As my pelvis connected with the barbell and I felt the resistance, I laughed and sat back down on the floor.
I looked at my trainer and told her that the 175-pound load was not going to budge.
She gently pushed back. She said getting the barbell up was the hardest part. It’s easier from there.
And with that, I gave it another go.
Sure enough, I hit a new personal record — or PR — on my hip thrusts.
That was after my trainer had observed me lifting a much lighter load, asked me to go to failure and started adding “plates” when she saw I was pushing 20 reps.
It’s late 2025, and I’m in an intermediate Women Who Lift class at Training Lane in Toronto. I’m a repeat customer, having taken the intro series the summer before last.
The eight-week training programs bring together women in small class sizes to learn how to lift weights safely, in a supportive environment. This one is led by founder Maida Comic, a personal trainer with more than 15 years of experience.
Before signing up for these classes, I had been an on-again, off-again gym goer for years. The sum of my knowledge was a complimentary session with a personal trainer as a teen, when I was given a cursory walk-through of how to use the various machines.
I hated cardio. I misguidedly protested that I didn’t want to get too bulky whenever my husband encouraged me to lift weights. Basically, I did the bare minimum to maintain a semblance of fitness, which was not a lot and worked for a while until it didn’t. A few years of dance classes here, a season of recreational dodgeball there, some YouTube workouts during the pandemic.
Sometime around my mid-thirties, my late-night snacking and over a decade of working a sedentary desk job started to show up in my mid-section. (I have mixed feelings about whether this should matter. Insert commentary on the patriarchy and toxic beauty standards.) Anyway, back to the gym, back to the routine.
I was getting results, but something was missing. That’s around when my husband mentioned “compound movements.” This time, he got through a bit.
I wanted to learn how to lift, but I wanted to get the form right so I didn’t injure myself. The algorithm had served me one too many videos of horrific gym accidents for me to consider outsourcing a lesson like this to an AI chatbot or relying on a video tutorial. The idea of attempting to figure it out in front of a male-dominated audience of gym rats was also intimidating.
I am not alone in this experience, Comic confirms. It’s one of the reasons she launched strength training classes for women a decade ago.
“I noticed that when I would train clients or even see women at the gym, they would either look a little shy, a little unsure of what they were doing or they would just grab one weight, go to the corner, do their workout and then that was that,” she says.
Comic’s own path to strength training was unplanned. As a high school athlete, she had aspired to go into sports management. When the program filled up, she pivoted to health and fitness.
After finding any excuse to skip weight-training class in high school, she returned to lifting as she learned about its importance. But it wasn’t until a conversation with a college friend that she got serious about it.
“She was so inspiring to me because she looked so strong,” recalls Comic. “I asked, ‘What are you doing?’
“She said, ‘I’m a powerlifter. I lift heavy weights.’
“I said, ‘Alright, I’m going to start doing that – I’m going to start lifting heavier.’”
In Comic’s class, there are some basics to learn before we get to the goal of lifting heavy. How to breathe, how to engage your core. Physical cues like leaning forward to activate your glutes (step ups) or squeezing oranges in your armpits to activate your back (lat pulldowns). What shoes to wear. (My chunky runners were a definite no for leg day, quickly replaced by flat-soled Chuck Taylors.)
“It feels like a slow start,” Comic says of the feedback she sometimes hears, “but once you get into it, you understand why it’s important to start small and slow, to prevent injury, to really focus on muscles you’re using, to understand your body a bit more.”
Things progress steadily from there. Before long, we are working in pairs to set up for hip thrusts by bracing benches against squat racks, sliding plates onto barbells, securing the plates with clips, moving the barbells from the racks to the floor and putting bar pads in place. We take turns completing sets.
Comic walks around, answering our questions and checking our form. She says she watches for how fast and how safe clients are doing exercises to assess whether it’s time to add more weight or fix something first. (Note: An AI chatbot can’t put a hand on your mid-back to help you confirm whether you’re feeling your seated rows in the right place.)
“Sometimes you’re kind of stuck in, ‘Well, my form has to be perfect before I can add more weight or push myself,’” Comic says, “but if you have somebody who says, ‘No, your form looks great, let’s try a new challenge, let’s try a new weight,’ it does push you outside your comfort zone.”
The extra push can also come from within the diverse communities formed in Women Who Lift classes. (The 70-year-old who was in my intro class is #goals for future me.) The support everyone offers each other goes far beyond the physical act of maneuvering the equipment.
“I’ve heard conversations about women going through IVF, going through a breakup, going through work stuff, kid stuff,” says Comic. “They’re having these really deep conversations while they’re lifting, between their sets, and it offers support outside of fitness, as well, which is just so wonderful to see.”
As the intro classes wind down with stretches, she shares bite-sized lessons supported with visuals sketched out on a whiteboard. We learn about the importance of progressive overload — essentially increasing the challenge over time, such as by adding reps, sets or weight, so you don’t plateau. We learn about different rep and set ranges for different goals, such as building strength versus growing muscles.
The first thing my husband noticed was a change in my posture. I had never worked out my back before but is it ever satisfying, especially when you spend your workdays hunched over a laptop. As I developed mind-muscle connection, I noticed other things, too — like how my glute strength powered my stride on the walks that had become a part of my routine.
Eight weeks later, when the intro program ended, I felt confident to keep going on my own, taking what I had learned back to my neighbourhood gym. I was ready to claim my place at the squat racks.
I reliably alternated between upper and lower body workouts four times a week for over a year after that, but something was off with my bench press. I kept feeling a sharp pain in my left shoulder, not a stretch in my chest, like I am now that I’ve got the arch in my back right.
That’s partly what brought me back to Women Who Lift for intermediate classes. It was time to check in on my form and add some new movements to my repertoire. (Here I am on the WWL IG learning sumo deadlifts.)
The goals I started out with are not the same goals I have today.
The aesthetics still matter to me, but the aesthetics I aspire to have shifted, too. Now I would love to look bulkier than a preteen boy who just started lifting or a sad cartoon character with a U-shape where the bicep is supposed to be. I want my quads to bulge and my shoulder caps to pop. (They’re getting there, slowly but surely.)
In my case, it has also become about making an investment in my future quality of life and mobility as I push 40 — something reinforced by the copious amounts of fitness content I now consume online — and providing a relief valve for work stress.
“I always tell people have multiple goals,” says Comic. “They’re all important. They all make us feel good.
“If one of them gets you in the door and gets you doing it, but then you realize how it opens the door for the other benefits, as well, I’m all for it.”
These days, you’ll find me doing dead hangs on the outdoor workout equipment at my local park so my grip strength keeps up with how much weight I can lift.
For a brief while over the winter, I drifted from my well-formed habits, choosing to hibernate and dropping down to weekend workouts only. The classes helped get me to the gym Tuesday and Thursday nights. Accountability, says Comic, is another benefit of in-person training.
“When you know there’s a group waiting for you, when you know there’s a time slot that you’ve paid for, you’re more accountable to showing up,” she says. “But also, you don’t want to let down yourself, either, because you made a commitment to something.”
Since spring, I have been back at it and bounced back quickly now that I know how to do it. There’s plenty of information available online, but only after taking a class with a professional trainer can I discern between good and bad advice. (And judging by the number of people who call themselves fitness influencers critiquing each other’s videos, there’s a lot of bad advice out there.) For those who get it right, they would tell you it’s about boring consistency – get protein, hit steps, lift heavy.
I use apps to track everything: Foodvisor for macronutrients, Health app for steps, Hevy for workouts. Beyond not pushing myself hard enough, my previous system of trying to mentally keep track of how much weight I had lifted the previous workout, for how many reps and sets, for every exercise, was undermining my progress.
But there are reasons I returned to in-person classes last fall and probably will again. (It’s not just me, with demand for Women Who Lift classes supporting its growth from one location to four and counting.)
Without Comic’s encouragement, I wouldn’t be lifting as heavy as I am now.
Today, I’m hip thrusting 195 pounds.
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