Dancing Shoes
by Victoria Holt | May 05, 2026
I haven’t been lifting a year yet,
but I could tell by the second month that I had found something
special. At first, I couldn’t put it into words. I tried explaining
to my coach the cocktail of feelings that surged in me when I drove
to the gym. Anticipation, anxiety, excitement, trepidation… but as
soon as I stepped into my lifting shoes, I seemed to settle into my
body.
I’ve worn a lot of shoes in my life.
Ballet slippers when I was four, tap shoes when I was ten, basketball
shoes when I was fourteen. I always had tennis shoes laying around,
of course, and Sunday shoes, dress-up shoes, sandals, flip-flops and
running shoes. I even had cleats at 21 for a short stint of softball.
My rite of passage fast-food job required non-slip shoes with black
leather uppers. If shoes make the man, then my woman shoes meant I
had a job to do.
For thirty years however, shoes were
optional. I’d taken the stay-at-home-mom route after marriage (and
softball), and the extent of my shoe collection involved church shoes
and tennis shoes with a once-in-a-lifetime detour to hot pink wedges
for a trip to Mexico.
Like a lot of people, I had let
parenting and life overtake my once athletic nature, and I found
myself in perimenopause with a health practitioner telling me that
strength training was the number one way to offset the impending
changes that my body was already starting to experience. Even so, it
took me another year to make up my mind and start.
A friend recommended a program called
Starting Strength, so I read the book, liked the science, and decided
to find an online coach. (I live in a region where the nearest
Starting Strength in-person coaches are two hours away.)
My lifting shoes were my first purchase
after the gym membership. When I slipped them on after they arrived,
I felt giddy like a schoolgirl. At 53 years old, that was no small
feat.
My coach, Bruce Trout, a certified
Starting Strength coach, programmed me for three days a week,
starting small. Out of all the sports I’d tried, weightlifting had
never been one of them. I began what Starting Strength calls the
“Novice Linear Progression,” which involves adding progressively
heavier weights to a barbell. Using a nifty mobile app to share
information and videos with my coach, I started weight training for
real.
The first few months of the Novice
Linear Progression are heady if you find you don’t mind the steady
hard work, or are of the mindset that you’re not going to quit no
matter what. The weight you’re able to lift keeps going up, and
watching those numbers rise can be affirming, if not downright
addictive. With a great coach like I have, I wasn’t just adding
weight to the barbell. He was helping me finesse my technique to
optimize my results while making lifting as reasonably safe as
possible for a woman of my size and age.
I had setbacks with a minor knee injury
from playing outside with my kids and another mishap involving
overconfidence in my ability to recover from too many vaccines at
once, but otherwise, I haven’t missed any scheduled workout
sessions, and my trusty lifting shoes have been with me every step of
the way. The other morning when I was tying them and pulling the
Velcro straps over the laces, this random thought popped into my
head. “I’m putting on my dancing shoes.”
It was silly, of course. Lifting shoes
are serviceable tools designed to help you stay balanced when you’re
supporting heavy weight. Instead of a cushioned in-sole and
spring-loaded bouncy sole, weightlifting shoes have a solid
wedge-shaped heel that help the lifter achieve an efficient and
consistent movement.
There is no dancing happening. What
I’ve been learning is that I want to keep the barbell over mid-foot
in every single lift (except the bench press, of course). All of the
movement happens in my knee joints, hip joints, shoulders, back, and
arms. My feet remain planted on the ground providing a stable base
for all of the muscle work.
And yet, there is a certain grace to
dipping below the bar to position it on my shoulder blades, and the
day I’d had the unexpected thought about dancing shoes, I found
myself placing my feet “just so” under the bar, under my
shoulders, under my hips, under my knees, the way I usually do. But I
recognized the intention in it.
My mind went way, way back to childhood
ballet and tap lessons. First position. Second position. Third
position. There were names for where I was supposed to place my feet
in order to perform the correct dance movement. Satisfied that my
analogy wasn’t completely irrelevant, I smiled and stood up with
over a hundred pounds on my back, took two steps backward, made sure
my feet were the correct width apart and evenly spaced, and began to
dance.
While it may not involve the steps of
my youth, strength training has become one of the greatest activities
of my adult life, in that it gives me joy, strength, inner peace,
mental acuity, and emotional grounding like nothing else ever has.
Just like dancing, I get to move my body with energy and intention.
There are proper positions and techniques, and when I master a
weight, there is a fluidity that means all of my parts are working
together in concert. That harmony of movement represents balance as
well as strength, and there is beauty in a human body that is using
its muscles, tendons, and bones to its full potential.
Maybe lifting isn’t technically
dancing, but as a woman in her fifties, I rather like the comparison.
I’m stronger than I’ve ever been, and lifting gives me confidence
in my physical presence and ability that I imagine dancers also
enjoy. My lifting shoes aren’t delicate-looking like ballet
slippers or glossy like tap shoes, but they’re perfect for how I’m
showing up for my body right now. I never would have guessed when I
was tapping in a chorus line with other ten-year olds that in four
decades I would be lifting more than my body weight on a regular
basis and loving every minute of it.
Silly or not, I love my “dancing
shoes,” and I hope I get to keep dancing for years to come. Having
stronger muscles and bones is one way to make that happen.
Would you care to dance?
Credit : Source Post
