By Katie Roiphe

I am the kind of person who asks a man to open a jar for me. If my own men are not around, I am not above texting my tenant and asking him to open it for me. I have lived basically my whole life up to now not caring about being strong.

But over the past year I've suddenly found myself doing bicep curls and push-ups and planks. I go to barre classes and pop into online strength classes. Is this a quiet, weirdly constructive midlife crisis? Whatever it is, it is oddly disorienting. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror at an exercise class and think: Who is that?

"I can meet you after barre," I text one of my oldest friends. "I'll never get used to you saying that," she texts back. She still thinks of me from the days of drinking until two in the morning and eating fries at Florent, a 24-hour restaurant in the Meatpacking District, where I used to live. My only exercise was walking very long distances at night in high heels. But I am not alone in my strange, completely out-of-character turn toward lifting weights and working on core strength.

I've been noticing a whole vibrant subculture of basically unathletic women in their 40s and 50s who are suddenly awakened to the desire to be strong. Some come to it because of a doctor's advice about perimenopausal symptoms, some from watching aging parents, and others from a low-grade existential panic about how they look. I now spy weights in the corner of friends' kitchens, and a surprising number of them tell me about daily online weight classes or a new passion they've developed for Pilates or barre. I guess it seems like a way to take control, to seize agency, to improve yourself in what is otherwise an inevitable march of decline.

For me, barre was intimidating. The writer Jia Tolentino characterized it as "what a ballerina might do if you concussed her and then made her snort caffeine pills." Though I dreaded my early classes, I was determined. After many months of being conspicuously pathetic, I have, to my great surprise, advanced to not terrible. Every now and then the teacher of my barre class even calls out, "Looking strong, Katie R." (a name I have not been called since second grade).

I used to feel that time spent devoted to improving your body was fruitless or monotonous. There seemed to be something basic or banal about whiling away hours in the gym. The Parisian writer Colombe Schneck wrote about taking up swimming in her 40s after a lifetime devoted to brainy, sedentary pursuits: "I had so much to learn, but it wasn't the kind of book learning I was used to. It was an unexplored, parallel world, the world of sensation." She wrote, "I was completely inhabiting my body. It was an entirely unfamiliar freedom, bodily freedom, rapture."

There is something peculiarly exhilarating about taking up an activity you are not naturally good at. There is a rush of mastery I don't get when writing something or teaching a class. Doing something you are not naturally inclined toward brings a distinctive kind of pleasure. A more exotic and startling sense of accomplishment. You have to work very hard to improve even a tiny bit, and the work itself slowly becomes the point. Instead of hating every minute of it, which is what I expected, it actually feels great.

To understand this unlikely plot twist, I had coffee with a former student, Emma Baker, creator of the podcast Stargirl, who also runs a personal training business. "The 'mind-body connection' is easy to dismiss as woo-woo nonsense if you've never nurtured it," Emma says. "But once you start, you understand that your experience inhabiting your body is the root of so many feelings you have about yourself. Being strong will literally change your identity because you'll feel so different in your skin." This seems undeniably true. I feel a glimmer of transformation, a slight mysterious difference moving through my day.

It is also liberating to spend 40 minutes not thinking about work or assorted problems and anxieties. The pure escape of strenuous physical challenge. Your sense of purpose or drive narrows to something suddenly very manageable.

I think, for me, it is less about vanity than a fantasy of gracefully traipsing into my later years. When you are young you can drink every night and wake up hung over and look great and feel basically OK, but eventually that ceases to be the case.

I have in my head an image of my own mother, nearing 90, who moves unsteadily, even with her walker. She never exercised. She was busy writing novels and going out to dinners and parties and catching up with friends. A couple of years ago, when she broke her hip and the physical therapist gave her a set of daily exercises, she said they were "boring" and never did them. Even the little cycle thing you can do while sitting on a couch and watching "White Lotus" was too boring. She is a flashing cautionary tale in my head.

I glance around at the other women my age in the class. I notice a woman in her 40s, with glasses, who has much heavier weights than anyone in the room. She doesn't have the vibe of someone who has devoted inordinate amounts of energy to fitness. If I were guessing I would think she edited literary novels or was a professor of French poetry. She is quietly determined, almost devotional in her movements. Her form is far better than any of the tattooed 20 somethings around her.

Is there the faintest suggestion in the room that, if you do this, you won't get older? A whisper of a fantasy? There is certainly the suggestion of enduring elegance, of self-sufficiency, or let's just say, of not falling while you are brushing your teeth 30 years from now. There is a way that these repetitive movements can ward off calamities, outfox deterioration, at least to a point.

Of course it is all illusion, but the flattering lighting and bougie boxed waters belie that revelation. Here, in this room, we are 10 hammer curls away from immortality.

At the very least, we will be opening our own jars.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 11, 2025 11:00 ET (15:00 GMT)

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