Summary of Perfectly Leveraged for the Squat

Overview of Perfectly Leveraged for the Squat

This episode of 99% Invisible follows the life of strength athlete and historian Jan Todd, using her story to explore the changing cultural meaning of women’s strength. It begins with Todd’s famous lift of the Dinnie Stones in Scotland and expands into a wider history of how women’s bodies have been policed, misunderstood, and eventually celebrated in sport and fitness. The episode traces how Todd helped build women’s powerlifting from scratch, then later uncovered a forgotten lineage of strong women from the circus and vaudeville era.

Key Points

Jan Todd’s breakthrough moment

• In Scotland, Jan Todd became the first woman to lift the Dinnie Stones together.
• The lift happened after a frustrating, gendered evening where the men around her received more attention and respect than she did.
• Her husband Terry’s encouragement helped channel that frustration into a successful lift.

Women’s powerlifting did not yet exist as a formal sport

• When Todd began lifting in the 1970s, there were:
  • no women’s divisions,
  • no official rulebook,
  • and no established competitive path for women.
• Todd helped create the sport’s early structure, including advocating for women’s divisions in major competitions.

Strength was long coded as masculine

• The episode explains how, historically, physical strength gave men status, power, and legitimacy.
• By contrast, women were often told their bodies were fragile and that exercise could damage fertility or femininity.
• These ideas were reinforced by pseudoscience, especially in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Fitness culture changed, but not always in empowering ways

• Mid-20th-century fitness messaging for women increasingly focused on appearance, not performance or health.
• Figures like Jack LaLanne promoted exercise broadly, but women were often still encouraged to work out primarily to stay thin and attractive.

Jan Todd’s personal path into strength

• Todd grew up as a sturdy, athletic girl in a conservative environment that discouraged women from sports.
• She met Terry Todd in college; he was a former powerlifting champion and became her coach and partner.
• She discovered she was naturally strong, and with training she rapidly progressed in deadlifting and powerlifting.

The archive that changed her understanding

• After acquiring a large historical collection from old strength performer Otley Coulter, Todd found magazines and photos of women strongmen from the 1800s and early 1900s.
• These discoveries showed that women lifting heavy weights was not new, just forgotten.
• This led to her academic research and her idea of “majestic womanhood”—a concept that framed women’s strength as central, not abnormal.

Major Themes

Strength as identity and independence

• The episode argues that muscle is not just aesthetic; it is a form of agency, currency, and resilience.
• Strength means being able to do something you could not do before.

Rewriting the historical record

• Jan Todd’s work helped recover a hidden history of strong women who had been celebrated in earlier eras.
• The episode suggests that women’s strength was not always rejected; attitudes changed over time, and those changes were cultural rather than natural.

Progress through repetition

• The episode ends by connecting weight training to the principle of progressive overload:
  • do something hard,
  • adapt,
  • add more,
  • repeat.
• That same logic is used as a metaphor for social change around women and strength.

Notable Takeaways

• Jan Todd was both a record-breaking athlete and a key architect of women’s powerlifting.
• Historical attitudes toward women’s bodies were shaped by fear, sexism, and bad science.
• Women’s strength has a much longer history than most people realize.
• Today’s more open attitude toward women lifting weights reflects a major cultural shift—but one that took decades of work by pioneers like Todd.

Closing Thought

The episode ultimately reframes women’s lifting as part of a longer human tradition of strength, not a modern anomaly. Jan Todd’s story shows how one athlete can help build a sport, uncover a forgotten past, and redefine what strength means for future generations.