There is nothing I find more annoying than the fact that exercise makes your brain feel better. Every time I am grumpy and miserable and depressed but still drag my ass off the couch and to the gym, I am filled with annoyance after I'm done. Why does picking up a few heavy things and setting them back down make me feel so much better? Why can't I be rewarded for simply lying down on my couch and watching television? Why do brains work like this? What is the point in having a body?
These questions haunt me, so I was thrilled to read Casey Johnston's new book A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting. Johnston is a beloved writer for the swole community. She has written about lifting weights for almost a decade, founded a program for people trying to learn how to lift, and now has written the book on why it all matters. She encouraged me almost five years ago to begin lifting, and it quickly became the only form of exercise that did not make me so miserable I wanted to quit it immediately.
The book is a beautiful rendering of how it feels to have a brain at war with your body. Johnston tells the story of her own experience of physically existing: a desire to disappear fueled by running and not very much food that one day broke open and made way for something bigger (literally), stronger and better. It is a book about the history of weightlifting in America and the science behind why it works for our muscles and our brains. But it's also a book about learning to trust yourself, and take risks and fail in safe ways.
I was thrilled to call Casey on the phone earlier this week and talk to her about the book, which came out last Tuesday.
Hello, Casey! It has been a second (four years) since we last spoke here on Defector.com. I’m so excited to welcome you back, especially because we are talking about your brand-new book.
How are you feeling now that the book is out?
It just takes so long to write and publish a book that at a certain point you feel a bit dissociated. It's like you're running, and the horizon point that you're running toward seems to never get any closer. And then all of a sudden it's in front of you. It's hard to internalize that something's happening.
When things like this happen, they're so divorced from anything physically happening in the world. Your book is out there, and you can see it online, but you don't physically see the book in the stores and you don't exactly see anyone with your book. So it's very hard to process.
Yeah. I'm laughing, because that feels very real to me. Publishing a book is so much less tangible than people think it is. But I’m interested in you talking about how you feel disassociated from the book, which is, like, extremely funny for a book that's all about physically existing in the world.
Yeah. I mean, I guess I would say if your goal is to return to your body and develop a practice of self-perception, don't write a book.
I think without this connection I’ve established through strength training with my body, I would be having an even harder time trying to sort out how I feel and trying to give myself what I need in this moment where I feel like I'm in a billion places at once.
Like, my life is like a car crash right now. Our cats started peeing on the carpet randomly. The baby may have an eye infection. My medication’s running out. I lost my phone. So many things are happening. I'm just like, Can anyone give me a break here?
As your friend, that is quite a lot of things to happen at once! But I do feel it humanizes you a little [laughs]. Like, you’ve written so much about strength (mental and physical and emotional) and you still don’t have it figured out. Life gets in the way. This isn't about being an elite athlete.
Yes, this is my greatest insecurity about the book. I completely understand, and I even say early on in the book that I hate these stories where someone's having a problem with themselves—they hate themselves or they're having trouble losing weight or whatever—and then they take up a sport, and it just cures them instantly.
So I understand that when someone looks at my book, they probably think it's that. Maybe I am flattering myself, but I don't think it's that. There's a lot more I tried to really dig deep on in terms of like: Why is it exactly that a physical activity can work that way? But also, why might it not work that way? And also, what exactly is it doing to our brains and our bodies? Because it's not just like you flip the switch and it's like, oh, everything's cured.
I wanted to dig into the actual processes that are taking place that honestly might even help somebody map this onto something completely different from weightlifting. It could be another physical activity. It could be knitting. There are ways of connecting this outward to the general experience of having a body and being a person in the world and trying to take care of yourself that are not just a book-length endorsement for working out. Everyone already knows you should work out. I'm not here to tell you what you already know.
I really liked how much of your book was not just about lifting. You write about your family and your eating, and even your dating. It is a holistic picture of you, and I really found it very moving to learn that not only are there benefits to becoming physically stronger, there are benefits emotionally and mentally.
Thank you. I mean, the whole point of the book is to speak for all of the things that are not just working out. I went into this knowing that I feel very different in a lot of ways than I did before. I feel like I'm seeing a lot of things differently, but there is a question of, is this just me growing up? And that's not not an element, but it did feel like there's more to it.
I wanted to research what it is that actually takes place in the body when you get stronger, when you start to eat more after a long time, when you start to build muscle back that you've lost over the course of dieting too much, when you begin to do incremental experimentation with a body that has otherwise felt unsafe up until then.
There’s this notion of interoception, which is that your emotional feelings are interlocked with the way your body physically responds. Like, if somebody scares you, you tense up and your heart rate starts going quickly. When we speak of trauma or trigger our trauma responses, even though nothing traumatic is happening, you can sort of re-experience that in your body.
Newer research is showing that the bodily signals side of interoception is likely a big factor in our ability to attune to what our feelings are about something: Do we like this person, or are we scared of them? And when you have all these traumatic experiences, those signals can be really mixed up. The experience of lifting and learning to monitor yourself in a situation that is safe can be specifically rehabilitating to the problems created by traumatic experiences
There’s so much science and research in this book, but there’s also a ton of history. In the book, you write about how American weightlifting descended from a German group called the Turners. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Sure, I think if you know anything about the history of our modern American conception of weightlifting, you probably know about muscular Christianity— that at some point the Christians were like "Christian people and people in general are too weak. We're not serving God as well as we could, so we need to exercise more." And a lot of this flowed from the Industrial Revolution, where we got machines, and then humans did not compare favorably to machines. So they were like, we gotta sort humans out, energy- and physical-ability-wise.
So that was where we got the YMCA and this publication called Physical Culture. But where all of that came from—literally what the YMCA people were citing in their documents and conversations about starting the YMCA—were this group of cultural Germans called the Turners, who started in Germany itself. There was a place called the Turnerplatz, where they educated people in physical pursuits. It was a lot of Olympic-type events: the bars and the rings and the pommel horse, but also dumbbells and weights and lots of gymnastic-type stuff. Eventually, people who were Turners came to America and found each other. They started what were called Turner Halls, which were sort of proto-YMCAs. They were like centers for German culture, but also for this practice of physical activity, and it was like a community thing.
They were not about achievement or winning. They didn't like that aspect of American culture. They wanted to educate everyone to a sort of baseline level of physical fitness, because this is a way of sustaining our community, of protecting each other from outside powers that wants to divide and separate and disempower us. That was the origin of gyms, basically, in America as we know them today. The YMCA co-opted it. They took it for their own purposes of serving God and serving power.
German cultural institutions became very unpopular when the 20th century rolled around and only got more unpopular from there. That was kind of like the big downfall of Turners, but they were huge in the culture before that. One of the big names in organizing the Haymarket Riot was a Turner. Some of Lincoln's bodyguards at various events were Turners. They were not only practicing their physical culture, but applying it in the real world. So weightlifting in America has this socialist, community-oriented origin that is not well told in our lives now at all.
I love that, obviously. I’ve also found it to be true in my experience that most gym bros embody that kind of Turner spirit of support and camaraderie. They want you to do well!
It makes sense that people who are huge, muscular guys who have spent a lot of time in the gym want to share it with other people. They're eager to have new friends and more people in the gym who are interested. Who doesn't want to share their interests with people?
What I sort of liked—and I get to this in the end of the book—is that while the people at my gym were encouraging and they were trying to be friendly to me, they also kind of left me alone. They didn't make me feel like I was under a microscope. I think they were sensitive to the fact that sometimes what you need is some space to figure things out, which was something that I had not gotten a ton in my life. Especially when you're a woman, especially in my family, I felt so meddled with all of the time. I felt afraid to do anything, because I was like, “someone's going to come in and give me 1,000 pointers and make me feel like an idiot.”
Everyone tells you, when you have a baby, to take all the help you need. Like, bring in as many family members as you can squeeze in there and just let everybody do as much for you as you can stand. But I need to sort of find my own way about things, and I won't be able to develop my own relationship with this in the way that I need to if I can't just have some time alone with the equipment to figure it out.
In this case, the baby is the equipment?
[Laughs] Yes.
Happy Mother's Day, by the way. You did finish this book before you became a parent, but is there anything that strength training taught you that has helped?
Thank you! I think being a parent is so much about patience and experimentation and accepting failure—not failure in the catastrophic sense, but in the sense that when your baby's crying, you try something like wave a toy at them or offer them a bottle or whatever. If it's not what they want, you can be like, "Okay!" and not be like, “I'm a terrible mother. I'm not fit for this,” which is how I very much used to think of these kinds of things. I used to be so quick to catastrophize and be down on myself, when this isn’t a referendum on how good I am or not. It is just is something that takes a lot of experimentation.
And kind of like lifting, what works now might not work in a few weeks. You're sort of just tweaking things all the time, and nothing is catastrophic. But you have to be about the process of it, and not about reaching some destination of success. Having experience with doing that in this sort of sandbox where nothing really matters and it's just the gym was a sort of safe area of experimentation for me. I can then bring those lessons into the rest of my life.
Okay, one final question and then I’ll let you return to your life! You've been writing about this topic for so long in so many different ways. How do you continue to keep it interesting for yourself?
I think there's a couple parts to it. One is that I do think my perspective continues to evolve, and the culture continues to evolve in terms of what is it that people need or are thinking about. Literally, in the last couple of years, things have gone from like, Body positivity is the best thing ever and the supreme force in everyone's life to Just kidding, everyone should be skinny again.
The culture continues to evolve and so do the tools. We're always learning new things. Just in the last couple of years, there have been more studies coming out about lifting weights, specifically the effects in older people. For example, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists for decades had said that pregnant people should not lift any weight ever and should consider just lying down. Then just a few years ago, they said, “Just kidding! Not only is that not true, but they actually should lift weights for a lot of reasons that supersede whatever we were worried about before.” So, things keep changing.
I got into lifting in 2014, when most of the emphasis was on cardio or Pilates or whatever. There are far more resources now, but that emphasis is back. I want to be there for the person who wants to try strength training. And that's sort of the nice thing about a book. You can always look up a book no matter what exercise is trendy.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You can buy A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting wherever books are sold and subscribe to Casey's newsletter here.
