Perfectly Leveraged for the Squat

On a damp evening in the summer of 1979, a woman named Jan Todd stood outside an old inn in Northeast Scotland. In front of her were two enormous granite stones. They were both about knee height and each one had an iron ring attached to it, like a little handle. Jan had flown from the U.S. to Scotland to grab those handles and try to lift the stones off the ground.

The stones – known as the Dinnie Stones – were legendary in the world of weightlifting. Together they weigh more than 700 pounds and they have a long and storied history in Scotland. In the past hundred years, just a few men had managed to lift them. No woman had ever done it. But Jan had recently been declared the strongest woman in the world by Sports Illustrated and her pilgrimage to Scotland was a chance to show just how strong she really was. And after two unsuccessful attempts, Jan lifted the stones. She’d hold the record as the only woman to lift them for the next 39 years.

Jan Todd’s life involved a lot of “firsts.” She was the first woman to lift the Dinnie stones. In competitive powerlifting, she was the first woman to total a thousand pounds in the combined squat, bench press, and dead lift. Before Jan came along, women’s powerlifting wasn’t even a thing. There were no competitions, no divisions, and no rulebook. So Jan helped write those rules and helped organize the first competitions. She became a kind of mother figure to women powerlifters.

For many years, as she was building the sport for women, Jan thought of herself as an anomaly or an outlier. After all, she was operating in the largely male world of weightlifting and she’d grown up absorbing the idea that there was something strange, maybe even dangerous, about a woman being strong.

Eventually, after paving the way for a generation of women weightlifters that followed her, Jan started studying the history of strength training, trying to understand where those negative ideas about women and muscle actually came from. And what she discovered would help to rewrite the history of women and strength.