How a ‘Swole Woman’ made her way to a new outlook and influence online

More Than Likes is a series about social media personalities trying to do positive things for their communities.

The video starts with an instructor and a barbell, like so many others on Instagram. But then, as Casey Johnston, the instructor, lifts the barbell — 45 pounds, plus 160 pounds of weights — up to her waist, a note pops up in the corner: “Things we should pick up regularly that weigh more than 25 pounds.” Examples are then mentioned such as suitcases, cool boxes, furniture, and so on.

Ms. Johnston, 36, has built an online community around both defending the functional benefits of strength training and demystifying a form of exercise that can be intimidating to outsiders. For Mrs. Johnston, lifting is about taking possession of one’s own body.

She doesn’t promise the secret to washboard abs or a slimmer waist like many fitness influencers do. Mrs. Johnston instead gives her more than 34,000 Instagram followers and nearly 25,000 subscribers to her She is a Beast newsletter with the tools to build a body that can move more smoothly through everyday life. And she writes sharp, penetrating views on the modern discourse around fitness, food and other related topics.

“It is often guilt, guilt, guilt. You never do enough,” Ms. Johnston said of the prevailing fitness climate. For her, gym sessions are “not about experiencing the most pain you can bear. It’s about building a basic skill that is accessible to everyone.”

In Ms. Johnston’s experience, that difference can in turn lead to better emotional and mental health. “This becomes a satisfying feedback loop, where it’s like, oh, ‘I can get stronger, and my body doesn’t exist just to be a meat bag holding my brain, or to look attractive to other people,'” she said.

Ms. Johnston, who was an editor at Wirecutter, a New York Times product review company, from 2014 to 2018, began writing to her Ask a Swole woman column for the site Hairpin in 2016 (“swole” means very muscular). She found that her writing style resonated with readers hungry for more accessible fitness writing, and after the site shut down in early 2018, her column bounced around before becoming part of the paid version of her newsletter. She has also written an e-book, “LIFTOFF: Bench to Barbell”, which is marketed as a “weightlifting guide for the rest of us” (it has sold more than 10,000 copies), and she has a channel on the social app Discord, where she connects directly with readers.

Before she started lifting, Ms. Johnston focused on running and restricting calories as a way to emulate the kind of body she had been idolized growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That pursuit was laced with negativity.

“I think people around my age grew up in an extremely difficult time in terms of the way the media treated women and ridiculed them for the slightest flaws,” Ms Johnston said. “There was so much right in the media to control what women looked like, or how they behaved in public. Britney Spears is probably our most canonical example of this, where there were constant headlines about whether her weight fluctuated.

In 2013, Ms. Johnston came across a Reddit post featuring a female bodybuilder that piqued her interest. She needed a change: she didn’t eat much and her hands and feet were often cold. Lifting, she realized, allowed her to balance her food intake and exercise in a smarter way. But she’s not here to judge other approaches.

“I radically accept whatever it is that people want to do. I’m not here to argue with them about what they think works,” Ms Johnston said of those who prefer other forms of exercise to weightlifting. “My only position is that I think weight training gets a bad rap.”

The first time she went to the gym — an “intimidating place,” she said — she pushed aside her feelings of insecurity and did three exercises: squats, benches and rows, three sets of five “reps” or reps each.

Then, she said, she headed for the bodega. “I got so hungry,” said Mrs. Johnston. “My body demands its feast after going to battle.”

Ms. Johnston soon began structuring meals around her lifting, eating more protein and carbohydrates. She enjoyed her new strength.

“She constantly thinks of her body as this system,” said Seamus McKiernan, her partner. “What’s in it? And what you can do for it? And how it can make you feel better and do more?”

Her platforms “give people a place where they know they’re with other people who are on the same page as them, where they’re focused on more functionality and a sustainable practice,” Ms Johnston said.

Her friend Choire Sicha, a senior editor at New York magazine and former editor of the Styles section of The New York Times, bought Ms. Johnston’s e-book in 2021. After spending hours at his desk during the pandemic, he realized his body was about to “deteriorate” and challenged himself to do something that made him “very uncomfortable,” as Mr. Sicha put it. He became a volunteer firefighter, but realized he had to build strength.

He turned to Mrs. Johnston’s guide to lifting and found that the philosophy underlying her work resonated.

“She knows we’re not all going to be champion weightlifters, and she knows we’re not all going to look pretty when we do it,” said Mr. Sicha. “It’s just very anti-Instagram aesthetic. It’s very pro-human.”