In therapy, and in my journey of healing through a lot of my traumatic experiences, I’ve had weeks where everything was absolutely horrible. Everything felt anxious. And my body could feel it.
Around the same time that I started this journey, I also began weightlifting. With weightlifting, a lot of that burden was taken off. I could feel my body feeling that anxiety and working right through it.
At the beginning, it was everything. Since my body was new to weightlifting, every strength training exercise helped. My confidence soared. Deadlifts in particular were pretty fun. After a year though, it was just a habit and it didn’t really work on those anxieties much anymore.
But there were weeks when I was going through something deep in therapy, and was feeling a lot of things. And depending on what I was experiencing, some exercise seemed to hit the spot for that feeling and anxiety.
Most recently, it’s been squats. I felt insecure, and squats gave me security and strength right inside my trunk, it seemed. It strengthens my heart. It’s still ongoing with this one, so I can tell you that as I lay in my bed writing this, I’m craving squats, an exercise that I always avoid as much as I can.
Another one was pull ups and other shoulder and upper back focused exercises like some yoga poses and stretches. They finally took a heavy weight off my shoulders and made me slightly more social and less burdened.
Another had been yoga itself. It released so much tension that had been built up inside me. I felt free, like the white Canadian boys I envied (haha).
That’s all to say, I’m glad I found weightlifting. It’s fucking amazing.