A Miscarriage Took Away My Faith in My Body. Lifting Heavy Weight Brought It Back

The one thing that appeared to have any noticeable impact on my sadness was returning to the gym. I craved the arrogance I had before my miscarriage—that inner and outer strength—so my coach built entire workouts around making me feel empowered. I channeled all my anger, exhaustion, and hurt into moving the barbell. As I set free beastly grunts of exertion, I exhaled all my pain, forcing it out of my body. Each time my muscles burned, I white-knuckled the bar and pushed through, reminding myself that I could overcome discomfort. And for a wonderful few hours after I left the gym, I bounded through life with my shoulders pulled back, my arms barely bent to indicate off my growing biceps, and my chest pressed forward. I couldn’t explain it, but strength training was bringing me back to life. I could face the remainder of the day with the sense of accomplishment that comes from trying something difficult and overcoming it.

Lifting gave me a probability to reconnect to my body and be aware of what I used to be feeling at any given moment. It forced my attention to my abdomen, an area that had been home to tremendous stress and sadness. The moment I took a gulp of fresh air and braced against my weight belt to regular my core in preparation for pulling the barbell, I needed to imagine it is also a spot of strength.

There’s a biological reason why lifting heavy things can feel so empowering, too, in line with writer, psychologist, and Stanford University lecturer Kelly McGonigal, PhD. McGonical explained that bracing your core muscles “feeds directly into areas of the brain which might be monitoring for signals of things like safety and power.” When your brain gets such a robust signal from this one single motion, “it computes [it] right into a sense of self that shouldn’t be, ‘My bicep tendon is pulling on my bone.’ It’s, ‘I’m powerful.’”

If I used to be going to maneuver weights successfully and safely, I had no selection but to imagine that my brain and muscles would work together. Rebuilding my confidence in that way helped me not only get better from the loss, but additionally endure the following months of fertility clinic visits and negative pregnancy tests.

“Ultimately, to place a barbell in your back and to lower your body and get up again, or to choose up something heavy off the bottom and put it back down again, you’ve to have a specific amount of self-trust,” Mariah Rooney, a licensed clinical social employee and cofounder of Trauma Informed Weight Lifting, a nonprofit that trains coaches, certified personal trainers, and physical therapists to take a trauma-informed approach to client work, told me. “Individuals who’ve experienced trauma often lose that, they lose the connection to self. To have the option to have that embodied experience after which eventually have that translate into something else is basically powerful.”

A number of days after my conversations with McGonigal and Rooney, I dug through emails I had sent my doctor in the beginning, middle, and end of the long strategy of miscarrying, which took 4 weeks in all. Then I looked through my phone’s camera roll from the identical time period. Every time my notes to my doctor were frantic or frustrated, I noticed that on those days, I also went to the gym. While a really real a part of me was seething, one other part was smiling as each rep of a heavy deadlift crashed to the bottom. The sensation of the cold metal of the bar and the rough edges of the knurling on my palms sent a jolt to my system, triggering the sense memory of strength. It was as if my brain knew my body needed those moments—proof of capability and power.

Lifting didn’t erase the burden of my miscarriage, however it jogged my memory time and again that I could endure hard things. Now I do know that strength isn’t about being proof against pain or impervious to failure. It’s about managing the struggle.

Adapted from Secrets of Giants by Alyssa Ages. Copyright © 2023 by Alyssa Ages. Published by Avery Publishing Group, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.