Review: "A Physical Education" by Casey Johnston

A Physical Education by Casey Johnston
Published May 2025 via Grand Central Publishing
★★★★

Before she took up weight lifting, Johnston was a runner. Not because she loved running, not because she even liked running, but because she thought she had to be to fit the mold of Thin Delicate Woman that she'd spent most of her life striving to be. She was sick of running, and she was sick of dieting.

For a long time, "weight loss" formed my entire conception of my body. Either I was small enough (and always getting smaller), or I was a disappointment. [...] But it's hard to recognize how narrow your worldview is until you become receptive to having it challenged. (loc. 110*)

This is one of those books that is so far up my alley it's knocking on my door. I'd read a couple of chapters and then go to work and talk to one of my coworkers about the books (plural!) I was reading about weightlifting and similar exercise, and then later in the week I'd meet the same coworker for a weightlifting class and spend half the class thinking about my form and half the class spacing out a little and half the class thinking about how much of those books did and didn't apply in the moment. (You do the math.)

I come at weightlifting from a different place than Johnston, and I doubt I'll ever end up in the same place as her, but there are definite intersections. I genuinely love running and spin classes and just cardio generally (give me spin classes or give me death). If I go to the gym on my own I will look at the weights and tell myself I should, but then I don't, because...I could lift something heavy, or I could get on the elliptical and read, and I'd rather read. But I go to weightlifting partly because it's good for my bones and partly because it's very social (you haven't lived until you've heard one of the middle-aged women in the class lecturing an overconfident barrel-chested man in too-tight shorts for lifting too much weight with bad form and not protecting his back) and partly because I'd like my arms to someday not be noodles (wishful thinking) and partly because, yes, strength training requires actually thinking about things like consuming enough protein and eating all the meals (two things that I have not, historically, been great at). I'm not committed enough to build up my weights much, or to abandon my cardio-happy routine.

But Johnston went all in. Not right away: She tested the waters first, did her research, and gave her body a chance to tell her if it was going to rebel from the change in routine (or regime). And gradually, as she gained strength and improved her form and got comfortable being the only woman lifting weights in the gym, she started to find that her relationship with her body changed—she didn't want to be thin. She wanted to be strong. And because she was a writer already, she knew how to dig into the research and science to figure out why things worked the way they did, and why they didn't work the way she'd always been told they were supposed to.

This leaves me with a lot to unpack. I already devote more thought that I probably should to ambivalence about what lifting weight does to the body, but I'm so terribly curious about the shift in mindset that Johnston describes. This doesn't inspire me to throw out my cardio classes (I made my knuckles bleed at boxing! Probably a sign that I'm doing something wrong, but also I'm proud of myself), but it does make me think that it's maybe time to actually check out the weight rack at the gym outside of class hours. Maybe. And chocolate protein powder in porridge sounds oddly edible...

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.