The strongest women in Canada want you to embrace your strength | Canada Voices

Sylvia Atkinson was 45 years old when a chance visit to a circuit-training class at her local gym changed her life. She had just entered perimenopause and noticed her body changing in ways she didn’t understand. She was willing to try anything.

“It was the deadlifts that sold me,” she remembers. “Picking up that barbell with weight on it and dropping it was so empowering. I was like ‘How can I do more of this?’”

She hired the instructor to teach her to lift heavy and after a few months, he pushed her to sign up for a powerlifting meet, a sport that focuses on just three lifts: back squat, barbell bench press, and deadlift. She won that meet. And then the next one too and the one after that.

Atkinson remembers that as a child and a teen she felt like her body was different from that of her peers and the skinny women she saw in the magazines that were supposed to represent the definition of beauty. She kept trying to mold her body into something else. “I didn’t look like them and I was trying to be like them, trying all these different sports and exercising and never looking that way,” she said. “I always thought that maybe I wasn’t beautiful.”

Powerlifting was a sea change, a sport where success is based on strength and athleticism, not the size of your jeans. Now at 52 years old, the four-time Canadian national champion is never looking back.

“Lifting heavy didn’t just translate to having a strong body,” she said. “It made me realize I don’t want to lose weight, I just want to be stronger.”

At 36, the Fittest Woman in Canada for two years running can squat with the weight of 28 gallon-jugs of water on her back and pick up the heft of an adult black bear from the ground. But Carolyne Prevost has always wanted to be strong, whether it was to control the soccer ball, to maintain balance and control in gymnastics, or to avoid getting pushed off the puck as a teen with Hockey Canada.

It wasn’t until high school that Prevost noticed how her strength changed the way her body looked, when she realized her legs were bigger and more muscular than those of her peers.

“But I never viewed it negatively,” she said. In the sports she played, being strong, fast, and powerful was an asset. That helped her avoid comparing her body to those of other girls her age or the women she saw in magazines.
Prevost discovered CrossFit in her twenties and quickly excelled. Here was another space where strength was revered in all its forms.

“It was about comparing numbers on dumbbells or barbells and not on scales,” she says. “The weight never had anything to do with your body. It was about the object being moved.”

While she continues to dominate the Canadian CrossFit space, Prevost also works as a high school physical education teacher, teaching students how to build life-long strength. She hopes to show her students, particularly her female students, that there’s power in taking up space.

“So much of fitness is about how to get skinnier,” she says. “Setting goals for yourself that are performance-based and seeing what your body is capable of achieving is one of the greatest things you can do.”

“They come in and look at me from shoulder to shoulder and are like ‘I don’t want to be this big,’” Sam Belliveau says, speaking about some of the women who come to train at her gym in Shediac, N.B.

“I just shrug it off and tell them ‘it takes a decade,’” she says.
The 33-year-old Belliveau, a strongwoman athlete who has hoisted 200 pounds (90 kilograms) overhead with one hand, has actually been building her athleticism for almost her entire life across an array of sports.

In 2017, after a few years in powerlifting, she entered a national level strongwoman competition and finished just a half a point off the podium, which lit a fire that still hasn’t gone out. Though she started to hear warnings from friends and strangers that the sport might make her “too bulky,” she persisted.

“I love showing people how strong I can be or how great my muscles can look,” she said. “I’ve always been someone that likes to prove people wrong.”
She started to eat more to support her training and initially put on 40 or 50 pounds, which surprised her. But she also started getting stronger and winning more and more shows. She tried to balance the warring desires to look a certain way and to perform to her potential.

“I struggled a lot with clothes,” she said. “And I think it’s just about throwing everything out of the closet and bringing in new clothes. You have to enjoy it and you have to be grateful for what your body’s able to do.”

“I think it’s really important for women to keep taking up space,” she continued. “If you want to add muscles and look strong, let no one stop you.”

Alannah Yip’s pronounced back, arm, and shoulder muscles have allowed her to ascend peaks that would make most of us weak in the knees. They’ve helped her win gold at the Panamerican Climbing Championships and taken her all the way to Tokyo for the summer Olympics.

Which is why she couldn’t care less if you think she’s too muscular.
“I compete for Canada in rock climbing, so I don’t really care what you say about my body,” she says.

But Yip wasn’t always at peace with her body. At 17, around nine years after she first started climbing and shortly after switching schools, she developed an eating disorder. Balancing her lack of eating with trying to stay strong enough for the sport she loved was near impossible. One day, as she struggled through a strength and conditioning workout, her coach asked if she’d eaten that day. “Food is energy,” her coach reminded her. It was a turning point.

“I remember at that moment being like, I want to get better,” she recalls. “I want to eat more because I want to have the energy to climb because this is what makes me happy.” That was the start of her recovery.

In the subsequent decade-and-a-half, Yip went on to excel in climbing and in 2020 at the Olympics, she set a Canadian record in the speed climbing event.
Today the 32-year-old Yip is focused on being strong enough to keep doing what she loves and to be able to live independently well into older age, to go on hikes, stand up and sit down unassisted, and carry her own groceries.

“Being strong will allow you to do anything that you want to do,” she says.

Ten-year-old Kristel Ngarlem pointed to her television screen. That is what I want to be, she told her mother. As she watched a young girl in a Québecois film lift barbells over her head, the Montreal native saw her future. And she wanted to get started right away.

Once she picked up a weight, she never stopped. She entered her first competition at age 11 and then went to the Junior World Championships. Fifteen years after she first walked into a gym, Ngarlem represented Canada at the Tokyo Olympics as a weightlifter.

As a child strength athlete, Ngarlem largely avoided being sucked in by teen magazine representations of the so-called ideal body.

“When I was younger, my idols were people in the sport,” she said. “They were muscular. They were training. That’s what I was seeing as my goal.”

Having a supportive mom helped too. In her mid-teens, Ngarlem worried she was gaining weight in a way that felt foreign. Her mom pointed out that most of it was muscle. “She said ‘just remember that you can clean 95 kilos. Nobody can do that at your age,’” Ngarlem recalls.

“I always try to remember that my body is built to do that stuff,” she adds. “My body gives me the strength to do anything.”

Ngarlem represented Canada at the 2020 Olympics and today she coaches aspiring weightlifters in Montreal. If she ever hears anyone – inside or outside the gym – say that they’re worried about lifting making them “too bulky,” she has a response ready.

“If you’re not able to walk with 20 pounds in your hand, don’t be surprised if you’re not able to put your luggage over your seat,” she says.