Heavy Going

Strength training is being increasingly touted as one of the key elements for longevity—especially for women. Alexis Okeowo intensifies her workout.

- Alexis Okeowo

POWER POSE Paloma Elsesser wears Tom Ford. Kenny Yu in MM6 Maison Margiela. Balenciaga sunglasses. Hair, Akki using Dyson; makeup, Kabuki for Dior Beauty. Details, see In This Issue. Fashion Editor: Patti Wilson.

I had arrived late and was scrambling. Where were the weights, and how many did I need? Was I feeling confident enough to grab the 10-pounders or should I risk silent ridicule from my fellow Body Sculpt attendees and retrieve a 4-pound set? “That’s my spot,” another student—short, impressive muscles—snapped. It was my first class, and I needed help. After more than three decades, I wanted my body to do something new and hard, but my anxious mind was not cooperating.

I had started to see it everywhere, the message that women need to be stronger. In May, the writer Casey Johnston released a memoir called A Physical Education, about trading constant diets for weight lifting and discovering herself in the process, a real-life counterpart to Miranda July’s fictional narrator in All Fours, whose journey of self-actualization includes extramarital affairs and kettlebells. This summer, longtime Wall Street Journal reporter turned professional bodybuilder Anne Marie Chaker published Lift: How Women Can Reclaim Their Physical Power and Transform Their Lives, chronicling how a weight training habit pulled her out of a punishing rut. “Psychologists who study sports behavior,” she writes, “say that the intensity of lifting weights actually fuels a rewiring of the brain”—apparently, my mind was going to reap the benefits as well. (Working out with weights has been linked to an improved nervous system in one study and a slowdown in cognitive decline in another.)