“The breaks give your nervous system a chance to calm down,” said Ms. Khoudari, who has also completed courses in body-oriented trauma therapy and has become a leading advocate of lifting weights as a form of healing. “When we deal with trauma, our nervous system generally has less capacity for stress and also less resilience,” she continued. “And then you can use strength training to push the limit of how much stress you can handle.” Over time, this can expand our tolerance window.
For this reason, Dr. Whitworth and others said weight lifting could be a useful tool for people undergoing exposure therapy, during which therapists encourage patients to focus on their traumatic memories in increments brief and controlled, not unlike the cyclical nature of strength training. Over time, this exposure can disable memories, as well as the related physical stress.
“The idea is that they may be really anxious at first,” Dr. Whitworth said. But “over time, patients begin to process the fact that those memories and feelings are not dangerous.”
Combining this therapy with high-intensity exercise such as weight lifting, he said, could be “particularly beneficial.”
For many people with trauma, lifting weights also helps them feel comfortable in their bodies. As Ms. Rooney explained, “bodies are often the harbingers of trauma and the carriers of trauma,” leading many people to experience a kind of disconnect between mind and body. For example, if someone has experienced physical trauma related to her torso, she may feel cut off from that part of her body as a coping mechanism. But lifting weights can help reconnect mind and body.
Take the back squat as an example, Rooney said, in which lifters twist at the hips and knees while resting a weight on their shoulders. “There’s something about having, for example, a barbell on your back that’s like, ‘Wow, all of a sudden I can feel my spine. I can feel the back of my body. And I don’t remember the last time I felt the back of my body,’” he said.
Danielle Friedman is a journalist in New York City and the author of “Let’s Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World.”
