Finding Strength: How Weightlifting Can Support Mental Health and Trauma Recovery

Julie N
Mar 17
8 min read

Over the past year, I began doing something I had never done before in my life. I started lifting weights.

At the time, I had no particular ambition to become stronger or more athletic. If anything, I was simply curious about how my body might respond to a form of movement that was entirely new to me. What I did not expect was that this small experiment would gradually begin to change how I felt in my body and in my mind.

Over time I noticed real changes. My sleep improved, my mood lifted, and I began to experience something that we often talk about in therapy but do not always feel so directly in the body. I began to feel a stronger sense of agency.

As both a therapist and a highly sensitive person, self care is essential to sustaining the work I do with others. Weightlifting unexpectedly became one of the most grounding practices in my week. When I lift, I feel my body mobilise. I feel effort, strength, and capability.

This experience also led me to become curious about something more professional. What does research say about weightlifting and mental health, particularly in the context of trauma recovery?

It turns out that a growing body of research suggests that strength training may play a meaningful role in supporting emotional wellbeing, improving mood, and helping people reconnect with their bodies after traumatic experiences.

The Link Between Exercise and Mental Health

We have long known that physical activity can have a positive effect on mental health. Research consistently shows that regular exercise can help reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety, improve sleep, and support emotional regulation.

In recent years, researchers have also begun to explore the psychological benefits of resistance training, including weightlifting. Studies suggest that strength training can significantly reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety across different age groups. Even relatively modest training programmes, such as lifting weights two or three times per week, have been shown to produce meaningful improvements in mood.

Part of this effect is biological. Exercise influences brain chemistry by increasing endorphins and other neurochemicals associated with improved mood. Strength training may also stimulate growth factors that support brain health and emotional regulation.

But biology alone does not explain everything.

Something else happens when we engage the body in this way.

Trauma, the Body, and the Experience of Agency

Trauma is not only something that lives in memory or thought. It is also held in the body.

Many trauma survivors describe feeling disconnected from their bodies, or experiencing their bodies as unpredictable or unsafe. In therapy, part of the healing process often involves gently rebuilding a sense of embodied awareness and safety.

Often, what makes an experience traumatic is not only the event itself but the profound sense of powerlessness that accompanies it. In moments of danger, the body instinctively prepares to respond by fighting, fleeing, or protecting itself. But when those responses are impossible, blocked, or overwhelmed, something in the body can become frozen. From a therapeutic perspective, healing often involves gradually restoring the body's capacity for mobilisation.

In The Body Keeps the Score, trauma psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk describes how animals in the wild naturally discharge stress after a threat has passed. After escaping danger, animals will often tremble or shake. This shaking is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is the nervous system releasing the intense activation that built up during the threat.

Humans have the same biological capacity. Yet culturally we often learn to suppress these responses. We are encouraged to remain composed, to hold ourselves together, and to move on quickly. In doing so, the body’s natural stress responses may never fully complete.

Over time, the body may continue to carry that unfinished activation.

Movement practices can sometimes help reopen this pathway. When we engage the body through practices such as yoga, therapeutic movement, or strength training, we invite the nervous system back into action rather than immobilisation.

For many people, exercise can become a gentle way of supporting trauma recovery by helping the body rediscover movement and agency.

Strength as a Lived Experience

In my therapeutic work I practice Gestalt psychotherapy. Gestalt therapy is a relational and experiential form of therapy that emphasises present moment awareness and the connection between mind and body. It invites us to notice what we are sensing, feeling, and experiencing in the here and now.

Weightlifting naturally invites this kind of awareness.

You notice your breath.You notice your muscles engaging.You notice effort, fatigue, and eventually progress. There is something grounding about this process. Attention moves away from constant thinking and back into bodily sensation.

This is something I have felt personally in my own experience of weightlifting. When I lift, I notice the direct experience of mobilisation. Muscles activate, breath deepens, and effort builds. Gradually something else begins to emerge. A felt sense of agency.

Each lift becomes a small experience of the body doing what it was designed to do. Generating force. Engaging with gravity. Responding to challenge.

It is not about performance or pushing limits. Rather, it is about rediscovering the body as a place of capability rather than helplessness.

Why Weightlifting Can Help Mental Health After Trauma

In this sense, movement can become part of healing. Not because it replaces therapy, but because it allows the body to rediscover something essential. Its capacity to act.

For people recovering from trauma, these experiences can help rebuild something that trauma often disrupts. A felt sense of power in one's own body.

Strength training offers a simple but profound message to the nervous system.

I can move.

I can push.

I can generate force.

These small experiences of capability can gradually shift how someone relates to their body.

Why Resistance Training Can Feel Different From Other Forms of Exercise

Many forms of movement can support mental health and trauma recovery. Walking, swimming, yoga, dancing, or simply spending time moving outdoors can all help regulate the nervous system and reconnect us with our bodies.

So what might be distinctive about weightlifting or resistance training?

One element may be the experience of producing force. Trauma often involves a sense of powerlessness. The body prepares to fight or flee, but those responses may be blocked or overwhelmed. In resistance training, the body is actively generating strength. When we push, pull, or lift a weight, we experience ourselves mobilising rather than freezing.There can be something psychologically meaningful in that experience. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by physical activation, the body is engaged in purposeful action.

Resistance training also tends to involve slow and controlled movements. Lifting a weight requires attention to breathing, balance, posture, and muscular engagement. In that sense it can resemble a form of embodied awareness practice. Attention naturally moves into the body and into the present moment.

Another aspect that I have become more aware of through weightlifting is a growing sense of bodily boundaries. Certain movements, particularly pushing movements, seem to bring a clearer experience of where my body begins and ends. When I press a weight away from me, there is a felt sense of creating space between myself and something external.

At the same time, there is the experience of meeting resistance. The weight pushes back, and I feel my body respond to that resistance. There can be something quietly strengthening in this. Not only in terms of physical capacity, but in the sense that I can meet something, hold my ground, and exert force in a contained way.

I also notice how the body begins to organise as a whole. Pushing is not just an action of the arms. It involves the feet grounding into the floor, the core stabilising, the spine aligning, and the breath supporting the movement. The body works together as an integrated system. This feels quite different from experiences of fragmentation, where parts of the body may feel disconnected or out of sync with one another, which is often described in trauma.

In this way, strength training can offer an embodied experience of integration. The body is not only moving, but coordinating, containing, and responding as a whole. For individuals who have experienced trauma, where boundaries can sometimes feel unclear or difficult to access, this kind of experience may carry particular significance.

Cardiovascular exercise can also be deeply beneficial for mental health, and for some people running or cycling may feel especially regulating. Yet resistance training offers a slightly different experience. It emphasises stability, grounding, and the capacity to exert force.

For some people, particularly those recovering from trauma, this can support a renewed sense of agency in the body.

Perimenopause, Menopause, and the Body’s Memory

Another stage of life when the relationship between body and emotional experience becomes particularly visible is perimenopause and menopause. These hormonal transitions can bring significant changes. Sleep patterns may shift, mood may fluctuate, and emotional sensitivity can increase. For many women this period can feel surprisingly intense, even disorienting.

In therapeutic work it is not uncommon to see how menopause can sometimes bring earlier emotional material closer to the surface. Hormonal changes, disrupted sleep, and shifts in the nervous system can make the body feel less predictable. For some women this may echo earlier experiences of vulnerability or loss of control.

Trauma researchers have noted that major physiological transitions such as puberty, pregnancy, or menopause can sometimes make previously held experiences more visible.

At the same time, menopause can also be a period of reclaiming.

Many women begin to relate to their bodies differently. Cultural expectations shift, priorities change, and there can be a renewed curiosity about strength, vitality, and self care.

This is one reason practices such as strength training can feel particularly supportive during this stage of life. Weightlifting helps maintain bone density, muscle mass, and metabolic health. Psychologically it can also offer something deeper. A renewed experience of the body as strong, capable, and responsive.

A Personal Reflection

Looking back over the past year, I am still surprised by how much weightlifting has influenced my wellbeing.

I began with hesitation and curiosity. What I found was something unexpectedly powerful. A tangible experience of strength.

Not just physical strength, but psychological strength.

It has also gradually changed how I perceive my own body. Like many people, I had spent much of my life relating to my body in evaluative ways. I noticed how it looked, how tired it felt, or how well it was functioning on a given day. Weightlifting shifted that relationship.

Instead of focusing on how my body appears, I find myself increasingly appreciating what my body can do.

There is something quietly transformative in experiencing the body as capable, responsive, and strong. Each lift becomes less about appearance and more about capacity. The ability to generate force, to stabilise, and to adapt.

Over time this has created a different relationship with my body. One that feels more collaborative, more respectful, and more grounded in experience rather than judgement.

Perhaps this is part of why strength training can be so meaningful psychologically. When we begin to experience the body as capable rather than deficient, something shifts not only physically but emotionally as well.

Each time I lift, I am reminded that the body is not only a place where difficulty is held. It is also a place where capacity can grow.

For many people, particularly those who have experienced trauma or who are navigating the transitions of midlife, reconnecting with the body in this way can be quietly transformative. Not because strength training solves everything, but because it offers something simple and profound. The experience of inhabiting a body that can act, respond, and grow stronger over time.

References

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books.

Singh, B., et al. (2024). Physical activity and mental health: an umbrella review. BMJ, 384.

Levine, P. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. North Atlantic Books.