The Miss Fits with trainer Jim Laird, center
The world of personal branding glorifies six-pack abs and lean bodies, but for a group of tenacious Kentucky women, strength far surpasses the eye of the beholder.
A Lexington-based, all-female powerlifting team, The Miss Fits, uses strength training as part of a broader lifestyle cultivated at their home club, Gym Laird. Their mentality is focused on learning to relax and creating an improved quality of life as much as watching the numbers go up on their lifts.
The Miss Fits comprise 11 women ranging in age from 18 to 48, including one grandmother. Suzanne Spencer Waldrop, a longtime member, is a real estate agent who has been working out with coach and Miss Fits trainer Jim Laird for six years. “When I first started I wanted to lose body fat,” said the 46-year-old Waldrop. “That’s what got me through the door. Six years later, I’m definitely leaner, but I’m also strong. And I’m totally addicted to the feeling you get when you do something you once thought was crazy impossible, like a 300-pound deadlift. It’s empowering!
“Right now, I am most appreciative of getting to do this with my 18- and 16-year-old kids. They inspire and motivate me. They are both great athletes and will be running circles around me soon, but for now at least, I’m showing them how it’s done. You know you’re doing something cool when your teenager puts it on her Snapchat, right?”
Her children, including Miss Fit Isabella Waldrop, are part of the larger community cultivated at the club. Other evidence—like a proliferation of CrossFit gyms, running clubs and other niche activities throughout Kentucky—points to a larger trend of social fitness. People want to get fit with a tribe, and the Miss Fits are no different. They just go about it differently, with the atypical approach of training only two to four times a week.
“The reason I love this place is because of the community that we’ve built,” Suzanne Waldrop said. “When I was a runner, it was the same thing; it’s social. I walk through the door because of the people. I’m never mad that I came in here. I’ve made lifelong friends.”
A national powerlifting competitor, Waldrop, along with other Miss Fit members, plans for more lifting competitions this year.
But they work on their lives outside of the gym more than inside the gym. For Waldrop, that means making sure she’s eating enough, going for walks as often as she can and getting eight hours of sleep each night.
Managing stress is a struggle that can “totally derail” her if she doesn’t work on it every day, she said.
Based on his own personal experiences with overtraining, Laird emphasizes managing stress for all of his clients. “I figured out that performance has negative effects on health,” he said. “Most clients don’t need to train like a professional athlete; they just want to look good and feel good. The formula to that is to do some form of strength training twice a week and then walk.”
For Kentuckians, Laird said, finding natural outlets for walking should be easy. “Some people take advantage of places like The [Red River] Gorge, Natural Bridge,” he said. “Just go hiking, get outside. This is a beautiful state, and we have resources to use to be active. You don’t have to come to a gym.
“People aren’t getting outside as much because they are attached to technology, and there’s no amount of technology that can make up for [getting outside]. Life is twice as crazy even as it was 10 years ago. There are more stressors and less daily stress relievers.”
The general population and The Miss Fits, Laird emphasized, benefit from more daily movement. “Go find some trails somewhere and some hills,” he said. “Get down on the floor and move around with your grandkids, play games, do manual labor, mow your own grass, shovel mulch, get a wheelbarrow, be active and do stuff. You want to use your body to keep it from deteriorating.”
In the case of Waldrop and some of her fellow Miss Fits, too much intense movement and physical stress for years was backfiring. “I came in here thinking I was going to add strength training to my running and quickly realized that was kind of hard to manage,” she said. “I’m just so hard headed. I ran a half marathon in the spring and literally drove from that race to the gym and said, ‘OK, I’m ready to do it another way.’ That was April 2012, and I have never looked back. I got quick results and fell in love with it.”
Mother/daughter duo turned fitness partners Isabella, left, and Suzanne Waldrop literally raise the bar at one of their sessions
Brittany Montgomery, 28, is an insurance claims adjuster who has been strength training for five years. Like Waldrop, she is a former distance runner and said she kept getting injured. “I certainly had to get crafty to work around my injuries,” she said. “I wanted to find a better alternative where I could still stay fit without sacrificing health … Enter strength training and my love of heavy lifting.”
As a result, Montgomery said she’s become mentally and physically stronger, more alert and ready to tackle projects. She’s noticed increased stamina throughout the day, gained a close group of friends, “and I love the way I feel in my own skin.”
“Shutting down” after stressful days at work is her biggest challenge, but she combats it by taking walks and practicing mindful meditation.
Clinical pharmacist Rachael Mathews, 40, is another Miss Fit who previously did too much. She has been a part of the group for almost three years, joining a year after her third child was born. “I realized the baby weight was not coming off, and I had to do something about it,” she said. “I started attending 5 a.m. boot camp classes three to four days a week, and after three years of pushing my body to its limits, I was gaining weight despite all of my exercising. I was exhausted, hungry and irritable all of the time.
“One day, I woke up and could not physically or mentally drag myself to class anymore. I realized I had to do something different. I immediately knew this was for me.”
Discovering the “do less” mentality, she said, has made her a better person and helped her shed fat and gain muscle. “I am more aware of how important sleep and meditation are to my health,” Mathews said. “I now de-stress by lifting heavy things, and it is wonderful. To sum it up the best, my kids no longer refer to me as ‘mean mommy.’ ”
Mathews is now working hard to crack the 300-pound deadlift threshold, like several of her fellow Miss Fits.
Danielle Howard jokes that her reason for joining The Miss Fits is to be able to eat more. The 26-year-old credit analyst has been with her “gym family” for almost three years. “It has taught me to be patient and to have more confidence,” said Howard, who is working hard toward national competition. “Exceeding my expectations in the gym reminds me that my capabilities in all aspects in life are more than what I give myself credit for. But I struggle with not seeing self-care as selfish. We’re meant to take care of ourselves. That’s how we present our best selves to help others.”
For 39-year-old Miss Fit Rebecca Vice Bowers, self-care is crucial to meet the demands of caring for her infant. Bowers is a speech pathologist and independent Arbonne consultant who has been at Gym Laird for seven years. “I had been running half marathons and contemplating training for a full marathon, and enjoyed the competitiveness of training, but I felt tired all the time, my joints hurt and I was interested in trying something new,” she said. “I realized I enjoyed strength training, and I also enjoyed seeing the definition in my arms, abs and back. I believe the biggest benefit for me personally has been my mindset.”
Soon-to-be mother Meaghan Nelson, 29, is a former health and wellness coach who has been with the club for three years. “I had previously done a figure competition where I was training purely for aesthetics and saw my strength decrease,” she said. “After the show, I became much more interested in furthering my physical strength and focusing less on aesthetics.”
She’s now focused on strength training to meet the demands of labor, delivery and motherhood, and she focuses on getting more sleep and eating healthy food. “I’m training in a way that is safe but is helping me work toward a fit pregnancy,” she said. “I tend to be an all-or-nothing person, so pregnancy has taught me a lot about holding back and listening to my body.”
Suzanne Waldrop competed in the bench press at the 2017 USA Powerlifting Midwest Regionals; she headed to national competition that year
The youngest Miss Fit, Isabella Waldrop, 18, started working with Laird in 2012 with the goal of getting stronger and staying healthy for soccer. She now serves as an intern at the gym while finishing up high school. “When her senior soccer season ended this past fall, she eagerly joined the powerlifting team and plans to enter her first competition this year,” said her mother, Suzanne.
Renae Corman’s biggest benefit of her nearly five years with the Miss Fits is gaining strength and confidence. “Building muscle has helped everyday life in the salon, and being strong has empowered me,” the 47-year-old hairdresser said. “I am notorious for not taking care of myself and putting everyone else first. Strength training with this awesome group of women has helped me learn I’m worth it!”
Missy Hicks, 40, an emergency department manager, has trained for seven years and was initially a little hesitant to join the team, “thinking I wasn’t sure I could do something like that.” But she did and has been hooked ever since.
“It has given me the ability to not only look strong but feel incredibly strong,” she added. “I don’t need anyone’s help for so many things. Strength comes with a certain amount of confidence, and this has been a significant boost for me overall. My job has a significant amount of stress attached to it, so strength training gives me the outlet I need to de-stress.”
Home-school mom to her four children, 44-year-old Heather Rae Perry also is a classical preschool teacher and health and wellness entrepreneur. She’s been at Gym Laird for five years. She said coach Laird’s principles “lined up beautifully with the ways I thought and believed regarding overall inside-out health.
“There is so much overlap between the strength training piece of me and the living life outside the gym piece of me. And when I’m training regularly and living life well-balanced, I’m just plain happier,” she said.
Amy Stricklin Statom, 39, a medical device business manager, said she joined the gym seven years ago because “Jim Laird is one of the best in the country."
“I feel like I am just getting stronger and better, as I am a few months away from 40,” she continued. “I’m better at whatever life throws my way because I feel strong and powerful … When I walk into my sessions, it’s all about me and my teammates.”
Radiology technologist Margaret Kay Bradley, 48, has practiced strength training for three years and joined the crew after reaching a limit with running due to joint pain. “Increasing my strength has made day-to-day activities much easier. I want other women to realize it’s never to late to begin.”
The Miss Fits defy cultural expectations for women to be small and lean. Waldrop noted that a lot of women are just afraid of lifting heavy weights. “They have this misconception that they’re going to bulk up,” she said. “The word ‘big’ is used to describe women who strength train, but people confuse lean with big because you can see my muscles. When I’m lifting 300 pounds, my muscles will show, but I look lean and normal.”
But she emphasized that lifting 300 pounds doesn’t need to be for everyone. “You can do body weight strength training and feel amazing and look amazing,” she said. “What is your goal?”
In the Miss Fits’ case, the goal is doing less to achieve more.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, visit themissfits.com
The Miss Fits train at:
Gym Laird Strength and Conditioning
356 Longview Plaza, Suite 150A
Lexington (859) 797-1595
