Strength As Resistance: Why your gym session is a political act.
There was a time when fitness was straightforward about looking good, living longer, and feeling better. The gym was a space of personal transformation, divorced from the complexities of political life. But that era, if it ever truly existed, is over. Today, strength is no longer just personal it’s political.
The rising cost of healthcare, systematic attacks on bodily autonomy, and the relentless economic squeeze on everyday people have made one thing abundantly clear: strength is resistance.
This isn’t hyperbole. This is the logical conclusion when we examine the intersection of physical capability, economic vulnerability, and political power in contemporary America.
Externalizing Rage: From Emotion to Action
“I would like women to externalize their RAGE and save us with it. Kick everyone’s asses, world needs some whooping!!” – Pedro Pascal
Pascal’s words, delivered with characteristic passion, strike at the heart of something far bigger than individual frustration. They speak to a fundamental truth about how transformation happens: rage, when externalized productively, becomes action. It becomes movement. It becomes transformation.
But what does it mean to “externalize” rage productively?
In a culture that teaches women and marginalized people to internalize anger to turn it inward as self-criticism, anxiety, or depression the act of externalizing that energy is revolutionary. Rage turned outward doesn’t mean violence against others; it means refusing to consume yourself with emotions that others have caused. It means channeling justified anger into building something: stronger bodies, stronger communities, stronger movements.
And in an era where personal autonomy is under siege, where the cost of illness is financially ruinous, and where entire systems profit from keeping people weak, dependent, and submissive, training our bodies is one of the most radical things we can do.
Strength isn’t just about lifting weights; it’s about reclaiming control in three key ways: Healthcare, Autonomy, and Economic Precarity.
The numbers are staggering. Insurance premiums have increased by over 20% in the past five years, while deductibles have climbed even faster. The average American family now pays over $23,000 annually in premiums and out-of-pocket costs. Meanwhile, preventable diseases heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, hypertension are draining bank accounts and cutting lives short.
Here’s the bitter irony: strength training is one of the most effective, evidence-based tools to combat these conditions. Research consistently shows that resistance training improves insulin sensitivity, reduces cardiovascular disease risk, lowers blood pressure, and increases bone density. It’s preventative medicine that costs the price of a gym membership or a set of dumbbells.
Yet preventative care remains de-prioritized in our healthcare system in favor of treating symptoms. And even as treating those symptoms becomes more financially burdensome, the cycle continues. Insurance companies profit from premiums. Pharmaceutical companies profit from medications. The entire apparatus benefits from managing chronic illness rather than preventing it.
See the loop here?
Being strong truly metabolically healthy, physically capable strong removes you partially from this profitable cycle. It’s not a cure-all, but it’s a form of economic self-defense. Every deadlift is a small rebellion against a system that would prefer you sick and paying.
Meanwhile Legislators and corporations continue to dictate what people especially women can and cannot do with their bodies. The overturning of Roe v. Wade crystallized what many already knew: bodily autonomy is not guaranteed. It must be defended.
Strength training, in this context, becomes more than exercise. It’s a physical manifestation of defiance, a declaration that control over one’s body belongs to the individual. When external forces seek to regulate, restrict, and control bodies particularly female bodies, trans bodies, disabled bodies claiming physical power becomes an act of insurgence.
Consider the language we use around strength: autonomy, agency, power, control. These aren’t coincidental. Physical strength creates a different relationship with one’s body one based on capability rather than appearance, on what the body can do rather than how it’s perceived or regulated by others.
As feminist theorist Susan Bordo wrote, “The firm, developed body has become a symbol of correct attitude; it means that one ‘cares’ about oneself and how one appears to others.” But in our current moment, we might expand this: the strong body symbolizes more than self-care. It symbolizes self-determination.
As The LGBTQ+ community, is facing increasing legislative attacks in states like Iowa, Florida, Texas, and beyond, it knows intimately that resilience is more than survival it is resistance.
When your right to healthcare is contested, when your right to exist freely in public spaces is debated, when your very identity becomes a political football, strength takes on additional dimensions. It becomes armor against a hostile world. It becomes community found in CrossFit boxes, running clubs, and powerlifting gyms that explicitly welcome queer athletes. It becomes visibility strong trans athletes, buff drag performers, muscular nonbinary folks who refuse to be erased or diminished.
Whether it’s the right to healthcare, the right to exist freely, or the right to bodily autonomy, the strength to fight literally and metaphorically is essential.
The physical culture within many LGBTQ+ communities reflects this understanding. From Provincetown’s muscle-bound summer crowds to the proliferation of queer lifting collectives in major cities, there’s recognition that in a world that seeks to make you small, taking up space building muscle, claiming strength is defiance.
“Let’s Start Building Some Hurtin’ Bombs.”
“So, what we’ll be calling on is good ol’ fashioned blunt force trauma. Horsepower. Heavy-duty, cast-iron, piledriving punches that will have to hurt so much they’ll rattle his ancestors. Every time you hit him with a shot, it’s gotta feel like he tried kissing the express train. Yeah! Let’s start building some hurtin’ bombs!” —Duke, Rocky Balboa (2006)
This quote one of my favorites is heavy on metaphor that extends far beyond the ring, far beyond film. Duke isn’t just talking about boxing. He’s talking about preparation. He’s talking about building the capacity to weather storms, to hit back when hit, to survive rounds you didn’t think you could survive.
Strength training lifting heavy, conditioning our bodies, reinforcing our endurance prepares us for life’s inevitable fights.
Not literal fights, necessarily, though the confidence that comes from knowing you’re physically capable has its own value. But the metaphorical fights: the fight against a healthcare system that would bankrupt you for getting sick. The fight against legislators who see your body as state property. The fight against economic systems designed to extract maximum value while giving minimum security. The fight to maintain hope and agency in a world that often feels designed to crush both.
And in a time when people feel increasingly powerless, when democratic participation feels performative, when individual action seems meaningless against massive systems, being strong is an act of rebellion.
It’s something you control. Something you build. Something that’s yours. Here is how we establish resistance training as resistance living creating a framework for understanding
It’s time for a mental shift in how we understand physical training. This isn’t about aesthetics or even just health anymore. This is about power literal and figurative.
We train because the physically strong are harder to control, oppress, and diminish.
This is historical fact. Strong people are harder to physically intimidate. Strong people have more options they can lift, carry, move, act in ways that weak people cannot. Strong people recover faster from illness and injury, removing themselves from dependency. Strong people live longer, independent lives.
We train because when the system tries to wear us down, we refuse to be broken.
The grind of modern capitalism long hours, insufficient pay, poor working conditions, inadequate healthcare is designed to extract maximum productivity while minimizing cost. It’s exhausting by design. Strength training is one tool among many to resist that exhaustion. It builds physical and mental resilience. It creates energy rather than depleting it. It reinforces the message: I will not be ground down.
We train because we will not be small, weak, or compliant when someone demands otherwise.
This is perhaps the most direct political statement. In a culture that often prefers women demure, marginalized people invisible, and working people grateful for scraps, choosing to be visibly strong—to take up space, to be capable, to refuse smallness is an inherently political act.
We train because those under attack need allies with the strength to stand beside them.
Solidarity isn’t just ideological. It’s physical. Showing up for protests, for community defense, for mutual aid networks all of this requires physical capacity. The elderly neighbor who needs help with groceries. The friend who needs help moving because they can’t afford movers. The community garden that needs beds built. The march that lasts six hours. Strength makes solidarity possible.
For those interested in the theoretical underpinnings of this argument, we can turn to Michel Foucault’s concept of “biopower” the way modern states and institutions regulate populations through control over bodies and life itself.
Foucault argued that power in modern society operates not primarily through repression but through the production of particular kinds of bodies and subjects. Healthcare systems, educational systems, and economic systems all work to create bodies that are useful, docile, and productive within existing power structures.
Physical strength training, understood through this lens, becomes a practice of counter-biopower. By intentionally developing physical capabilities that exceed what’s required for workplace productivity, by building bodies that are harder to control and contain, by creating a relationship to one’s body based on personal agency rather than external regulation, strength training resists the disciplinary mechanisms Foucault described.
Similarly, we can consider Audre Lorde’s concept that “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Lorde understood that in systems designed to devalue and destroy certain bodies Black bodies, queer bodies, female bodies the act of maintaining those bodies, of making them strong and capable, is inherently oppositional.
Practical Resistance: What This Looks Like
So what does “strength as resistance” look like in practice?
For the individual:
It looks like prioritizing training even when capitalism demands all your time and energy
It looks like investing in your physical capacity as protection against an exploitative healthcare system
It looks like building a body that’s harder to intimidate, harder to break down, harder to control
It looks like developing the physical confidence that changes how you move through the world
For the community:
It looks like gyms and training spaces that explicitly welcome marginalized people
It looks like sharing knowledge—teaching lifts, writing programs, demystifying strength
It looks like making strength accessible regardless of income through community spaces and mutual aid
It looks like creating physical culture that celebrates capability over appearance, function over form
For the movement:
It looks like recognizing that revolutionaries need strong bodies for the long fight
It looks like understanding that marginalized communities need physical capacity for self-determination
It looks like building networks of capable people who can show up when showing up matters
It looks like refusing the narrative that political action is purely intellectual or digital
One crucial aspect of strength as resistance is temporal. This isn’t about peak performance in your twenties. It’s about maintaining capacity across lifespans.
Sarcopenia age-related muscle loss begins in the thirties and accelerates after sixty. Without intervention, people lose 3-8% of muscle mass per decade after thirty, with faster losses after sixty. This loss directly correlates with loss of independence, increased fall risk, decreased metabolic health, and earlier mortality.
But strength training reverses this. People in their seventies and eighties can build significant muscle mass and strength. They can maintain independence. They can avoid or delay the cascade of health problems that lead to expensive, protracted, undignified decline.
In a society that often discards the elderly, that views aging as a period of inevitable decline and dependence, maintaining strength is resistance against ageism. It’s a refusal of the narrative that you become useless, that you become a burden, that your body’s only trajectory is deterioration.
Building strength early, maintaining it through middle age, and fighting for it in later years is a multi-decade act of resistance against systems that profit from your decline.
Any discussion of strength as political resistance must grapple with who has historically been allowed, encouraged, or expected to be strong.
White men have always had cultural permission to pursue strength. It’s been encouraged, celebrated, weaponized, and commodified for their benefit.
For everyone else, the relationship with strength has been more complicated.
Women, particularly white women, have faced cultural pressures toward weakness—being physically weak was long considered feminine, desirable, appropriate. Women who pursued strength were often masculinized, stigmatized, or exoticized. This is changing, but slowly, and strong women still face commentary and criticism that strong men do not.
Black Americans have a fraught relationship with strength. Black bodies have been simultaneously fetishized for physical power (in labor, in sports) while being threatened by it (the “dangerous Black man” stereotype that gets people killed). Black women face particular double-binds around strength—expected to be resilient and enduring, yet punished when that strength becomes too visible or assertive.
Asian Americans face stereotypes of physical weakness and passivity, particularly Asian men, making strength-building a form of resistance against racist caricature.
Disabled people are often excluded entirely from conversations about strength, despite many disabled athletes being extraordinarily strong. The assumption that disability equals weakness is itself a form of ableism that strength training can challenge.
Trans people, particularly trans women, face accusations that their strength is “unfair” or “threatening,” while trans men’s strength is often dismissed or invalidated.
Understanding strength as resistance requires acknowledging these different contexts. It requires creating spaces and cultures where everyone’s strength is welcomed, where building power isn’t the exclusive domain of those who’ve always had social permission to be powerful.
Critics and Limitations: What This Framework Doesn’t Do
It’s important to acknowledge the limitations of this argument. Strength training is not:
A replacement for systemic change
Accessible to everyone (though it should be)
A solution to political problems that require political solutions
A cure for poverty, discrimination, or oppression
Someone can be very strong and still be denied healthcare. Still be targeted by discriminatory laws. Still struggle to pay rent. Still face violence and oppression.
The argument here is not that individual strength replaces collective action. It’s that individual strength enables collective action. It’s that personal agency and capability are tools in a larger toolkit. It’s that the personal and the political are inextricably linked, and sometimes the personal act of building strength is itself political.
Additionally, we must be cautious about valorizing strength in ways that exclude or devalue those who cannot, for various reasons, pursue conventional strength training. Disability justice teaches us that all bodies have value, that independence isn’t the only valid way to live, that interdependence is human and good.
The argument for strength as resistance must include, not exclude. It must expand what strength looks like, who gets to claim it, and how we measure it.
So where does this leave us?
Strength is the new resistance. And resist we shall.
This isn’t a metaphor. This is strategy. In a world that wants you small, weak, compliant, and sick, being strong is rebellion. It’s preparation. It’s solidarity. It’s self-defense on multiple levels.
This is a call to action, but not a simple one. It’s not “go to the gym and all will be well.” It’s “understand that your body is a site of political struggle, that your strength has implications beyond yourself, that the work you do in training is connected to larger fights for justice, autonomy, and human dignity.”
It’s a call to build your strength while also building communities of strength. To make strength accessible. To recognize that some people face barriers to training that others don’t, and to work to dismantle those barriers. To understand that strength comes in many forms—physical, yes, but also mental, emotional, communal.
It’s a call to see the gym, the trail, the lifting platform, the yoga studio, the dojo not as escapes from political reality but as spaces where political resistance is built, quite literally, one rep at a time.
Now go lift something heavy. Go build your capacity. Go make yourself harder to break, harder to control, harder to diminish.
Go make life more.
Because in the end, they want you weak. They want you tired. They want you sick and scared and small.
Don’t give them what they want.
Be strong instead.
That’s the resistance.