In the early 1980s USA there was a female bodybuilder, Lisa Lyon, whose activities then would alter perspectives on strength training, particularly for women, and inspire many imitators and fans, but I didn’t come across her until 40 years later….We have been through so many societal changes since then but her appeal has outlasted all of them.

It’s really really daunting to think about end goals and how far one has to go to achieve them. Trying to make a lifestyle change can feel like trying to put the brakes on a massive tanker going full tilt in the wrong direction. If I knew in 2017 on 1 January when I set out on the road to trying to be fit exactly how many tonnes I would have to lift and still be the same weight now as I was then (but with a lot of added muscle!) I would probably never have started and would have considered that to be a bad use of time, and a waste of effort. But that’s because all I was interested in then was losing weight and being ‘fitter’. I had no idea of the emotional journey I was embarking on and my impending love affair with strength training.

But the inspiration and motivation to continue comes from multiple sources. Some of this came from personal interactions and relationships in the gym as well as reading copious books about mental discipline, sport psychology and behavioural science.  All of this energy and focus in order to be very average! But for me not giving up has been the biggest victory, and I sought inspiration from the visual world as well as the written word.

Back to Lisa Lyon though, a slightly niche figure from 40 years ago became central to my inspiration because she had clearly become a breakout phenomenon and to me appeared to be ahead of her time and with an image and style as interesting as anyone today. This retrospection is actually timely as Lisa Lyon, female bodybuilder and general badass, died at the end of last year.  There were many obituaries written about her because although she is not a household name, images of her have stood the test of time since she was photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe in the early 1980’s for the book, Lady Lisa Lyon.  Some of these images are hung in the great art galleries of Europe and America, and this was an amazing creative partnership.

I found the images of Lyon absolutely mesmerizing and now 40 years later her style and form still resonates. To me she epitomizes the ultimate in what can be achieved through training. To me she showed the relationship between form and function. Staggeringly beautiful but also incredibly strong and able to deadlift twice her bodyweight (Arnie was one of her biggest fans).

The New York Times stated that ‘she was interested in exploring new archetypes of femininity, different from the Marilyns and the Twiggys that had come before’. Some of her writing about training in her book, Body Magic, inspired me also, ‘It should be clear when you begin to train, increasing your strength and power, you will also be changing your basic sense of yourself.’  When I was not happy with my lifestyle and body, my method of dealing with this was almost really trying to pretend that my body didn’t really exist, it felt like it wasn’t part of me. I tended to not want to be noticed, whereas now I am happy to take up space and feel ownership of my whole being, or at least a lot more of the time.

Obviously one has to be realistic, it would be more than a ‘stretch goal’ to think I am going to look anything like Lisa Lyon, in the same way that my conviction in the early 80’s that I was going to marry John Taylor from Duran Duran(!) was rather unrealistic. But in the search for ongoing discipline and motivation I found the visualization of the results of training to be very helpful.  It also stimulated me to develop a better understanding of how training can positively affect the female body, particularly looking at muscular development of the upper body, and an amazing set of quads. I have also been hunting for a striped bodysuit similar to hers, but without any luck. Just as well, perhaps.