Death to gym knickers
A chapter from my award-winning 2021 book Stronger which is about redefining mental and physical strength for women
As a special gift to my paid subscribers without whom I couldn’t run this Substack, and given how much diet and exercise talk is present at the moment, I wanted to give you a chapter from my non-fiction book Stronger, which was about the redefinition of mental and physical strength for girls and women. When it came out, I don’t think people were ready for some of the concepts as they were pre-occupied with losing weight, but I think now the message lands differently. This book means a lot to some people, not least of which includes me - it helped me to see how strength comes in so many forms, abilities and interpretations.
We all have different journeys, different strengths and different traumas. Being physically active, for instance, is not a quick-fix for mental anguish. You wouldn’t suggest someone with depression could ‘cure’ it by going for a run every day, would you? But physical activity can be part of the weaponry you use to battle through the tough stuff in life and it can be a huge generator of joy, confidence and capability.
But while this sounds great in theory, there’s one small problem – many of us didn’t have the best experiences with physical activity as girls or in school. Unless you were naturally brilliant at it, you probably thought Physical Education (P.E.) was a shame onion – layer after layer of experiences designed to make you feel embarrassed, self-conscious or wrong.
Even if you were brilliant at sports, it likely still didn’t make you exempt from comments or critiques. The England rugby player Abi Burton, for instance, was a star pupil in sport when she was at school, captain of her rugby team, but was bullied by other kids for her size and told she looked like a man. I’d venture to say that a lot of the baggage and hang-ups we have can be traced to that time – and/or the things we heard about our bodies or other women’s bodies while growing up.
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