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Strength is for everyone, but its especially for women.
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Have a question for me about weight lifting, strength training, or anything related?
But here’s the thing: I have not exercised a single day in my life.
Can I just roll up to the gym and start lifting heavy things?
Will I break something?
Should I do cardio first because my heart is probably slowly atrophying?
The fleeing in terror?
That was exercise!!
You are, firstly, better at this than you might think.
But you’re free to also combine moves and get a lot done with less effort.
In other words, you could make working out endlessly complex or actually pretty accessible and simple.
There are a lot of kinds of exercise that are just doing stuff your body is naturally good at.
Picking up a heavy object?
Getting your luggage into the overhead bin?
Lifting movements come from how bodies move naturally and most efficiently.
They continue to choose them because we can be at our absolute strongest bytraining these compound movements.
I also played sports in high school, but that, too, involved no lifting whatsoever.
So, I didnt start from precisely zero, but I was closer to it than you might think.
Even now, four years later, I dont think Ive gained more than ten pounds of muscle overall.
There was equipment, plates, and dumbbells scattered all over the floor.
Between gym sessions, Id practice some more, a few minutes each day.
At first I couldnt lift the barbell for any of the movements.
You might surprise yourself!
But either way, absolutely everyone starts somewhere.
She writes the column Ask a Swole Woman for SELF.
it’s possible for you to find her on Twitter:@caseyjohnston.
