Nothing is Impossible: A Conversation with Alyssa Ages

Secrets of Giants: A Journey to Uncover the True Meaning of Strength

by Alyssa Ages

Avery Publishing Group (2023); 256 pp.; $26.04 (Hardcover)

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Alyssa Ages’s debut, Secrets of Giants, delves into the high-intensity world of strength training. It’s part personal anecdotes, part athlete interviews, and all inspiration. Throughout Secrets of Giants, Ages explores themes of strength and perseverance. She not only learns from fellow strongman competitors, but she processes the trauma and grief of her own miscarriage one deadlift at a time. Secrets of Giants delivers a universal message of what it takes to tackle obstacles both inside and outside of the gym that is sure to resonate with mothers and anyone who has ever struggled with life’s challenges.

Ages is a journalist whose work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Wired, Men’s Journal, Publisher’s Weekly, Parents, MTV News, Spin, and Vibe. She is a former personal trainer, group fitness instructor, strongman competitor, marathoner, triathlete, occasional rock climber, and a mom to two young daughters. A born-and-raised New Yorker, she now lives in Toronto with her husband and two daughters. Jennie Wexler interviewed Ages about her strength training experiences and all she has learned through writing her first book. This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Jennie Wexler: You wrote candidly about how strength training helped you process the trauma of your miscarriage. Has strength training helped you through any other aspects of motherhood? How so?

Alyssa Ages: Lifting has taught me to focus on what my body can do, not how it looks. That’s something I’m very focused on passing on to my kids. I’m careful not to disparage my own body in front of them, even when I don’t feel my best, and I try to model a really positive relationship with food. If they join me for my garage workout, we’ll share a protein shake afterward and I’ll explain how the protein helps us get stronger and the carbs help us replenish our energy stores. We bake together and we snack on the ingredients and eat fresh cookies straight from the oven, and I never refer to it as a “cheat” meal or something I “earned.” Those are all thoughts I had constantly as a teen and in my twenties, and caring less about how my body looks taught me that I can just enjoy food for the sake of food, and not because I burned off some arbitrary amount of calories prior to consuming it. I know at some point they’ll hear really crappy things about their bodies from their friends and social media, but if I can keep them sheltered from it a little longer, I’m doing my job.

JW: I assumed Secrets of Giants would be geared toward athletes and strength trainers. I was surprised to find myself nodding along as insights from the book mirrored my experiences. There is strength to be found in all aspects of life. Do you agree? Why did you want to write a book about strength and the world of strongman?

AA: I think strength is about so much more than just picking up something heavy. It’s about how you respond to difficult situations—do you give up, or do you persevere because you know there’s probably a way out? Sometimes you go into the gym, and the weight that you hoped to move that day doesn’t budge. But you know that if you keep coming back, maybe it will move the next time or the time after that. That’s what strength training teaches you: nothing is impossible, it’s just something you haven’t done yet.

I wrote this book for the people who look at a challenge and think they can’t overcome it, and for the many people who have said to me, “That strongman stuff you do looks so cool, but I could never do that.” I want people to read this book, a story of someone who was (and still frankly is) utterly average at athletics, and think, if she could do it maybe I can too. And it’s also very much a love letter to the sport of strongman and strength sports in general. I’ve dabbled in a ton of sports, from marathons and triathlons, to roller derby, to rock climbing, and I’ve never loved anything as much as this sport. There is something so primal and enthralling about looking at something that seems immovable and then learning that you can actually move it.

JW: The central question in your debut is: What is strength? Do you think your definition of strength changed after becoming a mother, and if so, in what ways?

AA: Absolutely! I always knew strength was about more than just how many pounds you can lift, but I’ve also learned that in the most practical of ways, it allows me to be a better parent. Sure, being strong helps me literally lift my kids up when they fall down, but more than that, it helps me teach them how to pick themselves up too. Learning patience in the gym—say, not rushing a heavy deadlift and making sure my form is right—has taught me how to have greater patience when my toddler takes 20 minutes to choose a pair of socks.

JW: It takes perseverance to write a book and then get that book published. In Secrets of Giants, you touch upon the unrelenting grit needed to train and compete in Strongman competitions. How do you think your strength training helped you to write and publish your first book?

AA: One of the best lessons lifting teaches you is that if you keep working towards something, eventually, you’ll master it. It might take a really long time, and you’ll fail way more times than you succeed, but eventually, if you stick with it, one day that barbell or boulder will rise from the floor, and when it does, it will be the most incredible feeling of accomplishment. There’s a study I quote in the book in which the participants showed decreased levels of anxiety after just two weeks on a structured resistance exercise training program. When I interviewed one of the researchers who led the study, he hypothesized that one reason for that decrease could be increased levels of mastery. It’s the idea that if I can succeed here, I can succeed elsewhere too. My experience with lifting has taught me that nothing is impossible, it’s just something I haven’t done yet, and that’s changed how I view every goal and challenge. I didn’t think I could become a first-time author at age 40, and the process from idea to finished book felt so daunting. So I did exactly what I do when I’m staring down a lifting goal: I took it one incremental success at a time.

JW: One of my favorite lines in your book is, “Maybe strength isn’t about being immune to pain or impervious to failure, but instead about managing the struggle.” I have felt that way during especially challenging times in my life. Are there times you’ve felt that way in your life?

AA: Oh my gosh, yes, so many times. I write about how the moment that inspired that revelation was when I had a miscarriage. I realized that the grief and the road to getting pregnant again wasn’t something I could just power through. The muscles I’d built over the years of strength training hadn’t conferred some kind of invisible shield around me that would protect me from all pain. So many people I spoke to for this book got into strength training to create armor, but then we realized that it’s not about just blocking out the bad stuff. It’s learning how to deal with the bad stuff. Failure in a gym setting can help teach you that.

JW: You interviewed about 50 athletes. What was your favorite piece of advice, and how have you applied it to your workouts or the way you live your own life?

AA: I learned something profound from each athlete I spoke to, but one of the lines that resonated the most was something I had kind of shrugged off when I first heard it. It’s from Colin Bryce, a World’s Strongest Man competitor who now runs one of the biggest competition series in Europe and is a giant in this sport. He said, “The guy who wins World’s Strongest Man is invariably somebody who has a hole in his heart. He thinks he’ll be satisfied when he’s crowned king of the world, but he isn’t. He wakes up the next day and finds out he’s just the same guy he was the day before. That’s a terrifying thought.”

When he said that to me, I thought, what a stunning revelation, but it doesn’t apply to me. I’ll never be at the top of the podium. And I haven’t been. But in the book, I talk about a major competition I kind of stumbled into, and how much work and dedication I put into getting ready for it because I thought it would be the last peak I’d have to climb in this sport before I felt like I’d really accomplished something. When it was over, I realized I wasn’t left with a sense of calm because I’d done everything I wanted to do. I was left with a kind of emptiness because I had no idea what to do next. Returning to Bryce’s words, I realized that you have to keep setting goals but never expect that once you achieve them, you’ll finally have “made it.” Sit in that success, embrace it, enjoy it, and then set a new goal.

JW: You quit baseball as a child because you struck out and felt you would never be good enough. In the book, you wrote about your realization later in life when your mother told you, although you had no recollection, that you never even swung the bat. You quoted your coach, Dain Wallis, as saying, “If we continue to tell ourselves a certain story, then that is who we will become.” As mothers, we want our children to become their best selves. How has your experience of quitting as a child and then triumphing as an adult shaped the way you speak to your children about the activities they’re interested in trying? What story do you want your children to tell themselves?

AA: A refrain in my house is, “We don’t say I can’t, we say I’ll try.” I spent far, far too much of my life saying I can’t, and it held me back from so much. I never want my kids to think there’s anything that’s insurmountable. I want them to see every challenge as something that they can accomplish as long as they work hard enough. If they’re in the gym with me when I’m lifting and they want to try to pick up the barbell that has 200 pounds on it, I always let them go put their hands on it and see if it budges (they’re 5 and 3 so this isn’t a dangerous situation—the thing isn’t even going to move). When it doesn’t move, I give them something they can lift—a five-pound med ball, a light dumbbell—and then I tell them that’s where I started too. I’ve been teaching my older daughter how to do basic lifts with a broomstick, and she puts stickers on a chart for trying, for doing the movement with help, and then for doing it on her own. Maybe lifting an actual barbell won’t be her thing when she’s older, but for now, I want her to know it’s possible.  

JW: Most working mothers seek ways to make their daily lives more efficient. As a mother to two little girls, how did you fit in all your training sessions and write a book?

AA: First and foremost, we have a nanny. Without her, I would not be able to do any of this. I also have a very supportive partner: if we were sitting around the dinner table and I had a great idea for a line in the book and wanted to get it on paper, he’d always just say, “Yep, go write it, I’ve got the kids.” I also have flexible hours as a freelance writer, so if I want to do my workout at noon, I can. Turning our garage into a gym made a huge difference because I don’t have to commute anywhere, and I often wake up an hour before the kids are up to get my workout in so it doesn’t disrupt the flow of my day (I also love the feeling of having accomplished something before sunrise). I’m the kind of person who can only write when I’m in the right headspace, so I also had places to jot notes everywhere, including a waterproof pad of paper stuck to the wall of our shower. I’d scribble a few lines and then take them to the computer with me as soon as possible to keep going. Also, coffee. 

JW: How is strength training different from any other form of exercise you’ve tried? What would you say to someone nervous to try strength training for the first time or intimidated by lifting heavy weights? And how would someone get started?

AA: Like anything, you should start strength training at the level that’s right for your experience level. You can start with no equipment at all; during the start of the pandemic, for example, some strength athletes without access to their usual gyms bicep-curled water bottles or squatted with a backpack full of canned tomatoes. There are also plenty of no-cost or low-cost classes you can follow online. That said, if you want to get serious about strength training or just lift heavier weights, nothing compares to having a personal trainer or coach to watch your form, ensure you’re moving safely, and help you understand when to add more weight and when to hold back.

It’s always easy to feel intimidated by something you haven’t tried yet. Especially when the most visible people in the lifting scene are wildly muscular and tossing around their body weight on a barbell like it’s a feather. But no coach or strength training class would ask you to start at that level (and if they do, RUN).

JW: You wrote quite a bit about the idea of moving goalposts—the notion that when we achieve what we want, we inevitably want more. I, too, have felt this way after any big accomplishment in my life. In the past year, you’ve competed in the United States Strongman Nationals and have completed your debut book. Why do you think human beings are always striving for the next rung? At this point in your life, are you satisfied? And what’s next for you?

AA: I recently interviewed the newest World’s Strongest Man, Mitchell Hooper, and he said something I wish I’d heard while writing this book. He said, “We worry so much about not accomplishing our goals when we should instead be worried about accomplishing them all. Because then, what do we have to look forward to?” I’ve always felt the need to work towards a goal, but after Strongman Nationals, I felt like maybe I needed to pull back on the big goals. Now I understand that it’s having something to work for that keeps me excited. The trick, I think, is to not let the pursuit of those goals consume every aspect of your life. And I’m quoting Hooper again here, but make sure it’s a want, not a need. I don’t think I’ll ever be totally satisfied, but now I believe that’s a really good thing.