Tag: strength training

I’m not sure that strength is such a virtue.

Not for women at least.

Strength almost feels synonymous with carrying what exceeds our capacity. Constantly.

You raise 6 kids single handedly whilst your husband/partner is nowhere to be seen. The world will call you strong.

You triumph in a toxic and sexist work environment. The world will applaud your strength.

This is especially true for women.

Society has seen fit for women to carry more than they can bare. Time after time. But are we, as a society mistaking strength for repressed pain and the systematic ignoring of pleas from our bodies. Ignored pleas for connection. Ignored pleas to just stop for a moment? Or worst of all: are we mistaking strength for a hardened exterior.

We’ve all come across someone who has been through a lot. But its not simply that they have been through a lot. It’s that it shows a lot. There’s an underlying anger, resentment, pride even. They’ve been hardened.

Is that strength?

Going through trials and tribulations and then having a chip on your shoulder?

Or is that learned helplessness?

Is that strength, or an armour?

Or, are you simply carrying dead weight?

Each ignored cry for help subconsciously teaches your brain that help will not come. So you build an armour. This serves as your defense mechanisms. Your brain’s task is to keep you safe. So you become strong, and not safe. You become defensive. Dreams pushed aside, and you’re on auto pilot.

This is where resilience enters the chat. Resilience does not require you to never fold under pain. It doesn’t ask you to carry every trial on your back. Resilience builds no armour.

There is a quiet strength in resilience. When we use our strength were often loud. From lifting heavy objects that makes us grunt and groan, to the unique, piercing screams that commonly occur in childbirth. It’s loud.

Resilience by definition means even under significant difficulties you have the ability to come back to centre. Remain mostly unchanged. Return to who you are at your core. To not be hardened by life’s challenges, pain and disappointments. Like a woman who endures childbirth: exerting so much effort and feeling intense pain. Calling upon the strength of every single cell in her body to bring the baby earthside…

And then the pain subsides and the joy returns. The warmth. The vulnerability.

Your core.

The hormonal cycle of a man is more or less nonexistent. It’s more of a state with few fluctuations. That state rarely changes throughout the month. Whereas women experience significant hormonal shifts throughout the month, sometimes throughout the week(!).

Women were simply not built to be strong all the time. It’s unnatural to us. It’s not our ‘permanent state’. And our hormones certainly don’t comply.

Women are comparable to endurance athletes. Preparing and planning, before we muster up the courage to execute.

But after such exertion comes the slow journey back to our true selves.

And just like the waves of contractions experienced in childbirth, each one building in intensity, plants the seeds of growth and flux. To be resilient is to flow. To wave. Reseeding in times of adversity and then safely, but surely, returning to shore.

This does not mean that you not allow the challenges of life to affect you or change you. Life should change you. Instead, you should wish to endure what is thrown at you without it changing you for the worse. Without it hardening you.

Allow yourself to bend. To be broken even. Allow yourself to cry.

But you come back to who you are at your core. The soft, yet sound part of you that knows you can bounce back from whatever is thrown your way.

There is a time for strength. Many a time.

But just like happiness, being strong can’t last forever. No-one is happy all the time anymore than somebody can be strong all the time.

But you can always possess a quiet knowing that you can overcome life’s challenges.

That’s resilience.