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Readers, the first thing I want you to know about  Lift like a Girl: Be More, Not Less by Nia Shanks is that it’s not just for girls/women/females.  The target audience is females, but males can learn a lot from this book too.  

The next thing I want you to know is that I had zero interest in weight lifting before reading this book.  That has increased, but only slightly.  I’m more interested because now I know that I can, if I want to, and I know how to do it.  I’m not sure I would want to even if I could go to the gym and get started right now.  That said, I still really, really enjoyed this book and highly suggest it.  

If you need a bit of a self care jumpstart, pick up Lift like a Girl !  I’ve been participating in group fitness (mostly barre and yoga) for about two years now, and at first I was thrilled when my studio moved all the classes to online (as it still is, if you need online classes) because that meant I could squeeze more in than my usual one a week.  There was even a challenge in April to complete a class each weekday and a self care activity.  The first week I did five classes (one was a short meditation because my studio is awesome), the second week I did three, then the third week I did…zero.  It was at the end of this week when I started Lift like a Girl (even though Ashley recommended it to me…54 weeks prior (yes, I did check to see when I borrowed it from Prime Reading).  Since reading this I’ve been getting in one or two classes a week, and I feel SO VERY MUCH better because of it!  

If I didn’t already believe in the timing of books, I would now!  Lift like a Girl: Be More, Not Less was the book I needed.  The first couple of chapters are about mindset.  I was definitely feeling defeated by the reality of life right, and I had hit a point where my body ached from not moving it.  Nia reminded me of all the reasons I joined group fitness in the first place.  I need the routine, and I need the accountability of people around me to push me.  I had also hit a wall where I had to realize that my body wasn’t what it was in high school when I was in color guard (hear lots of pushups and some running, plus the actual practices and performances) and working a (relatively) physically demanding retail job (wedding dresses are heavy y’all, as are tuxedos).  I had to acknowledge that my body wasn’t going to be strong again until I put in the work for it to become strong again, and my children need the example of parents who actually pursue physical health through healthy eating habits and healthy movement.  This is not to say I don’t have issues with body image and self talk (I do), but I am aware enough (finally) to realize that my body is pretty amazing (as are all bodies) and I can’t “should” on how my body looks, only how I treat it (I do allow should into my vocabulary for self care, but little else).  

Fast-forward to quarantine, and all of this is still true, only I am stronger than two years ago because I do (normally) put in the work.  My body reminded me that I stopped working so it was going to start aching and, with the helpful kick in the pants of this book, I started working again.  Even though I don’t plan to lift, I read all the lifting pieces about form and safety, and you know what – all of that has helped me as I get back to barre.  It’s also helping me when my boys do yoga and have awful, cringe-worthy form, for me to stop the video and remind them to pay attention and move with a purpose (knees and toes in line y’all, it’s important).  Oh and the nutrition chapter – quality!  Her advice is simple and uses her “more not less” language.  Eat when you’re hungry, savor your foods.  Choose real food with lean protein.  There’s more, a whole chapter, but it’s not a detailed guide, which I adore.  

If you need a kick in the pants via a body-positive read on physical fitness, pick up Lift like a Girl .  If you need a good pep talk on being awesome, this is good for that too!  Also, if you want to learn how to lift, I guess this would work (it’s way more informative than I was expecting), and there are definitely ways to tweak the exercises (especially in phase one of the lifting section) to use what you have around the house (some creativity required as this book is definitely pre-COVID – I have thoughts and might do it with you if you start something, so let me know).  This book is a solid four stars and I am likely to go back to pieces of it again in the future, especially the sections on positive self talk.  Am I likely to go lift when the gyms open back up?  No, but I might just add weights to my squats in barre class next time.  

~Nikki

I want to travel back in time to April/May of 2019 when I was still in California and the majority of my weekly routine focused around Monday’s laundry/cleaning schedule and our Thursday and Saturday personal training appointments with Juan. (I filled in 1-2 other times a week at the gym on my own or with Adam but it depended on his work schedule.) Juan guided us through all of our weightlifting. It was rough times at the beginning because neither Adam nor I had done any lifting in years. (Me really ever, and Adam for about 15 years since college.) But, by the time I read Lift Like a Girl for the first time last year, I was months into our routine and feeling really bad ass with the gains I had made. To be honest, I only lost about 20 lbs of weight off the scale, but we used a body composition scale with Juan during our once a month assessments and I could see the gains in other ways once my weight plateaued. My body fat percentage was less and my muscle percentage was up. I could do more push-ups (even if they were modified!), and my planks and my wall-sit were for a longer period each time. My pants fit me so differently I had to buy new ones. 

I was thrilled with all these non-scale wins that I was seeing but I was getting mentally caught up at the time with falling off the nutrition plan that Juan had assigned where we were supposed to track our macros (carbs, fat, proteins) for every meal. Counting calories or points has never worked for me over the long-term, or in this case macros, because I don’t like pre-planning meals. Hear me out. I know you’re probably thinking, this Enneagram 1 doesn’t like to plan something? And you know what, no, no I don’t. I hate meal planning. I prefer to have someone else do it for me, or, I just follow the food cravings I have and eat whatever I want that’s in the house. Usually something that doesn’t involve cooking, cause I also don’t like that. (I am however a tolerably good cook, which makes other people wonder why I don’t like it. We can, as people, not like doing things we’re good at doing!) I can’t really explain why I don’t like doing these things, but I think it’s that there’s just not enough ROI on the time it takes for me to do what I consider an acceptable job. Plus, even when I would meal plan, I’d decide I didn’t WANT to eat the thing I had planned and then mess the whole thing up anyway. Talk about a lot of guilt-tripping from the inner critic! So, I avoid that by NOT MEAL PLANNING. (Or assigning that household task to Adam, which sometimes works out and sometimes doesn’t but it’s better than it being on my tasks list.) I also don’t like eating leftovers so meal prepping is hard for me, too. Not having restaurants to go to during the pandemic has made me mentally and emotionally miserable but my pocketbook is so full so I don’t really know how to feel about that…but I have digressed long enough…

Back to these non-scale wins and when I read Lift Like a Girl last spring and I’m like, hallelujah! I don’t actually have to count calories or macros if I can just eat the majority of my meals with whole foods 80-90% of the time and have lean protein every time I eat. I don’t have to try to have my cheat day and then get bummed out when we’re invited out with friends last minute on the day after. Nia says over and over make the best decisions you can when you can, but if you want that cheesecake and it’s your favorite food then have that cheesecake with no guilt, and get back to making your whole foods decisions tomorrow. Bland, boring, unappetizing food is not punishment for not working out and exercise is not punishment for eating the ‘wrong’ foods. Nia talks about how food is much more than just fuel, food is a part of our social and emotional lives. Eating certain foods at certain times fulfills us as people, culturally and personally. She talks about overcoming her own bad relationship with food that is so relatable and so  much what I needed to read about at the time, and again this month. [I second Nikki about the timing of books!]

Now, you’re probably asking if I have done the weightlifting program that Nia lays out. The answer is no, but I have brought her ‘be MORE, not LESS’ mindset into the gym with me. Pre-Covid when I was able to get into the gym a couple times a week, I was working at beating my previous weight and reps on the weight machines. And now I’ve been safer at home and without a set of appropriately weighted dumb bells. Adam’s got a 20 lbs set and my highest hand weights are 3 lbs, I have nothing to use to challenge myself into being able to use the 20lb set! This has been a rough struggle in my need to lift something heavy. (Or beat a punching bag senseless, cause I love me some kickboxing.) I also realize that these are excuses, but everyone is able to commiserate with the loss of routine in the past couple of months, and I just haven’t found a happy new one when it comes to lifting heavy and feeling the physical strength my body actually has hidden under the body issues I still admit to having. After re-reading Nia in preparation for this post, I’ve been doing more body weight exercises, and that’s cool, but it’s not as cathartic as hitting some high number on the machines (or whatever other metric you use to be MORE).

This blog post has now become a therapy session for Nikki and me about our current fitness struggles, but I think that’s what you would want to know; how did Nia Shanks’s book change our outlook and habits in the short and long term. Sometimes you’re not always reading a book for a brand new program to follow step by step. Lift like a Girl: Be More, Not Less provides you with one, but it also allows for personal flexibility where mindset towards your goals and how you reach them is key. This book, Nia’s website and blog, and her other books are, I think, truly geared toward getting you in the best headspace about your gym time, so that you can crush it when you’re there and not feel guilty about the 165 hours a week you spend outside of it. (Yes, that’s 3 hours a week in the gym, math nerds.) Use this book, as I said in my GoodReads review from last year, to find helpful and empowering life rules that cut out the bullshit and just get to the point of life – to enjoy it, by having the energy and ability to do the things you love. 

~Ashley