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Heather looked from the stage over the crowd of unfamiliar faces, wishing she could be somewhere else. At fifteen, skinny and bespectacled, she could be as daring as the next teenager, but she didn’t want this kind of limelight. Between her and those expectant faces was an Olympic bar with plates as big as manhole covers on each end, one hundred thirty-five pounds, more than she weighed and certainly not part of her everyday world; she wasn’t an athlete, she didn’t even play any sport! How had she gotten herself into this? Closing her eyes briefly, she crouched under the bar, feeling it almost immovable against her shoulders.

The lead up to this situation had come a half year earlier, when a mom told me that her daughter Amanda, a seventeen-year-old senior at a nearby high school, had stopped her off-season efforts to improve her strength in the school gym. As Amanda says, “many times” we found that the weight room was closed to everyone except the football or wrestling teams. When we could get in, the machines were never free because after using a machine, the guys would stay there until one of the other guys came to use it. They also didn’t like the fact that us girls could lift more with our legs than they could using proper techniques. So they would use heavier weights and do it incorrectly. They would tell us that us we were doing it wrong, that’s why we used more than them. Also, the guys covered their legs with sweatpants since the girls who went to the weight room were soccer and lacrosse players, and they had bigger legs than some of the guys.”

I was hardly surprised: the much-heralded advances in women’s sports have yet to change society’s attitudes toward girls and strength. In my opinion, adolescent boys, subject to the same attitudes and grappling with their own physical identities, were less to blame than parents and coaches. Lots of parents set less-than-stellar examples of fitness (how many moms and dads do you know who can do ten good pushups?) and very few girls’ coaches (most of whom are men, right? that interesting?) really give more than lip service to serious off-season strength training for their athletes. But here was a mother and daughter who got he. “I’ll train her two nights a week at no cost,” I told the mom, “but here’s the problem: you I have to come train with her.” Mom thought about this. “Okay. Can her sister of hers Heather of hers come too?”

A week before Thanksgiving 2006, the girls and their moms (Heather: “Can my friend Tina come over?” Charles: “As long as her mom comes and trains too”) began their training. Initially we focused on free weight exercises; I always do this with new clients because dumbbells are basic, versatile, and available anywhere. The girls learned the correct form, how to identify each other and how to improvise. I would ask them about the mechanics, the “body logic” of what they were doing, and some of it took me a while to sink in. But I was finally able to step back, get out of the way, and watch them work with each other. And what I saw was extraordinary.

Once they got going, a synergy began to emerge, a combination of support and competitiveness, with Mom as the catalyst. Gloria is thin and wiry, always humble and optimistic, and as we all learned, strong. In just a few short months, despite some physical limitations, she was able to squat 135 pounds and even more incredible, bench dips (triceps) with a 45 pound plate on her lap. Amanda and Heather were not about leave this unanswered (“if mother she can do it…”) and soon all three girls were doing it themselves. As predicted, her leg strength blossomed; Tina, a year younger than Heather but stockier, especially enjoyed having heavy chains dangling from the bar when she squatted. And the donkey calf raise (a novelty to anyone outside of the world of bodybuilding) was a favorite of all three.

Later he would ask Gloria how the girls In fact I felt for all this. “They weren’t that interested at first, but after three or four weeks they felt comfortable with what they were doing: no one was looking at them, they were associating with each other, watching the weight gain, even participating in a little competition. They’d never been addicted to fast food, but now they’ve even started giving up Friday night dinners as their food choices changed. That included snacks, with a couple of hard-boiled eggs and a block of cheese replacing bags of Pringles.” A difficulty arose at his school: snacks of any kind are not allowed between 7:30 when classes start and lunch after 11:00. Amanda took some protein powder and it was confiscated. I find it difficult to understand how school administrators expect active and growing adolescents to go almost four hours without eating. something and stay tuned.

In February, what I had seen encouraged me enough to set a goal for the girls: “I’m calling this project ‘MoDa’ -MotherDaughter. And I want to share it with others. In May I’d like you to come with me to the PhillyFIT Bash and show what you’ve accomplished doing squats on stage.” Amanda nodded, Tina shrugged, but Heather gave me a horrified look. “We make have you?”

There were differences in the Bash place that none of us had considered. Unlike the Olympic weights the girls had been using in the study, the ones provided by Velocity Sports were encased in rubber. These tend to slide if the bar is tipped over, even slightly, which of course it did, since instead of a solid floor, we were on a makeshift stage that flexed under the weight. There were no barbell necks available at this time, so even with spotters, the girls experienced a slight “Bongo-Board” effect with that weight shifting over their shoulders. More significantly, they always trained in front of a mirror, which provided visual guidance to the proprioceptive senses; now they were looking from a stage at an audience. The weights that were easily done at my gym suddenly seemed a lot heavier.

So little Heather, who had lifted a lot more in training, dropped less than 135 pounds and couldn’t get back up without help. Tina would initially do the same with her 185. Amanda would have trouble with her 225. This was a white moment. It could have been humiliating, a complete defeat, denying the confidence they’d gained in recent months, undoing my reassurances against the stage fright that had nearly prevented them, especially Heather, from participating. But Heather, fearful of a public that had just seen her fail and a bar that still wanted to bury her, she reached within herself and found something new that had grown along with her sinew in recent months. Settling under the bar once more, she pumped out a confident half dozen reps, her lead leading Tina and Amanda to similarly redeem their initial attempts.

I saw something big happen that day, much bigger than I expected. Even though I told you this, I’m still not sure you understood. These girls had no experience or aspirations towards weightlifting. Even Amanda, although a soccer player, was not an athlete. No high-profile sports leagues or athletic scholarship searches for fans here…just ordinary schoolgirls who took a few moments in the midst of their busy teenage lives to do something few schoolgirls would attempt, and grew in ways they never expected. This does not happen in a vacuum. It took a mother, an unusually independent-minded one, to help make this happen. Is it too much to hope that there are others out there?