The True Meaning of Strength w/ Alyssa Ages

Podcast – Steph Gaudreau

Have you ever asked yourself what there is to learn from the pursuit of strength? How do the lessons we learn in the gym translate to our lives outside of strength? Alyssa Ages set out on a quest to answer these questions, and in return found a multitude of answers that can help any athletic person get more from their training regime and their life.

*Trigger warning of pregnancy loss*

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Key Takeaways

If you are curious about the true meaning of strength, you should:

1. Connect with your deeper why of strength training outside of the aesthetic value
2. View strength training as something that can connect you more deeply to your body
3. Be aware of the ways in which the strength training mindset can improve your life outside of the gym

Strength In and Out of the Gym with Alyssa Ages

Alyssa is a Toronto-based, New York-born author, freelance writer, and copywriter. She is a mom, strongman competitor, endurance athlete (six marathons & an Ironman), rock climber, CrossFitter, and former member of the Jersey City Bridge & Pummel roller derby team. Her debut book, Secrets of Giants: A Journey to Uncover the True Meaning of Strength, was featured in The New York Times and Publisher’s Weekly, among others. The book, part personal narrative, part research mission, part midlife crisis odyssey into the world of strength to answer the question: What if strength isn’t about how much we can lift, but how we manage life’s struggles?

The True Meaning of Strength

There is something about strength training and the pursuit of strength that is addictive and keeps bringing us back. But why do we love it so much, and feel so satisfied even when it feels hard? It all comes down to the story we tell ourselves. If you view yourself as a person who is able to handle hard shit, there’s a good chance you don’t mind getting comfortable with discomfort. Through Alyssa’s research, it became clear to her, that if you are purposefully able to do difficult things, the easier all of the things that you encounter in your daily life will start to feel.

You Can Do Hard Things

Building strength, physically, mentally, and emotionally, is all about pushing the boundaries of what humans can do. When strength is a part of your identity, you can discover things about yourself through the training process that will help you both in and out of the gym. Building strength is not just about looking good or feeling good, it is about having agency over your life and what you are doing. The ability to fail over and over again safely, allows you to learn something that is applicable in every other area of your life. That might be why we love it so much.

If you are also searching for the true meaning of strength, share your thoughts with me in the comments below.

In This Episode

• Learn about the genre of Strongman Strength Training and the role it played in Alyssa’s journey (8:43)
• Explore what it means to be an athlete or athletic person (19:13)
• Flirting with the edge of being uncomfortable and being in your comfort zone (23:42)
• What Alyssa discovered about women in strength throughout her research (30:10)
• How to address issues that come up when it comes to your strength training abilities or practice (38:24)

Quotes

“In the book, there is very little about what [strength] does physically to your body and your muscles, and almost exclusively about how it impacts everything else you do in your life outside of a gym setting.” (7:50)

“Strongman really showed me that actually, failing was really ok and kind of awesome. Because it was the only way to understand what I actually could do.” (17:23)

“It was just that little shift in mindset that gave me the courage to actually do it.” (20:05)

“It was really incredible to hear from so many women that they said ‘Doing a strength sport taught me that I could love my body not for how it looks, but for what it is capable of doing’.” (30:32)

“Once I started to continue with this routine of going back into the gym, with my coach and trying to do everything really safely as I was going through all of this, it helped me to start to regain this feeling of trust and this feeling of capability in my body.” (42:03)

Featured on the Show

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Alyssa Ages Website

The Secret of Giants by Alyssa Ages

Follow Alyssa on Instagram

Strongman Video

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The True Meaning of Strength w/ Alyssa Ages Transcript

Steph Gaudreau
What is the true meaning of strength? A question for the ages, and one that might be incredibly hard to answer, but today’s very special guest went on a journey to uncover the answers to just that question, what is the meaning of strength? What is there to learn about the pursuit of strength, about ourselves, about each other and about the world? You definitely don’t want to miss this episode. If you’re an athletic 40-something woman who loves lifting weights, challenging yourself, and doing hard shit, the Fuel Your Strength podcast is for you.

Steph Gaudreau
You’ll learn how to eat, train and recover smarter, so you build strength and muscle, have more energy, and perform better in and out of the gym. I’m a strength nutrition strategist and weightlifting coach. Steph Gaudreau, strength podcast dives into evidence-based strategies for nutrition, training, and recovery and why, once you’re approaching your 40s and beyond, you need to do things a little differently than you did in your 20s. We’re here to challenge the limiting industry narratives about what women can and should do in training and beyond. If that sounds good, hit subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and let’s go.

Steph Gaudreau
Welcome back to the podcast. I’m so excited that you’re joining me today, because, look, we love to nerd out about strength training on this podcast, and, of course, other physical and fitness pursuits, and today, we are adding a strong man competitor to our roster of incredible guests who have spoken with me about strength training and what it means to them and the way that they are leveraging strength training in their own lives. My very special guest today is strongman competitor and author, Alyssa Ages, she has gone on an incredible journey to figure out why is strength training and the pursuit of strength so, dare I say, addictive. What is it about this that brings us back to it, year over year, decade over decade? What is there to learn about strength and the insights that it gives us into the human condition?

Steph Gaudreau
Why do we love it so much? Why does it poke that part of our brain that is so satisfying, even though this can be so hard, Alyssa went on a quest to talk to so many different people related to strength training and strength sports and strongman, and she wrote a book about it, and on this podcast, she’s going to be sharing some of the highlights from not only her personal experiences but the people she talked to. And, hopefully, this will give you some answers to the question, what is the true meaning of strength by the time you’re done listening before you dive in, I just wanted to mention that we will be discussing pregnancy loss in this episode.

Steph Gaudreau
So if you’d rather not hear about that, then I do recommend that you perhaps skip over this episode and instead enjoy one of the many others that we have about strength training on this podcast. All right, without further ado, let’s go ahead and dive into this podcast on the secrets of giants with Alyssa Ages before we dive in, if you listen to this episode and you’re like, Okay, I am ready to get to work. I want to take my strength, muscle energy, and performance and take it up a notch. I want to take it to that next level.

Steph Gaudreau
I want to feel like a badass, but at the same time, do it in a way that works with my physiology as an athletic woman over 40, with coaching and community support. Then go ahead and check out Strength Nutrition Unlocked. This is my group program. We’re going to lay out the framework for you and guide you as you implement, and really customize it to all the things that you’re doing, your preferences, your likes, and the places you want to go with it. Then go ahead and get on board. You can start your process by submitting an application at StephGaudreau.com/Apply. We would love to hear from you and see you inside the program. Hello, Alyssa, welcome to the podcast.

Alyssa Ages
Hello. Thank you for having me on.

Steph Gaudreau
You know, it’s not too often that truly random people that I’ve never heard of in the realm of strength training message me, and then within a couple of exchanges, I’m like, did we just become best friends? But I feel like I have so much connection to so many of the things that you talk about. I am so glad that you reached out on Instagram and that we’ve sort of gotten to know each other a little bit. So thanks for being here.

Alyssa Ages
Me too. And honestly, if I’ve learned one thing from the process of book publishing. It is that if you are not your own best advocate, nobody else will be. And so I am out there just shamelessly messaging people that I admire and being like, Hi, can I talk to you? Can we do a podcast? Can we do an interview?

Steph Gaudreau
Truly? I mean writing a book and then having to promote said book, people think, okay, so you write the book, the book is published, and then you’re like, ta, da. But that’s not how it goes.

Alyssa Ages
No, once you finish the hard work of writing the book, you then get to do the extra hard work of being a shameless self-promoter. It’s a whole separate thing.

Steph Gaudreau
Yeah, and we’ll probably go at a timeline here. But what was it like to decide to write a book on this topic? I mean, were you sort of jonesing to just get this out there, or did it evolve a little bit more organically, kind of along the way, like, what was the impetus for putting this down on paper for posterity’s sake?

Alyssa Ages
Well, when I had the idea for this book. At first, it was super specific to strong men. It was literally, I wanted to write a book on the history of strong men. I thought this was the most fascinating thing, and it was going to be this window into this subculture and the history of it. And I’m very lucky that I have an author friend who was like, that sounds fascinating. That audience is incredibly small. Like, I think, I think you’re kind of letting the stuff you want to nerd out on get in the way of what you think is going to sell a book.

Alyssa Ages
And so then it morphed into, okay, it’s going to be, it’s going to follow my journey to uncover the history of this sport. And then the more that I kind of started to dig into that and add my personal element of it, the more that it became, you know, the part that seemed to resonate the most with anybody that I was talking to about it, they were like, Well, okay, but how did you get into strength, and how did you come to understand the importance of the pursuit of strength and how it impacts your life? And so then it just became this incredibly personal thing that ultimately ended up being what I call like part memoir slash personal narrative, and part research mission because it truly is this combination of both.

Alyssa Ages
So it’s me kind of searching for answers as to why strength matters so much to me. To do that, I went out into the world of strength, and specifically all the way into the world of strongman, at kind of the fringe end of strength, to interview all these athletes, both professional and amateur, and then researchers and psychologists and coaches and sort of say, okay, well, we know physical strength matters for our our bodies, right? Like we that, I think most of us understand that. But how else does it impact our lives? So the book is so there’s very little about what it does physically to your body and your muscles, and almost exclusively about how it impacts everything else you do in your life outside of a gym setting.

Steph Gaudreau
Yeah, it’s fascinating. And the more I kind of read more about you and our lives aren’t totally the same. You have some distinct differences, and sort of you know really how strongman helped you get through some things in life, which I’m sure we’ll touch on, but there were so many parallels, and I just thought, I need to, I need to have you on the show and talk about some of these things. And I’m just going to hold up the book and show it so people can take a look. So hey, the Giants, are really, really cool.

Steph Gaudreau
If nobody listening to this show has heard of Strongman, because I don’t think I’ve tried to do the math here and kind of go back in the mental archive, we’ve got 430-something episodes. You know, maybe somebody who’s like, dabbled in strongman here and there. But if somebody listening to this show has never heard of this genre of strength training, how would you define or describe it?

Alyssa Ages
Yeah. So I would say first, I often tell people like, okay, maybe you’re not sure that you’ve heard of it, but do you ever remember sitting down and watching, like, late night ESPN with your parents, and there’s these, like, huge dudes, and they’re pulling trucks and picking up giant boulders and flipping tires and all that crazy stuff, like that strong man, it’s been around since the 70s, so there’s a good chance that at some point you’ve either watched or you’ve heard some of the names of, like, the big kind of all time, well-known guys, Zajuna CIVICUS, Marius Buchanoski, Bill Kazmaier, these big, big guys.

Alyssa Ages
I mean, Lou Ferrigno competed in the very first world Strongest Man competition. And everyone knows who the Hulk is. So I kind of loosely defined strong man as picking up heavy and odd objects and then either putting them back down, lifting them over your head, throwing them, or carrying them for a distance or a finite amount of time. So that might be a truck that might be a Natla stone, that might be a keg that you’re either throwing or putting over a bar or putting over your head.

Alyssa Ages
Sometimes it’s just a barbell that you’re dead-lifting, but more often than not, it’s something a little bit out of the ordinary of what you would see in the gym. So if you look at Olympic lifting, which has two bases. Lifts and power-lifting, which has its three basic lifts, strongman, it’s kind of everything you will. In a competition, you’ll see a press of some kind, a lift of some kind, a carry of some kind, and probably a pull of some kind, but it could be totally different from one competition to the next.

Steph Gaudreau
Thanks for that. I’m sure we’ll put up some kind of video, something I can find and link to, especially on YouTube, if no one’s really seen these competitions, is they’re pretty entertaining and and just leave you with a sense of awe at what what people are able to do. Being as I have competed in both Olympic weightlifting and, to a smaller extent, powerlifting, I would say I would define Olympic lifting as, like, the nerdy, sort of, like, serious lifting, power-lifting.

Steph Gaudreau
And we’re being very stereotypical here. Powerlifting is, like, the metal, like, fucking rock on, like, just and then what would you what would you call strongman as, like, what’s the vibe of strongman? If you were to go into the average gym.

Alyssa Ages
Strongman is the dirtbag sport. It’s just like, what shit can you find and pick it up? Like it’s you can train for strongmen by just going outside and just finding something and picking it up. And you will be doing some version of strongmen. There is this really incredible guy out there right now, Tom Haviland, who, he doesn’t show his face on Instagram, and his whole deal is he kind of like, goes out and just picks up stuff in nature. And he is, he could probably be up there as one of the top strongmen if he ever decided to compete.

Alyssa Ages
You know, some of the stones that I have in my home are just stones I yanked out of the ground in my backyard. It’s what kind of drew me to it more than anything else. I had tried Olympic lifting. I’d never done powerlifting per se, but I’ve done I’ve trained all of those lifts, and Olympic lifting was very precise for me. I like that. With Strongman, we kind of joke that the only rule is that you can’t sumo deadlift, and beyond that, like there are no other rules, like, get the thing over your head. However, you can get the thing over your head. You know, your elbows don’t have to be locked out when you lift.

Alyssa Ages
Yes, to show that you’ve got, you know, control over it absolutely. But it’s not that level of precision, and it’s so DIY. I mean, you hear these stories from guys who were at the top of their game, who just had their own stuff, had replicas of equipment made for them, because you can’t, for the most part, go out and buy this stuff. So someone like Mark Henry, who won the first Arnold Strongman classic, and had to do this thing called the Apollo wheels, which is like a really thick barbell, like an axle bar with these wagon wheels on the end and it doesn’t spin. And he had one welded together for him.

Alyssa Ages
Magnus for Magnusson made these like handles that he wanted to see. Had them welded. Mitchell Hooper, who won, who was Canada’s first-world strongest man. He needed this thing called a single finger, which is like a large hollow telephone pole that you have to flip. And he was working out of a commercial gym, and he just had this, like, giant plank of wood attached to this thing, and we’re just flipping that back and forth in the gym. So there’s something I think really endearing about how to do it yourself it is.

Steph Gaudreau
Yeah, very MacGyver sort of, you could make it happen, if you’re creative enough, and have some things lying around. And we were sort of talking on Instagram about stone lifting and some of the classic sort of stones of Europe, Scotland, you know, those sorts of things.

Steph Gaudreau
And kind of nerding out on that, and even seeing sort of those versions show up in things like, is it rogue record breakers, where they were, you know, sort of lifting ditty stones and things like that, even the sort of sandbag replicas of the Husafell and things of that nature. So it’s cool to see that it’s starting to show up that way. But to your point, I don’t know. Can you just go pick some, pick up some heavy shit?

Alyssa Ages
You can and that’s what’s so raw about, I mean, listen, one day I would love to travel to all the historical stones, and, you know, get a chance to lift those. But yeah, for now, it’s, it’s cool because you can do, you can replicate these things. You know, in some way, the owner of this, of the gym that I started training at in Brooklyn, called A Global Strongman Gym, Hans, literally, that’s his name. He got these, these handles, like the dingy rings that Rogue made replicas of, and he attached them to two big boulders. And, you know, they’re totally different weights, but it’s like a nice way to train what that feels like to move those?

Steph Gaudreau
Yeah, absolutely. Now, okay, so we’re taking, like, a take-out side-to-side quest. I know that you have a variety of different sort of athletic experiences in your background. You also wrote in the book that growing up, you didn’t think that you were built for playing sports, and over the years, have done all sorts of different things, endurance, CrossFit, I mean, kind of take us through like, how do you go from a kid who didn’t really feel like you were you? Athletic or built for this to somebody who’s literally kind of now made it this very essential part of your life to participate in sports or athletics or things that kind of like tick tick that box for you.

Alyssa Ages
Yeah. I mean, I was to your point. I was this kid who, you know, I started out playing Little League baseball. I have this really strong memory of never hitting the ball at all, and kind of feeling like mortified by the fact that I had tried to be this tough kid who could play this sport with the boys, and then really kind of shitting the bed in it. And I that was I was 10 years old, and I immediately went to this place of going, Okay, well, maybe you’re just like, not athletic, maybe you’re just not coordinated, and maybe you’re not cut out for sports.

Alyssa Ages
Instead of doing what someone else might have done, which is saying to their parents, hey, can you work with me? Can I learn a little bit more about this? I didn’t do that. I created this story, and I believed that story for 10 years of my life, and then I was in my early 20s, and I had a phone call with my mom where I basically learned that it wasn’t that I had, like, swung and missed the ball all those times I had apparently just stood there in fear and never even swung the bat. And I was, you know, maybe 2122 when I heard that. And it was this moment of going, Oh my God, I’ve created this persona for myself as this, this person who can’t do these things.

Alyssa Ages
And as it turns out, I’m actually just the kind of person who is so scared of failure they don’t try. So that really set me off on this course of going, Okay, well, what? What could I do if I actually tried and started training for all these things that I had no experience in? So I always feel like I have to make that super clear to people like I was not an athlete. I’m not a natural athlete, and I wasn’t an athlete growing up. So in my 20s, I decided I was gonna run a marathon. I had not run a mile, and then I ended up going on to run six of them.

Alyssa Ages
I decided to do a triathlon, even though I couldn’t swim a lap in the pool, and I went on to do an Ironman, and then I found my way to CrossFit, even though I hadn’t really ever lifted weights, and it was CrossFit that kind of took me to strongman. And more so than anything else I had done, strongman really showed me that actually failing was really okay and kind of awesome, because it was the only way to understand what I actually could do.

Alyssa Ages
Right after telling myself for all those years, you’re not capable of these things, now, I threw myself into a sport where it was only going to find out if I was capable of doing something by doing it and failing at it, because then you can backtrack from that and go, Okay, I’m not ready for that yet, but, like, I’m ready for one step before that. So you can’t deadlift 300 pounds. So backtrack from that, you know what? What could I do if I pushed up to that level safely, obviously? And then I backtrack and go, Okay, could I do, you know, last time I did 270 and so now I’m gonna do, you know, five pounds more than that. And I know what my goal is, and I know where that limit is now, and can I keep training and push past that?

Steph Gaudreau
Yeah, I think that’s incredible. And I love what you’re saying there about failure and sort of that being information. And I think that that’s a really tough thing for a lot of people to wrap their brains around. And it’s, I think, also one of the reasons why so many people will come in to lift with, you know, in my program, or something like that, or they’re just out there and we’re, like, talking about Jiu Jitsu or something, and they’re like, oh, yeah, but I’m not, I’m not really an athlete. I’m not really athletic.

Steph Gaudreau
And so I don’t know, to what degree do you think that that sort of goes along with, like, there has to be some level of proficiency or some kind of standard. Like, hey, recently we’re talking in my group about, I heard that I should be able to back squat my body weight if I’m strong enough. And I was like, where did that even go? Yeah. So it’s sort of like, how do you, how, how do you, I guess, the question would be like, how do you explain or define what it means to you to be an athlete or athletic?

Alyssa Ages
Yeah. I mean, I think like, if you see yourself as an athlete, you’re an athlete. And there was a great article, I’m not remembering now where it was, but there was this concept of, like, whether you know, if you define yourself as someone who is an athlete, you will train like you are an athlete, that if you define yourself as somebody who isn’t, then everything that you do to approach the way that you work out is going to be under that lens, right? So, like, yeah, I never felt that way about myself until I started racing, and then I was like, you know, okay, now I’m an athlete and it wasn’t that I was competitive.

Alyssa Ages
I never won a single race that I entered. It was just that was how I decided to define myself. Instead of defining myself as somebody for the previous 10 years who wasn’t athletic, it was just that, like. Little shift in mindset that gave me the courage to actually do it. You know, I’m not a huge proponent. I say this a lot of like manifesting things. I think you really have to go out and work for things, but you do have to believe that you are that person, and then you have to go for it. So it’s got to be a little bit of both.

Steph Gaudreau
Yeah, 100%, I’ll link to one of the previous podcasts I’ve done, sort of on that concept of really deciding kind of what is the identity you want to lean into, and how that’s going to be a driver of the routines and habits you create, and then ultimately the outcomes that you get. I know you were talking about running. I’ve only done one marathon because I was like, one and done. I’m good. That was me personally. How is running a marathon or doing an Ironman or something like that, for you, different compared to lifting heavy things in terms of how it feels to do hard shit.

Alyssa Ages
I think they’re both up there as being really hard. It’s just in one you’re kind of sitting in the suck for a lot longer. You’re just sort of existing in this, this they call the pain cave, like you’re just existing in this place of discomfort for hours. But I think with both, it’s a bit of a mindset shift too, right? So when I did the Ironman, the only goal I set for myself, other than finishing, was I wanted to run the marathon with a smile on my face, and that was because I couldn’t control flat tires.

Alyssa Ages
I couldn’t control if my legs were going to be tired like there was just stuff that I wasn’t going to be able to do anything about, but I could control reminding myself, like, hey, the only goal you have for these 26.2 miles is to smile. And that helped me kind of change the way that I was looking at everything that I was doing. And I feel the same with lifting. It’s like, when you miss a lift, you choose how you’re going to react to that. So are you going to get really mad at yourself and throw the barbell down and walk out of the gym? Or are you going to go, okay, you know, I’m not there yet, but I will be.

Alyssa Ages
Or, Oh, bummer. I’ve gotten this lift before, but I’m not getting it today. And you know that doesn’t see who I am as a person or who I am even as an athlete. You know, it just, it changes. It’s just, how are you going to be next time you go in? And are you willing to kind of take that one little mistake, that one failure, and come back again the next time? And that, I think, defines whether or not you’re a person who will do hard things like that.

Steph Gaudreau
Yeah, I can relate to being an endurance mountain bike racer, which is kind of the last stuff I was doing in the endurance world, alongside some Xterra, which is basically like an Olympic distance triathlon, but off-road. But the endurance distance mountain biking was another beast in and of itself, because you’re, you know, you’re out there for hours and hours and hours, and you’re alone with your thoughts. And it’s just like this, can I sit in the suck, and it’s different.

Steph Gaudreau
I know you were talking about in the book about how straight like strength training, lifting, heavy things, like, there’s an element of getting comfortable with the discomfort, and I’m wondering, like, what did you uncover through your conversations, your research, and even you know through your own experience about dancing, like flirting with that edge of like being uncomfortable, versus wanting to retreat back to a comfort zone and something that felt more approachable.

Alyssa Ages
Yeah. I mean, my coach actually has said one of the best things about this, which is that the more that you purposely do these difficult things, and you know, in our situation, that’s in the gym, that’s strength training, and that’s putting yourself in these kind of positions where things are really, really hard, the easier all the stuff that you encounter in your daily life starts to feel because you already know that you’re somebody who can endure these hard things, right?

Alyssa Ages
And yes, this is going to be something different that you’re encountering outside of the gym, but you start defining yourself as a person who can do difficult things, and then conversely, the more you avoid doing those hard things, the harder, even the easiest, things, start to feel right.

Alyssa Ages
So it’s just again, it goes back to like, what’s the story you tell yourself about who you are? Are you a person who can overcome those kinds of things, or are you a person who quits, you know, and goes, Okay, like, this is, this is too hard for me. I can’t do this.

Alyssa Ages
So, I mean, I’m, I’m a parent of two little girls, and one of the things that we talk about all the time in my house is, we don’t say I can’t. We say I’ll try. And I say that to them like a broken record all the time, which is, you know, don’t tell me that you can’t do this thing. And it can be something as stupid as, like, I can’t open my toothpaste tube.

Alyssa Ages
And I’m like, Well, did you try it first? If you’ve tried it first, and you think, okay, now. Come and help you, but like, let’s give it a shot. Let’s give yourself, you know, the ability to do those things on your own, as small as they might be, just because then you know that you’ve given it a shot.

Steph Gaudreau
Yeah, absolutely. It’s tough because there can be so much discomfort in all of the periphery around lifting, just with life and the things that we go through, especially in middle age, I feel like is just a test of resilience in and of itself, and all the things that are going on. And it’s sort of like training that element, I used to think about, why do people love things like CrossFit or Jiu-Jitsu. You’re getting folded in half while you’re wearing pajamas, you know, why do we keep coming back? And it’s because this is like community, like suffering together, but in kind of like a more controlled situation. And I don’t know, there’s just something about it that you’re like, what is so what is so attractive about this?

Alyssa Ages
I mean, listen, you know, we talk about CrossFit being a cult, right? And I truly believe that, like a big part of that, is because people who do CrossFit just want more people to do CrossFit, because it’s so awesome, and they want more people in their community. You know, there’s a lot of cultish language around it. But, you know, there is, there is this element of shared suffering that comes from doing stuff like this with other people.

Alyssa Ages
I work out most days of the week on my own. I have a gym in my garage, and when I go and I compete, that’s when I really feel that sense of community. And I think you push yourself a lot harder in those situations, because we are, in a way, kind of hardwired to work together and to go through that shared suffering and to be stronger, because we all have to do that for each other like there’s, I’ve never experienced in any other sport, the level of camaraderie that you get in the sport of strongman.

Alyssa Ages
And I think it is because everyone who is there is there to push the potential of what humans can do, not just what they can do themselves. And so if you can’t get something that day, but someone you’re competing with can, it’s just so awesome to see them do something that is past the limits of what you thought human potential was. And you see this at the highest level of the sport, too.

Alyssa Ages
I mean, some of the guys I talked to were like, listen, if someone’s belt breaks at World’s Strongest Man, like, we’re gonna lend him ours. Because I don’t want to beat you on a technicality. I want to beat you at your best, and I want to see you do your best so that I know what the best looks like, and that I think is is really powerful, so freaking wholesome.

Steph Gaudreau
Honestly, it really is. You’re just like, how is it so wholesome? But it’s so awesome, yeah, to really be out there, and like you said, pushing the boundaries. One of my very best friends shout out to Becky. She we met actually before freshman year of high school, and we’re still really amazing friends. And she participates in strongman stuff, and I don’t do strongman.

Steph Gaudreau
I mean, I’ve lifted some Atlas stones and done some axle work here and there but never competed. And every time I see what she does, I’m just like, so fucking excited. I’m so psyched on the things that she’s able to do, like, deadlifting, you know, the front of a car, and, like, all pulling a truck. And, as you said, all the things that people do is so fucking cool, and just awesome to see people out there putting themselves to the test in that way,

Alyssa Ages
Absolutely. And I think also, you know, there is this sense of, I interviewed the founder of Barben, and he said this thing that really resonated with me, where he was like, you know, I when you watch somebody do something that’s really hard, he’s like, you know, I’m never gonna know what it feels like to be LeBron James and be able to dunk a ball.

Alyssa Ages
But he’s like, I do know, to an extent, what Eddie Hall’s going through when he’s going for that world record deadlift. And when you watch someone do that, you also get this sense of what you might be capable of at some point. One of the most fascinating things, and I didn’t get to include this in the book that I learned about, was the idea of mirror neurons.

Alyssa Ages
Where, if you ever watch somebody doing something, and you know you’ve done it before, or some version of it, and you find yourself like you’re watching someone deadlift and you find yourself like pulling your shoulders back, or, like clenching your hands, or whatever that is. It’s because your brain is kind of connecting to that and trying to mirror what they’re doing, and that does bond you to that person too, even if they don’t know that, that you’re feeling bothered to them.

Steph Gaudreau
I love that. I know that you did a ton of research about the history of Strongman, and obviously have participated in it yourself, and you were talking about writing the book, not specifically from a women’s perspective. You wanted to talk to all sorts of athletes, but I am wondering if you found anything really interesting or noteworthy about women’s participation in this sport, or anything around that since this podcast is. Is specifically looking at at women in strength. You know, what did you find out about, about that, that you would like to share anything interesting?

Alyssa Ages
Yeah, I mean, I think the most, one of the most powerful things I learned, and I don’t always love to to bring all this back to like, esthetic stuff, but it was really incredible to hear from so many women that they said, you know, doing a strength sport taught me that I could love my body, not for how it looks, but for what it is capable of doing. And there’s so many women who, you know, went into this kind of looking for, okay, how can I, you know, whittle this down or make this smaller?

Alyssa Ages
Who then learned, oh my god, the goal of the sport is to be bigger. Like, how cool is that there’s one of the one of the women, Inez Carasquillo, who is just incredible and one of the strongest women. She talks about how the first time that she went to a powerlifting gym, she walked in the door and the head coach of that gym, came running up to her and was like, You are the biggest woman I’ve ever seen. I want you on my team.

Alyssa Ages
Now that would rattle a lot of women, but for her, it was kind of this revelation of like this, he’s saying this to me in a revelatory way, like he, he thinks that this is awesome, and I think that becomes incredibly powerful. We’re we’re taught as women. You know, if you want to go into lifting, typically, someone’s going to say to you, don’t lift, you’re going to get bulky. Or you’re going to hear, you know, you can lift, but you won’t get bulky. But either way, we’re suggesting it’s this negative thing, right?

Alyssa Ages
And that, I think, is where that problem lies. And we talked about this a little bit offline, but like you wouldn’t say you wouldn’t tell a guy not to get too bulky. You wouldn’t tell a guy to go for muscle tone. Why are we telling women this? Human beings need muscle mass and muscle strength to survive and thrive. So why are we telling one gender versus the other that they get to look a certain way and the other one shouldn’t look that way?

Steph Gaudreau
Yeah, it’s one of the things that drives me the most bananas. Is, you know, and obviously it’s nuanced, but this idea of the fact that there are such different even just words that we use when it comes to women in lifting, or women in strength training, or in fitness in general, versus men, and I’m mentioning that in a binary because that’s just typically how we see things.

Steph Gaudreau
But you know, knowing that there’s a whole universe in between, but I see this a ton where, you know, people are like, Oh, but I don’t hear anybody saying we shouldn’t get bulky. And I’m like, where are you hanging out? Because I want to be a part of that place. That sounds like a great place. I know in your sort of talking to more people and looking at this aspect of like, don’t get bulky, or, you know, don’t take up don’t take up more space.

Steph Gaudreau
What did you find out, or what did you sort of come to the conclusion about, because we were talking about, it’s maybe not just about the size that could be the issue, but other things around it. So, you know, what did you What did you talk to folks about with that?

Alyssa Ages
Yeah, I mean, a lot of it was just about kind of creating that level of not just like acceptance, but love for what they’re capable of doing. And you know, I think especially some of these women, as we get older, we’re thinking more about, what does this mean for our longevity?

Alyssa Ages
And for so many generations, women were taught, and it’s this crazy thing that I went through in the book of like, what our bodies have been expected to look like for the past, you know, two centuries, and it is wild that we have wanted to change the ideal body back and forth so many times at this speed that far outpaces the human body’s ability to actually change its shape. You know, we’re saying to women, okay, you know, be really slim, and then it’s like, oh, it’s war-time.

Alyssa Ages
Now we need you to be big and strong so you can do these jobs that were traditionally held by men. Oh, but the men are coming back now, so now you gotta go back to being slim. And it’s kind of gone back and forth like this. And if anything, now we’re maybe in a bit of a heyday where we’re a little more accepting of things, but there is still this like, invisible line at which, you know, we decide that a woman is strong versus, like, freakishly bulky.

Alyssa Ages
And that line has not really changed that much over time. But what I think is incredible is talking to women now, especially women who are my age and older, that we’re starting to understand. You know, we have to kind of push back against this narrative that we are supposed to be smaller, because we know now, we’ve had enough studies come out now to say, if you are not strength training in some capacity, I don’t care if it’s resistance fans, I don’t care as a jug of water in your house, but if you are not resistance training in some capacity, you are going to lose muscle mass and muscle strength.

Alyssa Ages
As you get older, your bone density is going to go down, which it’s going to do no matter what, unless you are doing this kind of training. And then you get into a situation as you get older, where now you’re at greater risk of falls, you’re at greater risk of fractures, you’re at greater risk of losing your independence and nobody wants that.

Steph Gaudreau
Yeah, it’s a really interesting conversation, and I think one that we need to keep having, right? This idea that being bulky is somehow inconvenient in some way, or it’s, you know, undesired. Why is it undesirable? Right? We had to kind of keep, I think, bringing that up and having those conversations and slowly picking away at things. And obviously, there are so many layers there. And just even going, going back and looking at the history, and I have a book called Venus with biceps. I don’t know if you’ve ever said this before.

Alyssa Ages
Yeah, a lot of that research from that book, it was fascinating.

Steph Gaudreau
Super, super cool book. And then also, sort of this idea that, you know, there, there were these women who were these amazing and, like, this had these amazing physiques and stuff. And they were like, but, oh no, these are the freaks, like, they’re literally in the circus or in a sideshow or some kind of attraction. Because it was just like, nobody had ever seen this thing before.

Alyssa Ages
Well, and that’s why they were okay, right? That’s why, you know, Katie Sandwina could exist the way that she did, Minerva could exist the way that she did because they were not in your home. Yeah, they weren’t existing, as, you know, wearing the pants in your home. They were in this circus setting.

Alyssa Ages
And, you know, every time that they were mentioned in stories about their athletic feats, it was also mentioned that they were, you know, wives and mothers and that be, you know, that was the story that we had to tell about them. You’ve got all these photos of Katie Sandwina doing all these incredible things, but you don’t have photos of her flexing her biceps.

Steph Gaudreau
Yeah, I know it’s fascinating and terrifying all at the same time. And I mean, I hope things continue to change, and books like yours and what you’re talking about, and just opening the dialog and really looking deeply at things I think is so important. You know, there’s, I think, a fine line for people, and I can very much relate to this idea of being an endurance athlete and feeling like I was never small enough, and finding lifting and thinking like, holy shit, I get to, you know, explore, like, all these things I can do, like, and it’s not dependent on me being as tiny as I can possibly be, and how freeing that was.

Steph Gaudreau
I also know the other side of the coin for people is sometimes thinking, what if I start to pin so much of my self-worth or identity on what I can do, and I think about just folks that even have injuries, folks who have disabilities, people who have illnesses that have changed their ability to be physical and what they’re able to participate in. And I’m wondering, like, how do you, how do you think about that sort of thing? Like, are we trying to put all of our eggs in one basket here and saying, like, oh, or we’ll feel great if we can only do these things and do hard things, or is there, is it sort of a stepping stone on the way? Like, how do you think about those, those sorts of issues that come up?

Alyssa Ages
Well, I think there’s, you know, a danger in anything that you’re doing to an extreme level of defining yourself, like creating your identity around that, right? And so that was, that was me when I was running, and then I would get injured. I would get stress fractures, and I’m like, Oh, my God, I’m not a runner. Now, who am I? And so in general, I think, you know, it’s important that strength as well as part of your identity, but not your entire identity. But it’s also important that you know, we think about the fact that social media is a highlight reel, right?

Alyssa Ages
You see people posting photos of their big PR list, but you don’t see people posting photos of all the failures it took them to get there, right? But what that does is it makes us feel like, if I’m going to be doing XYZ activity, I have to be doing it to this level, I have to be competitive, or I have to be able to push myself to this point. And you don’t, I mean, for your health, like for your basic health benefits from resistance training, you could be doing as little as one session a week for 20 minutes.

Alyssa Ages
You don’t have to be out there doing, you know, that crazy thing, and that resistance training again, can look like a million different things. It just has to be, you know, you pushing up against a force that is pushing back on you. That’s it, you know. And as long as you’re doing that, you’re doing something really good for your body when it comes to strength training.

Steph Gaudreau
Yeah, absolutely, it’s an interesting journey to go on, and I think one that’s, you know, discovering things about yourself through that process, not necessarily thinking like, what happens if it all falls apart at some point? And just kind of going into it, and I know you’ve talked about how your own journey has changed, and how it’s helped you overcome difficult things in your life, or maybe not overcome, but move through them. You know, what were some of the, you know, things that stood out to you, either with your own strength training journey, or people that you talk to in terms of navigating life challenges and or life changes that were really hard?

Steph Gaudreau
Trigger Warning: Pregnancy Loss Story

Alyssa Ages
Yeah, when a big impetus for me writing this book, and for me kind of leaning into strength training in the way that I did, was that I had been strength training for two years and competing and strong man at the time, and I had my husband, I had just been starting to try to get pregnant. There was a day that I was working out in the gym and I was lifting an atlas stone, I remember feeling more tired than I had in the past.

Alyssa Ages
When I went home that day, I took a pregnancy test, and I found out that I was pregnant, and then a couple of weeks later, I found out that I was miscarrying, and I very quickly went from this place of feeling the strongest I’d ever been in my entire life to suddenly feeling the weakest, and not just weak, but also like my body had somehow betrayed me, because I had, for the last decade, at that point, sort of said to my body, okay, you know you are now this person who does hard things, and you run marathons and you do triathlons and you do weightlifting and you do all these things, and then I told my body, it was the kind of body that would get pregnant and carry a baby, and it didn’t.

Alyssa Ages
It didn’t listen to me, and it created this really significant level of distrust. But once I started to kind of continue with this routine of going back into the gym, you know, with my coach, and trying to do everything really safely as I was kind of going through all of this, it helped me kind of start to regain this feeling of trust and this feeling of capability in my body, and maybe wasn’t going to be capable of doing this particular thing that I wanted it to do yet, but it could still do all these other things.

Alyssa Ages
One of the most powerful pieces of research that I found when I was doing this book was that I spoke to two different people who practice trauma-informed weightlifting, which is basically working with people who’ve gone through some kind of trauma and helping them use weightlifting to heal from that. So, you know that could be something as simple as, you know, feeling, being able to feel the weight of something on your back and to stand up underneath that weight, and to trust your body for that.

Alyssa Ages
For me, and I didn’t know this at the time, to be clear, this is something I learned five years later when I started writing this book, I didn’t understand why strength training was so helpful, but what I came to understand was that when I was doing something like a heavy deadlift, I would have on my weight belts right, and I would to brace for that deadlift. I would kind of take that big breath, and I would push into that belt, and if I was going to do that lift in a way that was going to keep me safe, I had to believe at the moment that I was going for that that this part of my body, that was the part this the home of so much, you know, sadness and vulnerability and this feeling of weakness was also actually a place of strength.

Alyssa Ages
And so in the act of doing that, unconsciously, I was reminding myself that, you know, you are actually really strong, and you can deal with these hard things, and maybe in the end, nothing comes out the way that you want it to, but you know, you know that you are capable of going through a struggle. And that was, on a personal level, the most powerful thing that I learned. But I also spoke to all these athletes who, I mean, strongman is full of people who have gone through something really, really hard in their life, and then they came to this sport because it showed them that they could handle that kind of stuff. And, you know, that’s, that’s one of the reasons so powerful.

Alyssa Ages
I think it was amazing how you shared that story and everything around it in the book, and just such a great experience, you know, overall, in terms of being able to work through what you were going through. Not a great experience, of course, that had happened, but just something really powerful to have there in and work through those challenges.

Steph Gaudreau
Just so amazing. Anything else about writing this book, or doing the research that you did, or your own personal experience that really surprised you, or you haven’t mentioned yet, that you thought was really impactful?

Alyssa Ages
I one of the things that was really kind of incredible for me was hearing these stories of vulnerability, and a lot of them came from the male athletes that I interviewed. I mean, there was this moment where I was at a strongman competition, and I was interviewing someone outside in the parking lot, and one of the 10-time or 11-time world Strongest Man competitors, who is now, I believe, in his 50s, came out, and the guy was talking to kind of roped him into. The Interview, and was like, Hey, why don’t you get into strength training?

Alyssa Ages
And I’m all of a sudden, both of us watch this, you know, six foot four, maybe the guy who is just built like a comic book villain, start to tear up as he goes into explaining, you know, going through an abusive childhood and wanting to kind of become strong enough that nothing could ever hurt him, and then ultimately realizing like you can’t that doesn’t happen, right? But you can kind of use that to at least allow yourself to feel like you have some sort of agency over your life and what you’re doing.

Alyssa Ages
And those stories were really incredible, or kind of talking to people who compared strength training to this concept of compound interest, which I thought was a really interesting way to talk about it, where it’s like, again, you know, you go in, and every time you put a little bit more on and a little bit more, and it’s you’re not starting from scratch. Sure, you’re warming up from scratch. But every time you go in, you take that little game that you’ve made the previous time, and you build on that, and you build on it, and you build on that.

Alyssa Ages
And over time, you are showing yourself that you know you can work really hard towards something and you can achieve it. And that is something that you don’t just use in the gym, that is something that you take into work and into your social life and into every other aspect of your life because you’ve learned that that’s something that you’re capable of doing and you see how the hard work that you do leads to the goals that you want to achieve. That is, I think, one of the greatest things about it.

Steph Gaudreau
Yeah, it truly is seeing people making those strides, those improvements, and sometimes they’re big jumps, and sometimes you just see, you know, you keep plugging away and plugging away, and when you look back and see where you’ve come and how you’ve grown, I mean, that’s just the magic.

Alyssa Ages
Yeah, and listen, sometimes you go backward. Like, I don’t think that if you asked me today to try to hit my PR deadlift, I couldn’t do it. I’m not trained for it right now, but I don’t look at the lifts that I’m doing now that are less than that and go, look where I used to be. I look at that now, and I go, Okay, I know what it took to get there last time is that the goal, if that’s the goal, then all I have to do is just train this with more intention and more purpose, and I’ll get back to that.

Alyssa Ages
And I think that is something you know, that I have used. I’m a freelance journalist, and one of the things that you deal with on a regular basis is that you are going to fail 99% of the time that you pitch something right. But you know what? What are the levers that I can pull to make it happen next time?

Alyssa Ages
What did I learn from that failure that I can now take into my next attempt? And that is something I think the gym teaches you there are not a lot of other situations in life where you can put yourself intentionally in that situation of failing over and over again, safely in a way that you learn something that translates everywhere else.

Alyssa Ages
So well said, we’ll end it there. Tell the good people listening, where they can get the book, where they can follow you, learn more about what you’re up to, and just kind of dive in.

Alyssa Ages
So Secrets Of Giants is available, as far as I know, anywhere books are sold. Sometimes it’ll be in person at your local Barnes and Noble, Indigo, or what have you. Hopefully, it’s at your small bookstore. If not, you can ask them to carry it, but you can buy it online, pretty much anywhere, and then you can find me. I’m pretty much across the board, Alyssa Ages. So my website is Alyssa Ages, and then all of my social media handles are that as well. And I love connecting with people, so please, please reach out to me.

Steph Gaudreau
Amazing. It’s been such a pleasure to have you on and talking about some of these different aspects of strength you put into words and really looked at a lot of the research too, some of the things that I’ve always felt about strength training, but struggle to really get words for, you know, it’s such a feeling sometimes, and make it, describing it to another human is so hard. You’re like, I don’t know. It’s just so great.

Steph Gaudreau
And they’re like, I don’t know, I’ll say, you know, lifting something heavy just kind of like, pokes a part of my brain. That feels so amazing. And people are like, what does that even mean? But for anybody who’s looking for something more, a little bit more complete and sophisticated and just so fascinating. All the things you wrote about in the book, and the people you talk to, just paint such a rich picture of why strength is so amazing. So thanks for doing the work that you did. I know it probably wasn’t easy, but so appreciated. And thanks for being on the show.

Alyssa Ages
Thank you. This was wonderful. I really enjoyed talking to you.

Steph Gaudreau
All right, that’s a wrap on this episode with Alyssa Ages all about the Secrets Of Giants and the true meaning of strength. I hope that you’ve found something about this episode that really just connects and resonates for you. I know I did through Alyssa. Writing, I was able to gain so many words and descriptions of what makes strength training so appealing to me, and why I love it so much. So I highly recommend you check out the book as well, and we’ll put links to that in the podcast show notes.

Steph Gaudreau
And if you’re enjoying this podcast, please do a huge favor and hit the subscribe button. And if you’re watching on YouTube, hit subscribe and ring the bell for more notifications about future episodes. It really does help the show to be discovered by other people who might really love this content. I really do appreciate that you take the time to do that. It means so very much. Thanks for being with us today and until next time, stay strong.

The True Meaning of Strength w/ Alyssa Ages | Steph Gaudreau.