When I was growing up, there were two main women around: Sally Gunnell (Olympic 400m gold medalist) and Kate Moss. Sally wasn’t cool, Kate was – so I spent my life trying to look like her. There’s nothing wrong with looking like Kate Moss (I’m not here for the whole #StrongNotSkinny movement, which just feels like yet another judgement on how women look), but I definitely thought you had to sacrifice a lot to look a certain way. What a waste of time! Realising that I could just look like me was life changing.

My idea of the perfect body is nothing like what I look like now. And I’m more than OK with that, because in the pursuit of strength and fitness, I’ve made myself feel so good that I’m in it for the performance. The feeling of picking up something heavy that you never thought you’d be able to lift is just unbelievable. 

Back in the day, I’d look at my body and feel disappointed because I wasn’t thin or the weight I wanted to be. Now I’ve reframed that, I’m constantly amazed at the amazing things my body can do. The numbers that matter are those on the weights I’m lifting. I’m looking at how my body moves, and what impact my sleep and nutrition have on that. I’m really fucking proud to celebrate that and to show other people that they can achieve big things too.

The whole slim influencer pinching a stomach roll to prove how ‘real’ they are has never really been my vibe. I mean, I could do that pose and show that I too have skin covering my organs.

Health looks different on different people, and we need to be genuinely open about that. I’m sure a lot of famous bodybuilder influencers have health issues to look the way they do for the cover of a magazine. At what cost? That’s why I just try to post the fucking photo – to show that yeah, this is me. This is who I’m showing off today, and it was really hard to get here. If you don’t like it, that’s cool. You don’t have to look like me and I’m not for everyone. I’m going to be here to fly the flag for the people that are a little bit muscular. I’m not going to be the beautiful yogi making shapes on the mat – I’ll leave that to Sanchia.

Don’t get me wrong, I remember when I didn’t get it. It was really difficult because all I knew was what had been projected onto me: that fitness was about burning calories. To ‘get abs’, you had to do sit ups. And that wasn’t me being stupid, it was just the message that I’d received. I spent most of my life trying to look like that when, in reality, I didn’t enjoy the journey, and the actual fact is I’ll never look that way regardless of how much work I put in.

You’ve got to celebrate what health and fitness looks like on you. Within gyms, I see the reasons why people join, and I see the reasons why people stay. The reason most people join is because through the media, social constructs etc, people want to ‘lose a bit of weight and tone up’. And that’s OK, I get that. But what that really means is, ‘I want to feel good in my skin, and feel healthier, and feel happier, and feel ready to go and get my day.’ And actually, that looks so different to what I used to think back in the day. I used to think health was a weight on the scale and it was only through reaching that dream number myself, and realising that it didn’t make any difference to my happiness, that I realised it’s about so much more. 

We’ve all had a rough couple of years, but I found it very difficult not to have my gym environment and not to be around my game, my equipment, my space during those lockdowns. They had a big impact on me mentally, but the one positive was that they forced me to do something different. I tried running, I started working out in my car park. It made me realise that, cheesy as it might sound, the world is our gym. And actually, the pandemic got people turning to fitness for the right reasons: people started seeing the joy and the positivity that coming together to do the sport of fitness can create – whatever that looks like for you.

My thing is lifting. I love lifting weights, and I’ll preach that until the cows come home. But I genuinely believe that there’s no one way to move. It’s about whatever makes you feel good, whether that’s waking up in the morning and doing a bit of yoga in order for you to go on with your day, or lifting weights – it’s whatever is going to make you that little bit more resilient to the challenges that you face in daily life.

I always talk about gym time as being ‘adult PE’, and that’s because, let’s face it, training can be tedious. Strengthening and conditioning isn’t that exciting. There are only so many runs you can go on; it’s the same strength training for injury prevention. If you’re working on squats, there may be lots of variations, but in order to build strength, you have to progressively overload and that means doing the same shit over and over again. So, I always ask myself how I can make it more fun or a bit different.

For me, that’s about looking at your environment, the people, the music, your outfits. These are the things that you have control over. People always bang on about the ‘perfect form’ for certain moves, but there is no ‘perfect’. We’re all completely individual. We were all made completely different. There may be few principles to training but many different methods. Whatever your goal, you’ve got to avoid seeing training as a chore that you have to do, because that’s when it becomes unsustainable.

Strength training doesn’t have to just involve a barbell. Strength training can be callisthenics or yoga. Pilates is fucking hard. If you’ve ever been to reformer pilates, it’s all strength training. So, don’t feel like you have to train like me because we’re so unique.

We’re not getting paid to do this. We’re not going to the Olympics. So let your training fit in with your life. Let it feel empowering. And hope that it’s something that you can wake up tomorrow feeling fresh and want to do again.

For more stories of Strong Women, check out the Training Club library. You can find Laura Hoggins on Instagram (@laurabiceps)

Photography: Sarah Brick

Fashion: Helen Atkin

Hair: Afi Emily Attipoe using Charlotte Mensah Manketti Oil

Make-up: Nandi Kai at S Management using Glossier

Nails: Tinu Bello at One Represents using The Gel Bottle

Photography direction: Tom Gormer

Photography assistant: Caz Dyer

Laura wears top, £500, Herve Leger (selfridges.co.uk), shorts, £58, Lululemon (lululemon.co.uk), trainers, £165, Adidas (adidas.co.uk)