Healing through Lifting. The True Meaning of Strength, with Alyssa Ages

Alyssa Ages* is a force to be reckoned with.  Author, freelance journalist, crossfit athlete, marathon runner, strong woman competitor, and advocate for strength training and taking up space as a woman.

Alyssa talks to us about how strength training, in particular, helped her regain trust and confidence in what her body could do.  She talks candidly about her struggles with infertility,  how going back to the gym after a miscarriage helped her process some very difficult emotions.

We also discussed the following topics together:

• The benefits of strength training for women 40+ and why you don't HAVE to lift the heaviest of weights to feel the benefit
• Why training 1-1 with a coach is recommended if you're new to strength, if you have the means to do so.
• The barriers to strength training.  How to reduce the risk of injury
• How to know when enough is enough, and your body just needs rest.
• How to be comfortable taking up space in your body, especially as you focus on 'building' strength rather than shrinking yourself.

If you're on the fence about strength training or just curious about lifting atlas stones or swinging oddly shaped heavy objects around, this is the episode for you.

*Alyssa Ages is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, GQ, Elle, The Globe & Mail, and others. She is the author of Secrets of Giants: A Journey to Uncover the True Meaning of Strength. Alyssa lives in Toronto with her husband and two daughters. 

You can find her through her website or contact her on instagram.

Please reach out if you would like some support with your relationship to food OR movement. Ela currently has limited spaces for Intuitive Eating coaching and if you'd like to reconnect with movement, contact Christine.

AND if you enjoyed this episode, please share and follow the 'Find Your Strong podcast' and if you have time, write us a short review. It would honestly mean the world. Love to you all, Ela & Christine x

Transcript

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Christine Chessman: So, today, we've got a cracker for you, as always. We've got a really very special guest today, Alyssa Edges. I'm a bit of a fangirl. I introduced Ella to Alyssa, and now she's a bit of a fangirl.

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Ela Law: Yeah, might be, yes. She's amazing!

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Christine Chessman: Yeah. Do you want to sort of read the bio a little bit?

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Ela Law: Yeah, sure. So, Alyssa's a journalist, actually, and her work has appeared in the New York Times, GQ, Elle, The Globe and Mail, and other publications. She's the author of a really cool book that I haven't read, but

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Ela Law: Christine has and absolutely raves about. And the book is called Secrets of Giants, A Journey to Uncover the True Meaning of Strength.

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Ela Law: Alyssa lives in Toronto with her husband and two daughters, and we talked a little bit about, you know, how she raises them, how they are involved in her training, and in her sort of approach to strength training. So, it was just a really, really cool conversation, and me coming at it from somebody who didn't really know her very well. I did a little bit of Instagram stalking before the podcast recording, but

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Ela Law: She is incredible, absolutely.

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Christine Chessman: And I think…

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Ela Law: Amazing.

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Christine Chessman: If you're ever thinking about training, so this is what we talked to her about, but are nervous about being injured, or are not sure what the fuss is all about, or why.

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Christine Chessman: possibly want to lift heavy things. It's just a really good conversation as to, sort of, how she has found it helping her heave through really difficult times of her life.

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Christine Chessman: In a different way than maybe other pursuits like running, etc.

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Ela Law: Yeah.

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Christine Chessman: That have also been helpful, but haven't quite given her… The feeling of,

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Christine Chessman: What would you call it, serving?

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Christine Chessman: That feeling of strength and, like, being really grateful for what your body can do.

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Christine Chessman: And just sort of realizing that you can do hard things, and building that self… that resilience and self-efficacy, and it's just a good conversation.

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Ela Law: It is.

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Christine Chessman: Without further ado.

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Ela Law: Listen to it now!


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Ela Law: A very, very warm welcome to you, Alyssa. We are so excited to speak with you today. We have one long-term fangirl called Christine, and me, who's a newbie, but we're both completely in awe of you, and we'd love to talk to you about your story, your book, and we've got loads of questions that we want to ask you. So, maybe we'll start at the beginning, and maybe you can share a little bit about how you got into

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Ela Law: to strength training, and how you ended up pulling a bloody truck.

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Alyssa Ages: You got it. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. I'm so excited to chat with you both. Yeah, so I was not an athletic child. I always feel like that's really important to say when people see the stuff that I've done in the last couple years, to say, this is not…

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Alyssa Ages: something that comes naturally to me. It's never come naturally to me. I was… I mean, my kind of origin story was I had, decided to play Little League as a kid, and, I just had this very strong memory of

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Alyssa Ages: never hitting the ball once in the entirety of the time that I was playing the sport. And just kind of taking that and making it almost like a personality type, and going.

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Alyssa Ages: I am just a person who's not good at sports. That was what I took away from that, not I should practice more, not anything else, just this is… this is not something I'm good at. And then I kind of spent, like, the next 10 years just avoiding as much athletics as I could, believing I was just…

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Alyssa Ages: This person who wasn't cut out for it.

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Alyssa Ages: And I was playing a softball game that I had to play in with my job. I think I was, like, fresh out of college. And, I got up to bat, and I hit the ball, and I remembered I kind of ran off to the side of the field, and I called my mom.

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Alyssa Ages: As one does, in their 20s, and I said.

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Alyssa Ages: You know, oh my god, I'm like, remember I've avoided playing softball and baseball for so many years, and I just had to play it for work, and like, I finally hit the ball. Like, after all of those swings and misses from my whole childhood, I finally hit the ball.

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Alyssa Ages: And my mom goes, that's great! She was like, but it wasn't that you kept swinging and missing when you played Little League, you just never swung the bat. You would sort of stand there, frozen with fear, and not even try.

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Alyssa Ages: And I remember it was this… this moment of going.

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Alyssa Ages: wait a minute, so this thing that I have based most of my adolescence and the start of my adult years on, this story about myself, was maybe not true at all. And I thought, okay, I've got to see what I can actually do. So, I went out, and the first thing I did was I signed up to run a marathon.

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Alyssa Ages: I… like, I didn't know if I could run a city block.

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Alyssa Ages: And I trained for it, and the first year, I got injured and I couldn't do it.

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Alyssa Ages: But I trained again, and I did it, and I went on to run a whole bunch of marathons. And then I thought, okay, we checked that off, what's next? I'm gonna do a triathlon. Even though I, again, like, literally could not swim a lap in the pool.

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Alyssa Ages: And I went, and I did a bunch of triathlons, and then I thought, I'm gonna do an Ironman. And I finished that, and I thought, okay, well…

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Alyssa Ages: what's the next thing on my list? And I joined… I did do hot yoga briefly in there, but I did not like that very much. So, I went and I did, CrossFit. And I was like, oh, this is challenging in a totally different way, because all of a sudden, it wasn't just… you can make it from the starting point to the end point, and maybe it's just slower if you're having an off day, or if you're feeling

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Alyssa Ages: But that weight is, like, sometimes literally not gonna move.

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Alyssa Ages: And kind of going back to this… hearkening back to that childhood feeling of…

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Alyssa Ages: I can't do this, so I'm not going to, and having to now choose actively to do something where I probably was going to fail a lot of the time.

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Alyssa Ages: And making the decision to keep doing that, and being okay with that.

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Alyssa Ages: And I liked that so much, I met a friend there who said, come to this strongman class with me.

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Alyssa Ages: And I was like…

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Alyssa Ages: like, the guys on Late Night ESPN? What is this? Why do you think I can do this?

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Alyssa Ages: And I went, and I remember that first day, we got to lift an Atlas stone, which is this, like, round concrete boulder, it was 90 pounds, which now seems light to me, and I got it all the way up to my shoulder. And it was this feeling of just, like, invincibility.

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Christine Chessman: of, like, their…

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Alyssa Ages: Nothing in this room that I can't lift, if I want it badly enough or I try hard enough.

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Alyssa Ages: And that was the start of what's now over a decade, of doing this, and then, yeah, the year that I turned 40, I decided the new strongman goal was to pull a truck, which I then did, and it was awesome.

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Ela Law: Wow.

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Christine Chessman: Unbelievable. I mean, I find you, through Steph Godrow, because she's… I've followed her for many, many years, and had her on the podcast previously as well. And she's always inspired me in terms of strength. But then, after I read your book, and listened to all of the podcasts you've ever done in your life,

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Christine Chessman: Then I started buying documentaries with Donna Murr, who was, like, you know, a strong woman, and I was looking for all of… there's very few…

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Christine Chessman: documentaries or any shows about women, sort of strong women competitions that I could find, and I did my ADHD going down rabbit holes quite a lot, and I even ended up watching The Gladiators.

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Alyssa Ages: Yeah, I watched that too.

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Christine Chessman: Buffles and mayhem. But it's… it was interesting to me, because there's so many strong men.

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Christine Chessman: documentaries and things that you could watch, but, it's still… is it still relatively new for women? Is it growing? Is it…

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Alyssa Ages: Yeah, it's… I wouldn't say it's new, but I would say it's growing, and I think it's been… it was, like, this kind of slow drip, and then in the last, maybe, couple of years, it started to grow at a much greater level. So there are now competitions where women are getting, if not the same amount of prize money as the men, at least closer.

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Christine Chessman: Brilliant.

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Alyssa Ages: There have been some where they've put the women right on the stage with the men, so we're not, like, you know, kind of an afterthought.

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Alyssa Ages: And then I think you have a lot of women who are, like, Donna Moore, Chloe Brennan, Andrea Thompson. There's a lot of these women who are also actively out there making it a point to bring strong women

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Alyssa Ages: to the forefront and to a little bit more media coverage as well. So, yeah, I think it's growing. I mean, listen, it's a… it's a weird niche sport. It's never, I think, going to take off in the way as something like CrossFit has. Because it's, you know, it's a little grittier, too.

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Christine Chessman: Yeah.

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Alyssa Ages: And it's…

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Alyssa Ages: CrossFit gyms, for all of their grittiness, like, there's still… it's in a nice room, and there's, you know, the nice gym padding on the floors and the whatever, and, you know, Strongman, a lot of it is, cobbling stuff together in your garage, asking your welder friend to make you this weird implement because you can't find it anywhere else. You know, it's… I think it's… it feels a little bit intimidating to people, so I don't see it ever getting to that same

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Alyssa Ages: level, but I like that it is becoming a little bit bigger and more well-known.

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Ela Law: And how… how is the…

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Ela Law: the relationship between the men who may feel like, well, this is our arena, and the women who are competing, is it generally really friendly? Have you, encountered sexism in the sport, or is it generally quite, sort of, friendly and…

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Ela Law: And supportive.

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Alyssa Ages: Yeah, I think now, especially, it's gotten significantly more friendly and supportive.

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Alyssa Ages: At my level, you know, I can't super speak to the pro level, because I've never competed there, but the amateur level, certainly. You know, you are… I think there's…

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Alyssa Ages: there's not a lot of ego at the amateur level, because we are all competing in, like, the parking lot of a strip mall. Right. You can't think all that much of yourself in that scenario. And I, I mean, I… listen, I love watching the strongmen and the strong women, I think both are amazing.

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Alyssa Ages: But there's something for me about watching strong women compete that I feel like is particularly exciting, because you're seeing women who are doing something we've been traditionally told we shouldn't do, and are doing it to this extreme level. And so when they're lifting hundreds and hundreds of pounds, there's something more exciting about that to me.

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Ela Law: Yeah, absolutely. There's a significance to that, that you don't necessarily have with men who are expected to be strong, sort of stereotypically. Whereas for women, as you said, it's not something that is associated with a female person, sadly. So, yeah, that makes complete sense.

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Christine Chessman: Is there, I… is it mailman? Would you say mailman rather than postman?

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Alyssa Ages: Oh, oh, like the person who delivers my mail?

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Ela Law: Yeah, yeah. Is it…

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Alyssa Ages: Mailman, I guess.

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Christine Chessman: Kettleman, yeah, so we say postman. I had a story, sorry, that was the reason. So the postman delivered my kettlebell, my new kettlebell, because I'm now… I'm thinking of competing in kettlebell sport. I'm not going to do strongwoman, because I can't… I'm not good at welding or anything practical.

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Christine Chessman: But I love a kettlebell, and it's… they've got a little niche kettlebell sort of amateur championship.

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Alyssa Ages: Yeah.

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Christine Chessman: Very exciting. But, the postman delivered, a kettlebell to my door, which was only 14, 16K. Yeah. And he was like, oh, careful, love, you won't be able to lift that, it's really heavy.

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Christine Chessman: I was just like, no, no, no, it's fine, I can lift it, I can lift it, but he was, he was like, oh, no, I'll help you in, and he was trying to be nice and all of that. It was just more of the assumption, oh, there's no way you could lift it, because you're a woman.

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Alyssa Ages: Oh, yeah.

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Alyssa Ages: Listen, I still get that in the gym. I'm taking plates off of a barbell that I've just lifted for several sets, and I have someone go, do you want some help with that? And I'm like.

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Alyssa Ages: I just… if I could bring it over here, put it on the barbell, lift it a bunch of times, do you think that maybe I can just take one of them off myself? And again, I know there's a level of trying to be nice.

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Alyssa Ages: where did I have a similar thing? I went to go buy sand for one of my sandbags, and it was, like, a 50-pound bag of sand from the hardware store, and the guy was like, oh, let me… let me help you with that out to your car, and I'm like, I'm good.

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Ela Law: Yes!

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Alyssa Ages: Got it.

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Ela Law: Jaw drop. What?

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Alyssa Ages: special about that feeling.

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Christine Chessman: Oh, it's just… the idea, I think, what really struck me, it was so many things in your book that I could come back to, but it was about your girls, because I am a person who panders to my children. I don't know if you've… you know that, Ella?

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Ela Law: don't, I'm afraid.

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Christine Chessman: Something that… yeah, something that you said was, like, if your children were trying to open something, you would go, have you tried it first? So you would kind of say, no, you try it, and then if you can't do it, okay, fair enough, but you… it made me go, well, I need to do that.

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Christine Chessman: You know what I mean? It's by giving them agency and actually belief that they can do hard things and build the resilience in them.

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Christine Chessman: And I have a tendency to try and take their load away from them, and it is… it just… I mean, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was like, wow, that's something which…

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Alyssa Ages: I think we… listen, I think we're hardwired to do that as parents, right?

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Christine Chessman: Yeah.

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Alyssa Ages: is to take care of them. So, and even when that extends to things that we know logically they could probably do, the instinct is always still just, let me do it, let me do it. And I have to stop myself all the time with even just, like, the silliest things of, like, I went to pick up my kid's clothing off the floor this morning when she was getting changed and put it in the laundry bin, and then I was like, wait a minute, you do it.

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Alyssa Ages: You do it when you're done. Like, you don't need me to do this for you. And then it goes as far as things like I did, a mud run with my older daughter this summer, and I had said to her at the beginning, you know, we are allowed to skip obstacles, so anything that you feel like is maybe too much, we can skip. And I actually almost regretted saying that, but she didn't end up skipping anything.

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Alyssa Ages: She wanted to do all of it, and she wanted to take that chance, and I realized how many times we approached something and I wanted to go, oh, do you want to do the easier one of this? And having to kind of stop myself and go, let me let her make that decision.

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Christine Chessman: I didn't love that.

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Alyssa Ages: Feel like that looks scary, or… and 9 times out of 10, she made the decision to do the harder thing.

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Ela Law: It's quite interesting, because I think giving her permission to not do the hard thing might actually spur her on, and then if she can't do it, at least she won't feel like she failed at something that mummy expected her to be able to do, so maybe that's not a bad…

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Ela Law: Bad approach, because then she… she was… she had agency over whether she wanted to do it or not.

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Alyssa Ages: Yeah, and I think it depends. I mean, I have a kid who's particularly anxious, and a friend of mine had told me something that someone had told her with that, which was, like, sometimes if your kid says that they're scared of something, scared of doing something, and then you tell them they don't have to do it, you're just reinforcing their belief that.

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Christine Chessman: There, yeah.

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Ela Law: Hmm.

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Alyssa Ages: So that's… and that's not true for every kid, but…

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Alyssa Ages: For me, it's something I have to watch out for.

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Ela Law: Yeah, yeah. So how do you talk to your girls about, strength training and lifting heavy things? Is that something that they're really interested in, or is that something that they just see you do and think, well, that's just what mummy does? It's just normal?

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Alyssa Ages: They like to be in the gym with me, my younger one in particular.

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Alyssa Ages: And they will say, like, we were, they had a friend over from camp for a playdate, and they were playing charades, and this little girl kept doing this movement where she was, like, reaching down to the floor and then going like this, and then reaching down to the floor and going like this, and my older daughter goes, oh, are you being a strong woman?

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Alyssa Ages: That was so… I was like… and turned out, she was, she called it an exercising girl, but…

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Ela Law: Okay.

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Alyssa Ages: It was really funny, so they do… they get it, and I think to an extent they like trying some of that stuff. Like, they'll come in, they want to pick up the kettlebell, they want the things that feel more like a game, so they want to get on the rowing machine.

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Alyssa Ages: But, yeah, sometimes it's like, they want to know what… what thing they can pick up, and especially doing that race with my daughter, and there were times where we had to carry, like, a heavy load of some sort, and she wanted to do it. She was like, yeah, give me… which ones can I carry? Let me… let me go do that. So…

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Alyssa Ages: They get it. It's a funny sport, because unlike, you know, running, there's not as much I can truly do with them in it, so it's a lot of them kind of watching and then doing the little versions they can, but I'm hopeful that seeing that as they get older, we can get them more involved.

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Christine Chessman: I, I had a question talking about running,

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Christine Chessman: Because you talked a lot in your book about, sort of, your relationship with running compared to, sort of, strength training in terms of it being a tool you could use to process emotion and just help you through really tough times. And that's… it's an interesting one to me. I've run marathons myself in the past,

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Christine Chessman: I think it's 5 now, wow.

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Ela Law: Nope.

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Christine Chessman: And, yeah, I… it's interesting, because I go through phases where I run most of the time, or I lift, so it's…

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Christine Chessman: And I just was wondering why you find strength training different, or how you find it different in terms of processing difficult things that you're going through, compared to running, because I think you mentioned something about if you run

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Christine Chessman: you're not… you still got it with you? I don't know, I couldn't quite…

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Alyssa Ages: I found… I find with running, and in particular, there was, like, there was a point in my life when I was going through a lot of struggles with fertility, and I had had a miscarriage, and running was…

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Alyssa Ages: my kind of go-to, like, my safe place, and when I would run, it was this catharsis. Running brings up, I mean, that, like, that surge of adrenaline and whatever else comes up when you're running.

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Alyssa Ages: brought up a lot of emotion, and it would feel like I was releasing all of it, but then once that runner's high kind of wore off at the end, I was like, oh, I sort of just feel the same as I did before.

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Alyssa Ages: And lifting… I was doing something every time I went in that I didn't think I could do before I went into the gym. So I was leaving this different sense of agency and a different sense of…

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Alyssa Ages: That I could do and, like, endure really hard things.

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Christine Chessman: Hmm.

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Alyssa Ages: And so they… they both had a place. Like, running, I still… I still love running. It's… it's like a go-to for me, it's just… I love it. But lifting felt like it just changed the way I felt about myself.

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Alyssa Ages: and the things that I was capable of doing.

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Alyssa Ages: And there was this one, and I write about this in the book, but there was this moment where I was interviewing somebody who does something called trauma-informed weightlifting. So, she works with people who have gone through some sort of trauma and, helps them

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Alyssa Ages: Learn to heal from that through lifting weights.

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Alyssa Ages: Wow. And it's… that is very much about kind of meeting people where they're at, so sometimes having a weight on your back can actually be too much for somebody who's gone through something major. But…

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Alyssa Ages: for me, one of the things I realized from that conversation was that when I was going into the gym post-miscarriage, and I was deadlifting, and I was doing a heavy deadlift, and I had to wear, like, a big, you know, weight belt, to do that safely, I have to take this deep breath, and I have to brace my core, and I have to feel my abdominals pushing up against this belt.

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Alyssa Ages: And I have to believe, when I'm doing that, that this part of my body that had felt like

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Alyssa Ages: A home to, kind of, sadness and weakness and vulnerability and brokenness could also actually still be strong.

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Alyssa Ages: And I didn't know that at the time, that that was probably part of the healing process, and I only learned that afterwards in researching and writing the book. And it was this kind of revelation of, oh, that's… that's why it made so much sense, that's why it was so powerful.

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Alyssa Ages: And that was really cool to learn.

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Ela Law: That's beautiful. That's… yeah, that's… that's such a…

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Ela Law: A powerful connection to your call.

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Christine Chessman: Yeah. And I also, I also really appreciated you in the book talking so openly about your miscarriage, because

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Christine Chessman: So many women…

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Ela Law: have experienced it, but don't talk about it, and there's so many women carrying that around, and you know, it is such a loss, and it's such a hard thing to go through.

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Christine Chessman: And it was… it just felt… you have to read the book, Ella, I'm gonna…

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Ela Law: I do, yeah, I know, I know. It's definitely, it's on my list.

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Christine Chessman: I'm gonna get Ella into strength training by the end of this podcast.

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Alyssa Ages: Yeah, I love it.

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Ela Law: But, I like the idea of it, but I'm… sorry, you were just about to ask something, Christine, but I've got a question.

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Christine Chessman: Well, we always have the conversation. This is something that I wrote down, was that we always have the conversation because we don't want to put clients off movement, and we want to… a lot of our clients have quite difficult relationships with movement, and it's always that fine line between pushing yourself, challenging yourself, punishing yourself. What is… when is…

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Christine Chessman: too much? When is it enough? When is it too much? And I struggle to tread that line, because I naturally want to challenge myself.

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Christine Chessman: And often end up doing too much, and then I'm exhausted, and then… but it's…

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Christine Chessman: How do you tread that line yourself?

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Alyssa Ages: Yeah, I mean, one of the things… I don't…

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Alyssa Ages: So I've been competing in the sport for a really long time, and I stopped for a couple years having kids, and then for the few years afterwards. And then I came back to it a few years ago.

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Alyssa Ages: And I just very recently made the decision to take a break from competing. So, still training, strongmen is still the sport that I love, still lifting all the weird stuff. But I was kind of like…

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Alyssa Ages: I'm… feel like I'm continuing to force this part of the sport that is just, like, more than I… more than I need for myself right now. You know, I don't…

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Alyssa Ages: why am I pushing myself to a level to compete at this when I just want to continue to grow, and change in it, and get better at it? But it's a line that, like, for a long time, I mean, you know, you heard me kind of listing off all the extreme sports that I've done. I didn't know how to toe that line for a very long time, and some of that, I think, has just come with age of going.

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Alyssa Ages: you can do this, and it doesn't have to be who you are. It can be, like, a thing that you do, and not define your personality. And what I realized for me in particular, I was kind of like, oh, strength has now become both my hobby and my job.

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Alyssa Ages: And I need it to be one of those things and not both.

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Alyssa Ages: So, for me, I kind of was like, okay, well, I'm gonna continue writing about this and talking about this, but I don't think I have to compete in it in order to have… have what I'm doing have value.

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Christine Chessman: That is interesting.

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Ela Law: Yeah, that's… that must be a very sort of blurry line for a while, because I feel like, from personal experience, once you get into something, it almost becomes all-consuming, so to kind of say, actually, no, I can't have this taking over my life, I've got a…

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Ela Law: life outside of lifting and strongman stuff. It's quite important, isn't it, for your own personal identity.

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Alyssa Ages: Yes, absolutely. Yeah, and listen, I think, you know, you can take any sport that is, at its nature, a little bit extreme, you can very easily take to extremes. Yes. And that works for some people, doesn't work for some people.

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Christine Chessman: In terms of a coach, if you had a coach, which I'm sure you do, you have a coach, do you like the gentle nudge? Do you like the tough love? What do you… what do you respond to when you're training?

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Alyssa Ages: I…

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Alyssa Ages: So I spend a lot of time in gyms when I'm traveling, and I think one of the most fascinating things to watch is how the average trainer works with a client. And it's sort of like, hey, person, I found this thing that worked for me and gave me big biceps, and so I'm gonna now put that into your program. And maybe it's just because I've only had very good trainers. I find that wild. I'm like.

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Alyssa Ages: why are you not working with the individual person? So I've now had the same coach for…

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Alyssa Ages: Gosh, almost 10 years.

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Alyssa Ages: And I have that relationship with him that has lasted that long, because…

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Alyssa Ages: it's never been about pushing me beyond what I want to do, or making me into some sort of athlete because he feels like he needs to be able to say he's got an athlete who wins competitions. Like, it's been… he's worked with me through pregnancies, and postpartum, and all of that, and, like, all very…

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Alyssa Ages: Safely, and just with, kind of, my… with my body and what works for my body and mind.

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Alyssa Ages: And that's… that's not every trainer, but I also would very much encourage people that if that's not your trainer, go find one that is like that.

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Christine Chessman: Oh, 100%.

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Ela Law: Can't be easy to find someone who's that, sort of, in that sort of niche.

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Ela Law: Sports.

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Alyssa Ages: In this sport, oddly enough, yeah, because a lot of times people get to a high level, and then they go, I will now coach.

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Christine Chessman: codes.

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Alyssa Ages: Which is exactly what I'm talking about.

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Ela Law: Oh, okay.

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Alyssa Ages: gyms of, like, I did this, therefore I can now coach you to do it.

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Ela Law: Okay.

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Alyssa Ages: And, you know, that doesn't… to me, that just makes you somebody who's, like, maybe a good guide?

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Christine Chessman: A good…

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Alyssa Ages: Coach, or a good trainer, or somebody with that level of expertise.

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Ela Law: Yeah, yeah. Christine said earlier, by the end of this conversation, you will both.

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Christine Chessman: That's me.

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Ela Law: me into someone who's going to lift. So, walk me through how you would do that. So, if someone is completely new to it, like me, I swing a kettlebell, and I lift a tiny little dumbbell every now and again.

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Ela Law: But that's it. So, where would I start? If someone's listening to this and says, actually, this sounds amazing, I would like to give this a go, where do you even start with it?

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Alyssa Ages: Yeah, I mean, I will start by saying, you know, I'm no longer a trainer, so I'm saying this from… I was a trainer, but I'm saying this kind of just anecdotal, my personal opinion.

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Alyssa Ages: But I do think, like, the most important thing that anybody can do if they want to get into strength, and it is within their means, is to work one-on-one with somebody. Okay. Because when you are lifting something, even if it doesn't seem heavy, like, it's heavy for you when you get started, and if you are moving your body in the wrong way, and you're engaging the wrong muscles.

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Alyssa Ages: the risk of injury is so much greater than with most other things. You know, if you swing a tennis racket wrong a couple of times, like, I don't know, maybe you're gonna get a little bit of, like, tendonitis or something that's gonna go away, but you're not gonna, like, seriously injure yourself.

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Alyssa Ages: And so I think that that is… that's the most important start, and then I would want that person that you're working with to start you out with bodyweight movements.

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Ela Law: Okay.

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Alyssa Ages: no one should put a barbell on your back the second you get into the gym, right? I want you to learn how to get down into a squat properly, how to engage the muscles, how to feel the right muscles. Maybe the next move is to do it with a resistance band.

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Alyssa Ages: then very slowly, you're adding weights to it, and then I would want them to do what's called progressive overload with you, which is…

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Alyssa Ages: You are slowly increasing either the weight or the time that you're under tension, so, like, the amount of time you're spending, let's say, lowering into a squat, or the time at the bottom, whatever that is.

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Alyssa Ages: Making those little changes, kind of, as you go to keep you progressing at a pace that makes sense for you.

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Alyssa Ages: And thinking about functional movements, like, if you are not somebody who is entering a bodybuilding show, I see almost no reason for you to stand there doing endless bicep curls.

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Ela Law: Okay.

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Alyssa Ages: Like, someone who's starting in strength training, compound movements. Like, I want you doing these mostly full-body movements that are gonna make you a more functional human, so that you actually see the benefits of it.

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Alyssa Ages: Maybe you walk in and you're like, my goal is bigger biceps, but for the average person who gets into strength training, the goal is, I just want to be a stronger human. I want it to, like, not hurt when I carry my grocery bags down the street.

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Christine Chessman: Yeah.

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Alyssa Ages: I want to be able to lift my kid, and carry them screaming in the middle of a tantrum, at least the kids at my age, my kids' ages, like, you know, from the playground back home, and not throw my back out. Yeah.

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Alyssa Ages: I think that, like, that's where social media can get a little screwy with us, is, like, we have these ideas that we have to either do strength training to look a certain way, or do strength training to be able to do these ridiculous feats, and, like.

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Alyssa Ages: You don't… no normal person has to pull a truck with their body. I can't do that, but, like…

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Alyssa Ages: You know, but the main goal of strength for me still is just to be able to, like, move through the world knowing that there's very little that I can't do.

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Ela Law: Wow.

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Christine Chessman: I think… I think you were… was it a podcast that you were on, where you, you were talking about when you're a grandma, and… or it was somebody, maybe it was the podcast host, and you… and I think she said she doesn't want to be the tiny little grandma, she wants to be the.

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Alyssa Ages: But he spoke to me. I was like, I don't want to be the tiny little grandma. I want to be the father.

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Christine Chessman: We're not talking.

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Alyssa Ages: Wait, there's this commercial that airs here, I couldn't even tell you what it's for, I don't remember.

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Alyssa Ages: But it's this old man, I don't know how old he is, maybe he's in his 80s, and he's in his little, like, shed in his backyard, and he is, for, like, 2 months, you see him trying to lift this kettlebell. And eventually, once he's able to get it off the floor, now he's trying to pick it up a little higher and a little higher, and at the end, you see that what he's doing is he's doing reps of picking it up like this, and bringing it over his head. And then the final scene is he's

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Alyssa Ages: got his

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Alyssa Ages: his daughter and his granddaughter over at his home for Christmas, and he picks up the granddaughter and, like, brings her to the top of the tree to put the star on it. And I'm like, that's it. That's it, that's fine. That's fine.

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Ela Law: Yeah.

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Christine Chessman: That's… I… and you were talking about, sort of, why some people would train, and, sort of, obviously, aesthetics comes into the conversation at some point, and I did a post which was kind of inspired by you on…

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Christine Chessman: you know, if you're scared to get bulky. And this is a, you know, a question that… that I get all the time when I have a new client. It's like, will I get bulky? And we have to obviously dig down into that. But it's also… we live in this culture, and it's… it's something which I've made peace with, that when I'm…

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Christine Chessman: sort of training a lot with kettlebells, I develop muscles and look slightly different than I do when I'm running a lot, and not lifting so much. And I just have to… occasionally, I'll see myself and I'll go.

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Christine Chessman: That's okay. And it's okay to feel that initial, oh, that's okay, that's just the culture.

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Christine Chessman: It's okay! And I think that's, I really enjoyed the chapter on taking up space in your book, because you addressed that really beautifully, and it was kind of that… because you've had the same sort of battle, haven't you?

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Alyssa Ages: Yeah.

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Alyssa Ages: Yeah, I mean, my whole life, right? I mean, I grew up in, like, I came into my teenage years in the 90s when we had Cape Moss, Nothing Tastes As Good as Skinny Feels. Like, you… I mean, I can't… that is so pervasive that sometimes I think about that, like, once a day. Involuntarily. And it doesn't necessarily change, like, I'm now… I have enough free will that it doesn't…

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Alyssa Ages: make me not eat the donut, but I think about it.

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Christine Chessman: Yeah.

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Alyssa Ages: intentionally, it just pops into my head. So yeah, it's, you know, it's this huge fight, I think, for me, for women of my generation, like, our entire lives, if you are told that smaller is better.

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Alyssa Ages: Then, you know, choosing to make stronger, bigger, better, is, like, it's, you know,

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Alyssa Ages: it's a very different feeling, and it's not without… it's kind of back and forth. Like, I don't… I can't say… I would love to be able to say I found lifting, and all of a sudden I have no body image issues anymore.

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Christine Chessman: Hmm.

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Alyssa Ages: it's a thousand percent not true. You know, even as I try to put on muscle, when you're putting on muscle, you are putting on mass, right? And so things are gonna fit differently, and sometimes I put on a shirt or a pair of pants or whatever that fits tighter than it did before, and even though I know I'm stronger, there's still that moment of going, oh no.

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Ela Law: I've got to fix this.

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Alyssa Ages: Right? And I think what lifting has radically changed for me is that recognition.

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Alyssa Ages: So, in the past, I would have just felt that way, and I would have immediately, like, I don't know, crash-dieted or something, whatever it is, or just felt terrible about myself. And lifting has given me the ability to have that feeling.

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Alyssa Ages: But then go.

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Alyssa Ages: let's, like, let's look at that. Let's dissect that. Why do you feel that way? And then kind of talk myself away from it as best as I can.

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Alyssa Ages: So it's… that, I think, is… that's the big shift.

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Ela Law: Yeah, so not acting on that thought and making it your story, but just being curious about, oh, okay, there's that thought.

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Alyssa Ages: About my body.

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Ela Law: And I'm gonna sit with it.

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Alyssa Ages: Yeah, and I, and it's…

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Alyssa Ages: for me, it's also just really important because of my daughters, you know? I don't want them to have… they're gonna have those feelings at some point, you know, girls in the world, what are we gonna do? But, you know, at some point, social media is gonna get them. But for now, I try to have conversations around… and it gets, like, hairier and hairier as they understand more, but just around, like.

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Alyssa Ages: you know, foods are not inherently bad or good, and, you know, it's… we had the funniest conversation where they were… they can both read now. One of them picked up a ketchup bottle, and the ketchup bottle, for some reason, had in huge letters, like, you know, only 20 calories per serving. And my older daughter said.

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Ela Law: That's a calorie. I was like, okay.

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Christine Chessman: Okay.

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Christine Chessman: Tay soon!

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Alyssa Ages: thank God she'd not heard of it before, but I said, well, calories are energy.

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Alyssa Ages: And she thought about that for a second, and she goes, oh, she goes, we should probably not give that to Isabelle, her younger sister. We should not let her have ketchup for dinner. I was like, why? She goes, because you always say you don't want her to have too much energy before she goes to bed. I was like…

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Alyssa Ages: That's perfect. That is good.

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Ela Law: Let's go.

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Alyssa Ages: How does the understanding?

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Ela Law: Let's stick with that for now. Excellent.

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Christine Chessman: I absolutely love that. I have… my eldest daughter is, she's 17, so nearly 18, and she was doing really big exams in the UK called GCSEs, and I, you know, you worry about your kids when they're that age.

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Christine Chessman: But, before her exams, she would sit down to the biggest meal I've ever seen.

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Christine Chessman: And she would have potato waffles, she'd have the whole lot of stuff, and she's like, I don't want to be hungry, and I need the energy to think for my brain, and for… and it was just, matter-of-fact like that, it was, I need this food, because I certainly don't want to be hungry in the middle of my exam. And it just… it just made me go, oh, this is… the relief…

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Christine Chessman: It's just to see your child kind of enjoy food, and see the relation to how it makes her feel, and how it… do you know what I mean? It translates into her feeling better and being able to concentrate more, rather than, what is this going to do to… it was just a lovely thing.

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Alyssa Ages: Yeah, yeah, and listen, they're all gonna hear about it in some way or another, but if they have the basis of knowing at least that, like, the most influential person in their life.

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Ela Law: Hmm.

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Alyssa Ages: As long as we are the most influential people in their lives, feels a certain way.

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Ela Law: Yeah.

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Alyssa Ages: then I think that that's the best job that we can do.

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Ela Law: Yeah, yeah, you're so right. We can't shelter them from what's going on outside, and their, you know, diet culture is rife, and they will encounter.

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Alyssa Ages: all of those things. But if they have the basis and the foundation of, actually.

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Ela Law: It will be in the back of their minds, and that's, as you said, that's the best we can do, really.

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Christine Chessman: Yeah, yeah.

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Christine Chessman: Alyssa, what was… what in your… what is your next step in terms of writing? So, I absolutely love your writing, and I would like to read more, so if you could write some more books, that would be brilliant.

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Christine Chessman: But what have you got planned? Do you, sort of, do mainly articles for papers, or for… what is your, kind of, mainstay at the minute?

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Alyssa Ages: Yeah. That's the… the bulk of my work now is… is the journalism, is freelance journalism. So, I write a decent amount for the New York Times, for their well section. I write for the Globe and Mail, which is sort of Canada's New York Times, I guess? And then I… I write for Outside Magazine, and I occasionally do features for… I just did something for GQ.

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Alyssa Ages: And something for, Men's Health UK, as well.

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Alyssa Ages: So, that's the bulk of it, and then I've actually gotten into ghostwriting, because I love writing books, but I don't have anything in mind to write another one of my own.

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Alyssa Ages: So it gives me that kind of opportunity to dig into a bigger project without having it be my thing.

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Christine Chessman: Emily, you wrote an article, was it… is his name Mitchell Hooper?

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Alyssa Ages: That's it.

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Christine Chessman: Yeah, I loved that. So you kind of followed him on… and that was fascinating to me. Sorry, Ellis.

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Alyssa Ages: I believe that was a blast to write, that one.

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Christine Chessman: So, can you just describe what that was about for Ella, who said…

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Alyssa Ages: Yeah.

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Ela Law: doesn't know anything about it.

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Alyssa Ages: Yes. So I, became connected to Mitchell Hooper, who was the 2023 World Strongest Man and the first Canadian to ever win World Strongest Man. When he first won, I had done some interviews with him for some Canadian publications, and then we stayed in touch. We've actually been working on his book together.

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Alyssa Ages: And the opportunity came up to fly to Sacramento for World's Strongest Man this year, and follow him around, and then write about it for GQ. And it was a really… it was a very interesting time to be there, because he's somebody who, for a very long time, just won absolutely everything.

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Alyssa Ages: everything he entered, he dominated. And I was there for a year where he didn't win, and so it was a very different article than I'd kind of gone and expecting to write, but it ended up being a sort of, you know, what is that pressure like? What are those expectations like when you are known as the person who doesn't lose? And then you do.

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Alyssa Ages: So it was… yeah, it was a really, it was a bucket list thing for me to just be at World Strikes now, because I've been watching it since I was a kid. I literally got chills when they set up the Atlas Stones.

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Ela Law: Wow.

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Alyssa Ages: I've been watching this for so long, and it's right here in front of me, because I can really nerd out on Strongman.

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Ela Law: Brilliant.

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Christine Chessman: But it's that idea of how do you overcome nerves just before you… you lift something, and you, you know, talking about how you would feel lifting it in the gym on any normal day, and then why is it so different when, well, you've got eyes on you, and you've got expectations on you, and it's…

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Christine Chessman: That idea of how do you go about keeping your nerve when… I just, I find it fascinating.

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Alyssa Ages: Yeah, I do too, which is why I love kind of digging into that with him and just with athletes in general.

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Ela Law: So, Ella, have we convinced you?

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Ela Law: I'm gonna dig up my heaviest kettlebell in a minute. Yeah, I think so. No, I do like… I really, really like the sound of it. I really like the idea of, for all sorts of different reasons, to be able to…

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Ela Law: lift things, and I think what really struck a chord is this, do I want to be that tiny little grandma, or not? And absolutely not.

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Ela Law: I want to be the one that, you know, lifts that 20 kilo packet that comes and surprises the postperson with how strong I am. That's what I want to be, and I want to carry my supermarket bags home. So, I think from a functional point of view, I'm totally convinced.

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Ela Law: I think my worry is the, the, the risk involved in injuring yourself.

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Ela Law: Because I am prone to… sprains and strains and muscle inflammations and things like that, so I would be

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Ela Law: probably I would need to work one-to-one with somebody on that, so that I would do it properly, rather than just.

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Alyssa Ages: Even in a small group, you know, and then you also have the benefit of having, that accountability with somebody else.

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Ela Law: Mmm.

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Alyssa Ages: One, it's… makes it a little bit more, like, reasonably priced, but two, it's also… you have… you've got a buddy doing it with you.

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Ela Law: Yeah, I love that idea.

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Christine Chessman: And Ella, remember, the more strength you build.

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Ela Law: Mmm.

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Christine Chessman: more robust. That's it, you know, in a whole day. Exactly, exactly.

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Ela Law: Exactly, that's why… That's what, sort of,

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Ela Law: quite appealing to me, because I want to… I don't want to be the one that's always injured and always hurting, so I want to be strong. So yeah, definitely. Watch this space. Meet me in a year, and we'll talk about how many Atlas stones I'm swinging over my shoulder. Is that the right word? Atlas? Atlas stones? Is that right?

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Alyssa Ages: Atlas Stones.

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Christine Chessman: I'll come watch you.

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Ela Law: There we go.

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Christine Chessman: Alyssa, thank you so much for joining us today, and if anybody would like to see more of you, or to engage with you, what's the best place for them to find you?

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Alyssa Ages: You can find me on social media. I'm… I guess, on all the platforms, it's just Alyssa Aegis, and my website is also Alyssaagis.com, and I have all of my clips of my work there, and you can find me that way, you can contact me that way. You can find links to the book there as well, and the book is sold pretty much everywhere you can buy books.

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Christine Chessman: Yeah, I've got… I got it on Audible, and I love it. I love it when the author actually reads it, you know, it's absolutely brilliant, so I loved it.

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Christine Chessman: Thank you again.

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Alyssa Ages: Thank you, this was wonderful.

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Christine Chessman: And for anybody… I was gonna say the podcast will be out on Friday, but obviously, if you're listening, you're gonna… you're gonna…

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Ela Law: It is out already then, isn't it?

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Christine Chessman: So I'll just say goodbye, then.

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Ela Law: Thank you so much, it's really nice to meet you.

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Alyssa Ages: Thank you, you both, as well.