Strength Training 101: How to Start and Succeed with Alyssa Ages

Have you ever doubted your own physical abilities? Believed that you were simply not cut out for sports or fitness? Well, let me share a story that will challenge your perceptions. Meet Alyssa, a woman who thought she lacked natural athletic talent, only to discover an unexpected twist that changed her life forever. This twist led her down a path of self-discovery, strength training, and ultimately, the realization that our bodies are capable of so much more than we could ever imagine. Curious to know what happened next? Keep listening, because this story is bound to inspire and leave you with a burning desire to unleash your own hidden strength.

In this episode, you will be able to:

• Gain the mental and physical empowerment you've been seeking through strength training.
• Overcome intimidation and become confident in your strength training journey.
• Learn how to get started with strength training and build a personalized routine that works for you.
• Discover the benefits of bodyweight exercises and how they can help you build strength.
• Explore the mindset and community surrounding strength training competitions and how they can enhance your fitness journey.

My special guest is Alyssa Ages

Alyssa Ages is a journalist and fitness expert whose work has appeared in GQ, Self, Men's Health, Parents, and other publications. She is currently the fitness columnist for The Globe and Mail, Canada's preeminent daily newspaper. With a background in competitive strength training and endurance sports, Alyssa brings a unique perspective to the world of fitness. Her journey from self-doubt to discovering her true physical capabilities has inspired many, and her book Secrets of Giants delves into the true meaning of strength. Alyssa's passion for pushing boundaries and challenging herself is evident in her approach to fitness. As a guest on "We Should Talk About That," she shares her insights and experiences, offering valuable knowledge and motivation for beginners looking to start their own strength training journey.

Buy the book here:
Secrets of Giants

Transcript

Jessica Kidwell: 0:00

This podcast was created to be a space for conversation. The topics will vary, but the conversation will always be honest, authentic and sometimes even a little uncomfortable. My hope is that through these conversations, we will build a community of people who might not always agree with each other, but will definitely feel less isolated and alone. So I'm Jessica Kidwell and this is we Should Talk About that. Hello, we Stack community. How are you?

Jessica Kidwell: 0:44

I am sore, not like oh, I maybe overdid it on a hike or something. I mean my muscles are not fully following my directions when I try to go down steps or sit on the toilet, the kind of store that makes putting on socks feel like something you might not ever be able to do again. What has caused this amount of soreness in me? Well, I have introduced weightlifting into my life. And listen, I am not trying to bulk up and hulk out, although I do happen to call my early morning workouts swole camp and my workout buddy, jamie, is my swolemate. But I have decided to introduce weightlifting into my regular fitness for the same reason that I've introduced most changes in my life these days the impending menopause, and I want to get into the reasons why weightlifting and weight training is something we should talk about, especially at this age. But first I want to introduce today's guest.

Jessica Kidwell: 1:50

Alyssa Ages is a journalist and fitness expert whose work has appeared in GQ, self, men's health, parents and other publications. She is currently the fitness columnist for the Globe and Mail, which is Canada's preeminent daily newspaper. Alyssa also happens to be a strong man, or maybe rather I should say, strong woman, competitor and endurance athlete, and this fall she published the book Secrets of Giants a journey to uncover the true meaning of strength. Alyssa, thank you so much for coming on. We should talk about that. Thank you so much for having me. I actually have so many things that I want to talk to you about. I hope that you are ready for all of them. But first and foremost, I want to start off by you sharing how you got involved in the world of competitive strength training, because you certainly did not have this as a long-term goal in your life, right.

Alyssa Ages: 2:51

That is right. Yeah, I was not like your typical athletic kid. When I was about 10, I moved from Brooklyn to Long Island and all of the girls in my age group were playing softball and for some reason I decided this was not what I was going to do. I was going to play baseball. And so I decided I was going to do this and it really did not go well. I feel like it's an understatement, actually, despite the fact that my team actually won the championship that season. I had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Alyssa Ages: 3:22

I never once hit the ball and in fact, the only accolade I got in that entire time was I got the MVP game ball once for being hit with the ball instead of hitting it and getting an automatic walk to first base, and you know that kind of. That's a formative year. So that really changes how you think about yourself. And for me, I internalized this idea that I am just not good at athletics. I am not an athlete, I'm not coordinated. This is not something that's innate to me, and I started to just kind of avoid it as much as I possibly could. And I avoided it as much as I could for the next probably decade, until I had to play a softball game with a job that I was working and I really didn't want to, but it was kind of like you know, go up to bat or I guess, quit, I don't know. And I went and I hit the ball and when I had a chance I ran off the sidelines and.

Alyssa Ages: 4:17

I grabbed my phone and I called my mom and I was like, mom, mom, like I finally hit the ball. Isn't that like the most amazing thing? After all those times that I swung and missed? I finally hit the ball. And there's this kind of pause on the other end of the phone and she goes well, yeah, it's great that you hit the ball, but you know, it wasn't that you swung and missed. All those times in Little League Baseball you just never swung the bat and it was this real moment of going. Oh, my god, this story I've told myself about myself for the last decade is wrong.

Alyssa Ages: 4:52

And I decided okay, well, I am going to now swing at absolutely everything. So I quite literally signed up almost right away for a marathon without being able to run a mile. When I did a few of those, I decided I'm going to do a triathlon. Even though I could not swim more than two laps in the pool, I went all the way through to doing an Ironman and when I finished that I thought, well, what's the next extreme thing that I can do? And first it was sign up for a year of hot yoga. But that was really short lived because I do not like hot yoga. So that's maybe like the only thing that I quit. But from there I found my way into a CrossFit gym and I just remember the feeling of picking up it was, you know, an empty barbell for the first time and starting to kind of understand the way that that movement should go and how my body was supposed to move and what it felt like to move something one day that I couldn't do the day before and I just wanted to keep going back as much as I could.

Alyssa Ages: 5:48

I went every morning dutifully at 6.30 AM. I was part of the 6.30 AM morning crew. I loved it. I loved hitting personal records because everything was a personal record. And then a friend of mine said you should come to this group Strongman class with me.

Alyssa Ages: 6:03

And my knowledge of Strongman is what probably everyone else's knowledge of Strongman is, which is like late night reruns on ESPN of gigantic dudes pulling you know trucks and lifting boulders and walking with refrigerators on their back, which is still probably my favorite event to watch. And you know, I kind of sucked it up. I went and I remember that day we lifted a whole bunch of different things, but the thing that sticks with me the most was we picked up atlas stones at the end, which are just these kind of round concrete folders, and it was a 90 pound stone and I picked it up and I got it all the way to my shoulder and when I put it back down afterwards, I remember having this sensation of, oh my God, I could lift anything in this room or anywhere. I can do absolutely anything. It just it just triggered something in my brain that went this is how your body is supposed to move and that was it. It's been nine years.

Jessica Kidwell: 6:54

I think it's amazing to think about the power that a story can have on our entire life or, luckily for you, a little bit less than your entire life and to just realize that the way that you were remembering those early experiences was wrong. It can be a little, I imagine, disorienting at first, to kind of get to a place of wait. What, what do you mean? I never actually swung at the bat and I just think it's very interesting about you that you then swung the complete opposite direction. I think that you know I can only speak for myself. There are lots of stories that I have in my head, and when I'm trying to rewrite them I don't necessarily successfully clean the slate, like it sounded, like you did, and I just am wondering why do you think you were able to just forget I am not a good athlete and be so open and curious to literally try everything. Yeah.

Alyssa Ages: 8:12

I don't know that I would say necessarily forgot. I think it more just drove me to sort of prove, I guess, prove myself wrong, right, there wasn't really anybody else that was proving wrong. Nobody else said to me you're not good at this, it was just me, and I am also just a deeply stubborn human being. So if I say I'm going to do something, I'm going to do everything in my power to do that something, and I think it was also just once I started doing it I was like, oh, this is awesome, and running, in particular, right away, was something that I didn't have to be amazing at.

Alyssa Ages: 8:46

I was living in New York and I was doing all these New York Roadrunners races and people were of all different ability levels, so I never felt like I had to be the fastest person out there. I wasn't really competing to compete. It was sort of what can I do? This race that was better than the last race that I did and CrossFit, despite the rap that it gets, I think of being this kind of really bro-y, super competitive thing. One of the best things about it was that people would stay at the end of their workout if they finished first. They would stay and they would cheer on the people who were a little bit slower to finish, and so I always felt like I was never doing anything wrong. I was just going to keep getting better.

Jessica Kidwell: 9:25

When I was reading your book. I have to say that it seemed like a natural percussion for you to have been so into CrossFit to then move into strength training. But what just really surprised me is how then you took the strength training to the strongman competition level of strength training. I have a lot of questions about why. And is that late night ESPN show every competition Like have you strapped a refrigerator to your back? Have you pulled a truck? Actually, I know the answer to that, but can you tell the listeners have you pulled a truck?

Alyssa Ages: 10:12

I have. It was a real, like long, long-term goal, but I was competing in New York and, like you may know, this about New York City, but there's like not a lot of places where you can just pull a truck across a park and a lot, so it was just never a thing that came up for me, but I was always kind of a secret goal. I have never strapped a refrigerator to my back, though, and in fact they took that out of the world's strongest man competitions because it, like, completely obliterated someone's knees. It was not pretty to watch, but the truck pull was.

Alyssa Ages: 10:42

I mean, you talk about things that will really change your sense of what you're capable of doing, and strapping yourself to a 50-ton truck and pulling it with just your body weight and holding onto a rope. There are few things in the world, strength-wise and otherwise, that I look at now and go, oh, maybe I can't do that. I think everything is doable if you just work hard enough for it. It's one of the biggest takeaways I've gotten from strength training, and strongman training in particular.

Jessica Kidwell: 11:07

And then, as far as you talked about CrossFit having a bit of a bro culture, one would also think that strongman competition and gyms that specialize in it would have a bit of a bro culture. But you are here to say that's not the case, right?

Alyssa Ages: 11:24

Yeah, I think there's always going to be a bro culture to lifting weights, right? I was asked this question a bunch of times something similar to this, on a radio syndication that I did and by the end of it I was like listen, bros are just going to bro, and then we just got to do whatever we're going to do, right? You know, I think it's almost a bit of a kind of misunderstanding with CrossFit, especially that it's got the bro culture to it, because people in the middle of their workouts just rip off their shirts and that feels really bro-y. But one of the coolest things about all strength sports so CrossFit, powerlifting, Olympic lifting, strongman, all those different things is that a lot of it is about seeing not just what your body is capable of doing, but what the human body is capable of doing.

Alyssa Ages: 12:04

So in strongman in particular, one of the things that I love the most about it is that is part of the community aspect. I think is really the biggest thing. So if you show up to a competition and you're missing a piece of equipment, your strongest competitor is going to lend that piece of equipment to you because they want to see you perform it your best, and if they can't lift something, they're going to be on the sidelines cheering you on because they want to know well, I couldn't do it, but is this something that can be done? And you're watching someone push the absolute limits of human ability. There's something really inspiring and incredible and very kind of primal about that.

Jessica Kidwell: 12:43

I also really enjoyed how much you were able to paint the picture of how much mental effort goes into these physical strength activities, that there is this whole additional capability that the human physical body has once we activate a part of our brain.

Alyssa Ages: 13:09

Oh yeah, hysterical strength, yeah, that is. Oh man, I became so obsessed with that I could have written a whole extra chapter on it. It's so interesting. So hysterical strength. People will know it as those stories that you would hear in the news of, like a parent lifting a car off Of a child or a child lifting a car off of their parent. You know, basically, something where someone is summoning this superhuman level of strength. So we don't know a ton a ton about it, because it's incredibly hard to replicate something like that in a lab setting right. It's very hard to make someone artificially feel that sense of fear that causes that to happen. But basically, when you're in that situation, that sort of extreme fear level situation, your body can recruit a hundred percent of its available strength and, for reference, the average person can recruit about sixty percent and a trained lifter in a competition can recruit about seventy percent. So imagine you can get thirty percent more of that strength because of that level of fear. All these things go on in your brain, in your body, and one of those things is that you have these pain deadening chemicals that will flood your body so that when you go to move this thing, you don't feel the pain associated with that in that moment.

Alyssa Ages: 14:19

One of the things I talked about is this athlete who went for a world record deadlift and he found out that hysterical strength was a thing while he was training for this and decided I am actually going to try to replicate this. He worked with a hypnotist. He started to picture this is his name is Eddie Hall. He started to picture that the barbell that he was going to be lifting which was a thousand pounds, by the way was not a barbell off the ground but a person off of his family.

Alyssa Ages: 14:44

And you can see he did this video afterwards where he talks about it and you can see, even as he's talking about it, like a couple years later, you see something almost kind of go off behind his eyes where he's like almost put himself back in that hypnotic state and he recalls that when he went out there to lift, he Kind of he stood, he stood in the bathroom, he stared at himself in the mirror before he went out, tried to think about that, felt that kind of moment happened for him and went out to go lift and Recalls almost being in this hypnotized state when he lifted the barbell, to the point where, when he was standing up with that world record Weight in his hands, he finally came to and realized where he was. And at that point he is, literally he is bleeding out of his nose, his eyes, it's just. I mean it's, it's kind of terrifying.

Jessica Kidwell: 15:32

It was. It was terrifying to read about, to just be like what the body is capable of Doing and the cost, and I guess that's why we only recruit 60% of our Strength when we are layman and 70% when we are trained athletes.

Alyssa Ages: 15:51

Yes, exactly. But you know, my takeaway from that was that what you can do is you can put your body into a state of complete and total focus if you know how to do that, and that is that is what I've applied to my own training. So I have like a breathing technique that I do when I go for a heavy lift now, where all that does is really just kind of Narrows my focus on that spot.

Jessica Kidwell: 16:12

It's not tapping into that hysterical strength, but it did give me a sense of how you can use that to your own benefit in in that setting now the book is part memoir, but you also do a lot of research and talk to a lot of other individuals and in addition to this mental aspect of pushing your body farther than you think it can go, you and some of the other people that you spoke to for the book have also used the physical strength to Kind of help heal your emotions and your mind. Would you mind sharing what happened with you mid-strength training and how then strongman training kind of Brought you back to life?

Alyssa Ages: 17:02

Yeah, absolutely so. I had been training two years in the sport of strongman. I was getting ready for a competition, I was training with my coach in the gym and I was lifting an atlas stone so that big kind of round holder I was talking about and I remember getting it up to about chest height and feeling this sense of exhaustion that wasn't. You know, this is a hard workout, exhausting. But something else is going on in my body and when I went home that day I thought, okay, well, this is just a different level of exhaustion than I've experienced before.

Alyssa Ages: 17:33

My husband and I had talked about starting to try to have kids, took a pregnancy test, found out that I was pregnant and Then, three weeks later or found out that I was miscarrying and I very quickly went from Feeling the strongest and the most capable that I ever had in my life to feeling just Weak and vulnerable and like I'd lost this amount of trust in my body. For years I had been able to get my body to do whatever I wanted it to do. I wanted to cross marathon finish line. I wanted it to learn how to swim and bike and do this triathlon. I wanted it to learn how to lift heavy things and it did all the things I told it to do and then I told it to stay pregnant and it didn't do that and that was Really confusing and really kind of heartbreaking for me.

Alyssa Ages: 18:16

When I was going through that and then when I was going through the subsequent months of fertility clinic visits and monitoring and everything that goes along with that, one of the things that I found that really helped my recovery was going back to the gym, which was hard at first because there was some guilt associated with that, even though, you know, logically I knew that it wasn't my fault and my fertility doctor also told me it wasn't my fault. But your brain goes to those places and I would find that when I would walk out of those lifting sessions that I would walk a little taller. Shoulders were pulled back more. I held my head up higher. It was starting to regain the sense that my body was capable of handling really hard things, and that was what kind of took me on the journey for this book to go. Well, maybe strength isn't about how much weight we can lift, but how we use the things that we learn about ourselves in the gym to handle the struggles that we go through outside of the gym.

Jessica Kidwell: 19:09

And you talked to several other people in the book that had similar experiences right.

Alyssa Ages: 19:14

Almost everyone I spoke with for this book Men and Women talked about how strength training really helped them transition from a place of feeling vulnerable to feeling strong. So that was anything from someone who went through you know, abuse in childhood to a woman who had two strokes almost back-to-back six months in between them. She was not an athlete before this, but after that happened she was kind of like I wanted, what else am I doing? I want, I don't have anything that I'm doing for myself, I don't have any hobbies.

Alyssa Ages: 19:47

And she decided she was going to do this sport that she saw on late 90s PN and she went out to you know, she found a gym. Her husband would drive her because she couldn't drive herself. He would help her by tethering five pound weights to her hands just so she could have that sense of motion again. She went on to become a world record holder in the deadlift and she talks about the fact that in competition she is known to throw her shoes off or rip her weight belt off of her waist because sometimes she can't feel herself bracing her core muscles or she can't feel the ground because of that nerve damage from going through those two strokes. And she said you know people ask me all the time like why, why do this extreme level of sport? And she said, when you're that close to dying, it takes a hell of a lot more to feel alive. And I thought that is you know what a what a powerful statement.

Jessica Kidwell: 20:42

It is incredible because you know you share your experience of how you felt like your body had betrayed you and then, through going back into the gym, you had to kind of heal that relationship with your body and you started to see that your body is a all.

Jessica Kidwell: 21:03

All bodies are capable of incredible things and I you know, baby, baby, understand this from the tiny amount of weight training that I've been doing. As far as you do walk a little bit taller, you do think, oh, I can't do this, and then a breath technique or something causes you to get that last rep through, when you literally feel like you're already at failure. There is a real benefit to seeing how strong you can be physically, and then I think that translates to how strong we can be mentally as well. Yes, absolutely. Which is why it bothers me so much and I am completely guilty of this as well that it feels like, culturally, strength and femininity do not necessarily coexist in the same space, that there is this thought of strong, bulky women are not feminine, attractive women. Can you help uncouple those things? I hope so.

Alyssa Ages: 22:27

When I started researching the section of my book about body image, one of the things I did was I went and I looked up the first thing the definition of bulky, and I love this definition of bulky in the dictionary is taking up much space, typically inconveniently, and I read that and I went oh right, that's there it is right.

Alyssa Ages: 22:52

So when we talk about, oh, don't get too women, don't get too bulky, well it's inconvenient, right. So a woman who's taking up space, it's assumed that she's taking that space from a man. That's inconvenient, challenging gender norms of the way that your body looks because you're more muscular and people can't see me doing air quotes. But people will say manly, that's inconvenient. But the women that I spoke to for this book and myself included, every single one of them said the most powerful thing that strength training is.

Alyssa Ages: 23:20

The most powerful thing that strength training has taught me is that I want to take up more space. I want to take up not just more physical space, but emotional space. I want to take up space in the workplace, in my home, in every other situation in my life. That is something really important and that's part of what they learn, in addition to learning that your body is something that you should love, not for how it looks, but for what it can do, what is it capable of achieving. And that is more powerful than fitting into any pair of jeans. It just is.

Jessica Kidwell: 23:52

Yeah, and I think that the example that you talked about with the woman who had the two strokes there's a perspective that we don't get soon enough in our lives that we need to value what our bodies can do and many of us don't realize it until we are faced with our bodies not being able to do something, and that's kind of like the whole wisdom of age and experience. But we want to push that earlier and earlier, especially into young women's lives, that getting strong is beneficial for so many reasons and that you should not avoid it because you're worried about how it's going to make you look.

Alyssa Ages: 24:38

Yes, that's it Exactly, and I think it's interesting because we often tell women who want to get into strength training you hear one of two things right. You hear, oh, don't do it because you're going to get bulky. Or you hear from people who are enthusiastic about lifting no, no, you should do it, you're not going to get bulky, but either way, we are suggesting that bulky is something negative and it's just not. Putting on muscle mass is awesome because it means you can do more stuff. You know, I'm a parent of two little girls and one of my great joys is that I can lift each one of them overhead with one hand, and they love it. I love it. I don't ever want to not be able to do that because I'm trying to fit into a you know, I don't know a pair of pants.

Jessica Kidwell: 25:23

So that then helps transition to these actual benefits of strength training. And as I reference my perimenopausal state, there is just so much research now out there that women who are approaching middle age and beyond need to be concerned about their muscle mass. And the way that you can address your muscle mass is through strength training. And as we have spent, you know, the first third of our lives thinking that we need to make ourselves small and not take up space, little do we know that we are making ourselves extremely vulnerable for later in our lives. Can we talk a little bit about how muscle mass actually protects us as we get older?

Alyssa Ages: 26:15

Yeah, first of all, I love the way that you phrase that that we're spending that whole chunk of our lives setting ourselves up to have a kind of crappy end of our lives. If we're doing that I mean, listen, we know that as you get into so for women, as we get into menopause, we're going to start losing bone density. That's what happens when we lose estrogen, right. So that's the that's the start of our concerns. The second part and this is men and women is sarcopenia, which is the loss of muscle mass and muscle strength. When you put those two things together, that's where you really get into trouble. That's where you get into fall risk territory. And if you do fall because you don't have the musculature to keep yourself upright, you don't have the balance that you gain from having muscle and you fall. And then you have that low bone density coupled with it that can send you to the hospital.

Alyssa Ages: 27:06

That can mean the end of independence, which I mean we're too young at that age to lose our independence. That is that's crucial. We know that when we put pressure on bone through, when we're pushing up against a force and resistance training and again, that doesn't have to be heavy weights I feel like. That's a really important thing to put out there. Resistance fans are great Picking up gallon jugs of water in your house. That's a really good start right, but you have to be moving against some sort of force. We know that that is what helps build bone density.

Jessica Kidwell: 27:39

I think that I want to just emphasize that so many people, as we get older, we hear the importance of mobility and stretching and how you really need to keep yourself loose so that you are safer later down the road and no offense to my yogis or to my runners and walkers who are listening. It's actually muscle mass that is much more protective.

Alyssa Ages: 28:11

Muscle mass and muscle strength. Those two things at hand-in-hand are incredibly important. And listen, mobility is important through your entire life. Obviously, especially if you want to continue strength training, you also need that mobility. You can't lower down into a squat, for example, if you don't have the mobility in your hips and your knees and your legs to be able to do that for sure. But we also know that strength training as we get older has other benefits, right. So it's been shown to help decrease symptoms of Alzheimer's. It's been shown to do things like in this study I love, because I feel like this is going to really resonate with a lot of the women who listen to this is it's been shown to increase and help the thickness and the appearance of your skin. We're all spending a small fortune on face creams and you could just be lifting weights and that would help. That's pretty awesome.

Jessica Kidwell: 28:58

Yes, it seems like everything gets thinner, except for one particular area of your body, which is the middle, which isn't there? Some also wonderful research that shows high strength training helps with that dreaded middle spread.

Alyssa Ages: 29:15

Well, in general, we know we can't spot reduced places right, but in general, the more muscle you have, the higher your metabolism is going to be right. The more muscle just burns more calories at rest. Then that's throughout our lives.

Jessica Kidwell: 29:27

And then you spoke about the Alzheimer's, but in general it also helps with mood right, or at least that's what I like to believe.

Alyssa Ages: 29:35

Yeah, absolutely. I think you know, and again, every person's going to react to doing any kind of exercise different than somebody else, but we do know that you know it has that release of serotonin. There's also just tremendous empowerment that you get from moving something that maybe felt immovable to you the day before and that again, it doesn't have to be a heavy object, even if it's you're just typically using five pound dumbbells. In your class you were like you know what? I'm going to pick up the tens, let me see how I can do. The feeling that you get from being able to do that is unparalleled.

Jessica Kidwell: 30:10

So I want to reference one of your more recent articles from the Globe and Mail, and that is a beginner's guide to strength training, even if you're intimidated. So, as we have just spent the first part of the conversation talking about the importance of, and why people should be strength training, there is some intimidation associated with even imagining getting started. For instance, for me it was where do I do this and do I need to remodel an area of my house in order to be able to do this? So can you tell the listeners about some of the guide of getting started?

Alyssa Ages: 30:57

For starters, you don't have to be doing CrossFit or Strongman or Powerlifting or Olympic lifting or any of those things. You don't have to do that. There are great group fitness classes that have strength training in them. What I typically tell people is, if you have the means, one of the best things you can do is work one-on-one with a certified trainer. There's also some levels to that where it's really important to find somebody who works with people that are similar to you, who is going to create a program for you. That is not the same thing that they're giving to the next person that they see, who is at a completely different stage of life or goals.

Alyssa Ages: 31:33

If that's not something that's available to you, doing small group training is great, whether that's getting a bunch of people together and hiring a trainer or going to classes where the ratio of members in the class to the instructor is low. You want to make sure that the instructor can see you and to that end, it's very instinctual, when we go into a class like that and we've never been there before to go hide in the back of the room. Then the instructor can't see you and you're the person they need to see because you're new. You want to be up in the front, you want to make sure that the instructor can actually see you and correct you, make sure that you're with an instructor that is going to correct your form too.

Alyssa Ages: 32:10

Beyond that, I tell people there are plenty of apps out there that have video that go along with them, but not just watching the video of someone else doing it, then also videoing yourself, which feels weird and awkward, especially if you're not like social media person. But you don't have to post them on social media. What you want is to take a video of yourself doing a movement and then compare it to the video that you just watched, because a lot of times you'll see oh my gosh, I was rounding my back when I went to pick that up and I didn't even notice it. Those are the quickest ways to get injured, as if you're moving your body in the wrong way or a way that's unsafe. I take videos of every single one of my lifts because then in between sets I can look back and go oh, that didn't feel great because I didn't realize my foot was here. It is the only way I've been able to progress in my own training.

Jessica Kidwell: 32:55

I think that, for sure, one of the most intimidating things for beginners is this fear of injury. What it sounds like is if you're willing to invest or swallow your pride at the beginning and just understanding the mechanics of what you are supposed to be doing, then that pays off for the entire rest of the process. It's not as if you will need that much oversight for the entire time Once you understand the mechanics of a correct movement that sticks with you.

Alyssa Ages: 33:36

Yeah, absolutely. Then too, when we talk about taking videos of your movements, at a certain point you start to understand enough about what that movement should look like that if you look back at a video of yourself doing it, you're going to know right away oh, I'm not doing that thing that I'm supposed to do. This happens to me all the time with my own lifts, where, yes, I send them to my coach, but I also look at them myself so I can correct in between. I also think that one of the absolute easiest ways to get started is at home with just body weight movements, squats, push-ups, tricep dips off the edge of your couch, and then you can always progress to lifting things in your home. You can progress to getting gallon water bottles.

Alyssa Ages: 34:16

When I've been traveling before, one of the things I've done is I've put all of my stuff. Or when we were traveling in a camper van, I put canned food in my backpack and did squats with it, pressed it over my head. Don't underestimate the power of finding rocks outside and picking those up Really anything. Strength training can be really low barrier to entry if you want it to be.

Jessica Kidwell: 34:40

The benefit of body weight resistance I do think is under estimated, because I think everyone thinks you need to invest in a bunch of dumbbells and weight plates, but in reality you're walking around with built-in weight on you at all times and just training against your own body weight has a lot of benefit. Yes, absolutely Okay. Any other beginner's tips to help those of us who may be feeling slightly intimidated about introducing strength training into our life?

Alyssa Ages: 35:18

Yeah, the biggest thing is that no one is watching you, except the instructor, who should absolutely be watching you, but really no one else in the class cares what you're doing and they don't care if you're not doing it well, and actually, if you're at a great gym, they just maybe want to help you do it better. You're there for you and that's the biggest thing. And once you start, you're not a beginner anymore, right, you just have to get started.

Jessica Kidwell: 35:40

That's a really good point. You stay a beginner until you start, and then you're already past that point. So are you still currently competing?

Alyssa Ages: 35:51

Yeah, my last competition was actually this stone lifting event. It was the end of the summer, beginning of the fall. It was awesome. It was really, really fun. It was basically part of the Highland Games, which is traditional Scottish games, and we were lifting all different kinds of stones, which was an absolute blast. I was a true beginner at that. There was maybe one event that I had done before Everything else I just walked into and was like going to see if I can pick this up, which is a joy, and then I will compete again, probably in the spring or summer.

Alyssa Ages: 36:20

I just haven't chosen what to do yet, but I absolutely love this sport and I think one of the best things is training and then going and testing myself out in a competition. Not can I beat this person, and I will tell your listeners because I think this is really important to say out loud. I have come in dead last in almost every single strongman competition I've ever done. I don't care, I did at the beginning, I don't now. Now it's just about an opportunity to go out there and be with a community of like minded people and see what I can do. All strongman competitions have a novice class, which is great for beginners and people just want you to go try it Like that's. It's funny because people will talk about CrossFit a lot as being kind of cultish, right, but once you're in it I realized it's just that people love it so much. They just want other people to feel that joy and that empowerment too.

Jessica Kidwell: 37:13

I think that I appreciate you clarifying that to the listeners that you know here. You are kind of my subject matter expert on this, and dead last is still amazing. You still walk taller and you still feel accomplished and it doesn't exactly matter because you have pushed your own limit. That's amazing. So, alyssa, I'm going to link in the show notes a couple of things to help listeners learn more about you, for instance your website. But can you just tell us verbally where are the best places to follow you or find out more information?

Alyssa Ages: 37:51

Yeah, I am the most active on Instagram, which is just at AlyssaAges that's also my handle pretty much everywhere so on Twitter, where I have a grand total of 100 followers, and on TikTok, where, like no big deal, but I've got about seven.

Alyssa Ages: 38:04

I just started doing that. That's seven more than me, by the way. Yeah, I really really resisted TikTok, but a girlfriend of mine said it's really good for getting people who don't follow you, and she was right. The first video I posted there, I think I had one follower and 700 people saw it and I went oh okay, I see what you're doing here. That's great. My website is AlyssaAgescom. I have a monthly column in the Globe and Mail and I try to freelance as many places as I can, so the book is called Secrets of Giants a journey to uncover the true meaning of strength.

Jessica Kidwell: 38:38

It is part memoir, but also just full of extremely important and useful information. Alyssa, before I let you go, season five's theme is evolution, and I ask every single guest what it means to them.

Alyssa Ages: 38:54

I think it's about being a little bit better each day than you were before, and that doesn't mean that you are necessarily even accomplishing something more, but that might just be a little bit more belief in yourself the next day than you had the day before. I think failure is one of the most important things that we approach in our lives, ideally on purpose, so that we can learn that it doesn't make us a failure right and that we have a chance to learn and grow and see things from a different angle. And I started out as a kid who was really terrified of failure, and I think that my evolution is becoming an adult that thinks failure is awesome because of the opportunities it provides.

Jessica Kidwell: 39:39

And you're an adult who is modeling that for two young women, and that, I think, is awesome. Yeah, I agreed. Thank you, elissa. Thank you so much. I am buoyed and encouraged to continue my baby steps in my own strength journey and I wish you nothing but the best, and I really appreciate your time today. Thank you so much for having me. This was wonderful.

Jessica Kidwell: 40:07

Hey, can you wait a second? I have a favor to ask you. Can you open up your podcast app and make sure you're following the show? That means, every time a new episode comes out, you'll already have it waiting for you, and I've asked this before, but I'm going to ask again. Will you please leave a review of the show on Apple Podcasts? I read every single one and I'd love to read what you think. Ok, that's it. I'll let you go now we Should Talk About.

Jessica Kidwell: 40:42

That is hosted and produced by me, jessica Kidwell. The audio engineering is done by Jared Nicolay at Mixtape Studios in Alexandria, virginia. The theme song Be when you Are is courtesy of AstraVIA. Graphic design is by Kevin Adkins.

Jessica Kidwell: 40:58

Do you have a topic we should talk about? Let me know. Submit your idea on our website, wwwweestatpodcom. There's a form right on the main page for you to get in touch with me. And if you don't have a topic but you want to let me know what you thought about the show, think about leaving me a voicemail. You can call Weestat at 631-4-Weestat, that's 631-493-7828. Or you can send me a comment on any of our social links Facebook, instagram, twitter and Instagram, linkedin Threads that platform formerly known as Twitter. On all of these you can find me at WeestatPod. You may even hear your comments on the air. And finally, there is no we without your participation. I really couldn't do this podcast without your support. So thank you for being here, and if you or your business want to monetarily support the show, I'd appreciate that too. Email me at info at Weestatpodcom for more information. You.