With help from her Equinox COACH, a Pilates instructor adopted a heavy lifting routine after years of fearing weights.
Forged at Equinox is a series highlighting an Equinox member’s foray into a new workout regimen, with help from an expert coach. The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
A longtime dancer turned yoga instructor, Jess Battipaglia has always kept her body moving. Yet, she’s consistently shied away from heavy weightlifting — a result of her years practicing ballet, during which teachers would often warn of the risk of becoming “bulky,” she says.
In 2016, shortly after becoming engaged, Jess signed up to work with an Equinox COACH in hopes of “getting into wedding shape.” But she was still adamant about lifting no more than 20 pounds for any exercise, she recalls. When her trainer left the Club two years later, Jess partnered up with Ideen Chelengar, a COACH X at Equinox Sports Club in Boston. For a while, the duo would meet for twice-weekly workouts that Jess describes as “really, really lightweight, nothing crazy.”
Then, her stance on using hefty loads suddenly did a 180. “Right before the pandemic, I just walked up to him one day and I was like, ‘I just want to start lifting really heavy weights,’” Jess says. “...I think I started deadlifting, like, 95 to 100 pounds. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is so heavy.’ I was really, really apprehensive about it.”
The nerves quickly settled. She started hip thrusting a whopping 180 pounds before the pandemic forced a hiatus. Once the Club reopened, Jess and Ideen jumped right back into their new take on training — this time, with three sessions a week.
Flash forward to today, Jess is now a Pilates instructor at the Club and can deadlift 255 pounds and back squat 205 pounds. She can power through weighted pull-ups (one of Ideen’s few clients who can do so). And she can perform Bulgarian split squats with a load of 130 pounds — more than her body weight, says Ideen. “I would argue Bulgarians are more impressive than any of the other lifts, but not everyone can translate that really well,” he adds. “[People] see 255 on a deadlift and [think] that's really high. I'm like, ‘No, 130 pounds in Bulgarian is really high.’”
As Jess progressed, Ideen found himself revisiting heavy weights, something he hadn’t done in nearly a decade. “I just kind of got over it in my early 20s, but [working with Jess] brought back my excitement around heavy lifting, so I experimented with it again,” Ideen says.
Here, Jess and Ideen open up about the unexpected changes they’ve seen after focusing on strength training, the value of quantitative data, and the challenges they’ve faced — and overcome — together.
Aside from the load you’re lifting, how have your sessions changed since you prioritized heavy strength training?
Jess: “[Once we shifted], we were also up to [training] four times a week because, with strength, I saw that the more you repeat the movement every single week, the faster and stronger you would get. So [when] I was back squatting twice a week, I got up to, I think, 205 for one rep. But that's because I was consistently doing it for a year, twice a week.”
Ideen: “That was one of the biggest parts of the transition. The old workout style was not necessarily bad or not as productive per se, but you don't necessarily need as much practice of each one of those workouts because they're very fast-paced, very intense. They're a little bit more systematically challenging, and the rest times are much shorter. But once you get into the strength side, rest is super important. Our density goes down in terms of sets and volume, but then the requirement for more sessions a week does tend to go up if you genuinely care about it. And she did and she understood that pretty quickly.”
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How does Pilates influence your strength training and vice versa?
Jess: “They really do go hand-in-hand, for sure. I don't think that I would be this physically strong without a really strong base from Pilates. I encourage all of my clients that I see to strength train. I think that they're both extremely important. I truly don't think that I would be able to lift as heavy without a very strong core, understanding my breathing, understanding any type of intra-abdominal pressure when I'm squatting…[Early on,] I made it a point to tell [Ideen] I do not want to use a weight belt. I want to use my own internal weight belt. I really want this to be my own personal strength. I don't want anything else to kind of come between me and the weight.
“We do a lot of serratus stuff, so any type of movement when I'm planking or if I have to push out when I'm in Pilates, I'm able to do it much easier because I'm much stronger. Obviously, the weight on the spring tension is definitely much easier for me now because I'm lifting very, very heavy. I've noticed a huge shift in the way that I move in general. I have a new love for lifting very heavy. Especially as a woman, that foundation of strength is going to be very important when I start going through menopause or whatever. That base is a large part of why I wanted to start doing this because the younger that you build that foundation, the stronger you will be when you get older.”
I don't think that I would be this physically strong without a really strong base from Pilates.
What were some unexpected changes you saw from your new training approach?
Ideen: “I think one of the cooler things from my end as a coach was actually seeing how [Jess’] nutrition changed in response to [training]. I think the way she was eating before was a lot more, like, ‘wedding-diet centric,’ like, the classic way health is marketed to women — which is: ‘Don't have too many carbs. Worry about your calorie intake. Keep it low.’ It's suddenly shifted into [viewing] food as fuel; you need it as a tool for this kind of lifting. [It was now] getting into nuances around which days you need more carbohydrates versus others all these things. You do have to get a little bit more meticulous with it, but it's the positive side of meticulousness versus the negative side, which is strictly restriction.
“That shift, to me, in that relationship with the strength exercise was almost the more exciting or cool part compared to just the shift in the program. That shift will stay if we go back to working out the way we did before — it's more sustainable and involves more positive outlooks on food in general.”
Jess: “My relationship with food — because I was in the dance world — has always been interesting. It was not the best. [In the beginning], we did my RMR [resting metabolic rate] test, and I was burning, like, 800 calories by myself without lifting or working out, which was terrible. I immediately started studying how to do my macros and started measuring. I knew that if I wanted to lift heavy, I would need to gain weight, which was, at the time, very scary for me. But I was like, ‘Okay, you know what, I'm just gonna consider myself as my own little project and I'm just gonna see what happens.’ I was slowly taking my calories up, so I was kind of reverse dieting in this situation… I got my RMR all the way up to like 2,100 calories at one point.
Ideen: “The RMR itself moved up from, like, 840, which is extremely low for her size. It’s reflective of a couple of things, in general, not just under-eating, but because she's so active throughout the day; your body does tend to compensate a little bit for that the moment you get to rest. But the combination of improving the macronutrient intake and understanding rest and recovery a little bit, by the time six months went by, she went up to where it should be, which is, I think, 1,260 for her height and weight.”
Why is data like resting metabolic rate so valuable to members?
Ideen: “One of the things the resting metabolic rate test, but also the treadmill actual metabolic rate test, highlights is the value of assessing for someone who comes from a world like dance, where it's so hard to get over that idea of restriction. You're being shown the quantitative effects of that kind of thinking. That's the convincing flip. If I had just told her, it probably wouldn't work. It was seeing that number be 40 percent lower than it should be, and the only explanation is either you're not resting enough, you're not eating enough, or both. Once you see that as a member or client, you're like, ‘Oh shit, I have to change it.’ There's no way of lying to this device. Our assessment at the Tier X level can drastically impact someone's life in a way that a conversation might not necessarily be able to do.
“[The data] can be overwhelming at first, but it can really give you peace of mind and also a more objective understanding of how these shifts in your life are impacting your body composition — and how to adjust for it.”
RELATED: Demystifying Metabolic Rate
What challenges have you faced together, and how have you overcome them?
Jess: “With strength training comes injury. [At one point,] I had pulled my adductor doing a reverse lunge with, like, 115 pounds or 125 pounds on my back. I got a little nervous and pulled either my hamstring or my adductor — we're not entirely sure what — but it's fine now. Then with my three days a week lifting, [focusing on] legs, I did something to my back or the top of glutes. So we had to shift the program.
“My mindset goes dark real quick. Basically, I was like, ‘I'm never gonna be able to lift again. I'm not gonna be able to lift as heavy.’ And Ideen’s really good at pulling me out of my spiral and being like, ‘We need to take a break. We need to adjust your program. We need to work on technique. We need to do all of these things in order to get you back to where you were.’ Because I haven't been lifting heavy for about three weeks, I've lost some mass but that doesn't mean that I stopped moving. That means that I just start doing other things that I need to do in order to get back to that place.”
Ideen: “I think this is the pro and con of training someone who does Pilates. The pro is I barely have to coach technique — they know exactly what to do. The con is they're so used to feeling perfect all the time. And I'm like, ‘A little tweak here and there is so normal.’ As a former football player and athlete, I'm like, ‘This is just part of the process.’
“My injury history and my issues in the past make it a lot easier for me to be like, ‘Hey, I've been there before. I've had to take time away from strength training multiple times. In the long run, in the grand scheme of things, that year goes by and you look back at that little blip and you're like, ‘Oh, that was nothing.’ The adductor pull in November or December, at the time, felt like we were never gonna be able to lift heavy ever again. In hindsight, it was a 10-day thing where we still lifted through it. If anything, it helped her progress strength pretty quickly right after.”
What goals are you working toward next?
Jess: “Definitely getting back to my regularly scheduled program would be the first one. Before this injury, I wanted to be able to get up to 275 in my deadlift, so hopefully that will happen. But I think just the fact that I've gotten so strong so fast was a huge goal for me, so I’m really, really proud of my progress. And [Ideen’s] a great coach — I definitely recommend him to everyone.”
Photo Credit: Iri Greco / BrakeThrough Media