Lifting weights just makes you stronger

If you’re a muscly woman you are technically a man. Isn’t that what they say? I’ve been lucky enough to not experience any negativity towards my body through my career, if anything it’s been quite positive, but I have friends that have experienced that sort of feedback. Something I’ve learned being an athlete and woman in sport is, we build our bodies up to protect ourselves from injury and to make sure we can get out there and play our sport at the elite level and be as fast as we can be, jump as high as we can, achieve and tick off any goals we want to.

To do that, you need to put on muscle; you need to eat more. Sometimes I’m sitting at a dinner table with friends and they will eat the smallest amount and I tell you what, I feel like I could eat five times the amount of them. But we just live different lives.

I’ve always been quite lean and always tried to put on weight and get bigger, but every single body is different and you just have to manage your body the best that you can.

A former school teacher asked me to come in and speak to the younger girls who were afraid of lifting weights because they didn’t want to put on muscle.

It’s about flipping their mindset and getting them out of that thought process that lifting weights makes you massive – it actually just makes you stronger.

My passion for lifting weights actually started when I missed out on a NSW state team when I was 17.

I noticed in the trials how easily I got pushed around on the court and how tired I got before my opponent did.

Missing that state team changed my life. It flicked a switch in my brain and told me I needed to work harder and be stronger to achieve my goals, and I’ve not looked back.