger I’ve become, the less shock I experience. Sometimes you have to force yourself to do things. There were so many wrestling moves that made me think, “I’ll never be able to do that,” and now I can. There’s more in me than I realised.

‘The girls on GLOW are so fun and we’re so supportive of each other. I could’ve walked into an environment where people weren’t supportive, and I wouldn’t be able to do what I do.’

New strengths