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Barb DeAngelis lifting weights when she was 76 years old. From the Geezer Jock archives (2021) a story that should lift us up.
By Ray Glier
Barb DeAngelis, 76, is a weightlifter and she understands there is something much more profound going on than her lifting a steel bar. She is reminded daily that “little old ladies”, like her, are invisible in society and their place is in our hearts, or in the kitchen, not in a gym standing over iron. Barb says she is routinely profiled by the baggers at the grocery—“I look like any other little old lady’’—and she has to beg them to put more than the bananas in one bag.
So she crushes the monolithic screed of frail Grandma one deadlift at a time. She raises eyebrows, not just for herself, but for older women who have endured one too many “Be careful, sweetie, you’ll hurt yourself.”
“They have been clobbering us with messages that seniors should do weight training, but the message is not getting to older women,” DeAngelis said. “Maybe they think it is something we can’t do, won’t do, or that we are afraid of getting big muscles and look like men.
“I wear my weightlifting tee-shirt in public and I have a shirt that says ‘Old Ladies Lift’. Yes, we can lift.”
Barb, who lives in Washington, Vermont, a hardscrabble country burg with one stop light, wants a reputation as a “stealth badass.”
Well, check that off. On July 13 at the USA Powerlifting Association event in Palm Springs, Ca., DeAngelis set two world records, one in the Dead Lift for 253.5 pounds and Aggregate Weight at 479.5 pounds.
“I wasn’t competing,” Barb said, “as much as I was representing.”
She wasn’t competing, per se, because there was no one else in her age group, 75 and older. And that’s her fault.
This was Barb’s best thought in a 30-minute interview with Geezer Jock:
If you don't keep your strength up, you lose function, you lose balance, you lose joint mobility, and little by little you're chipping away at your active and functional life. There is a wheelchair waiting for every one of us. And the point is to stay the hell out of it.
Barb understands there are some seniors where irreversible disease has set in and Mother Nature has ruled. The weights will not help.
“There are people who have disabilities and debilitating illnesses, for whom this doesn't apply, but 80% of seniors don't end up in nursing homes,” she said. “And we can increase that number from 80 %, and we can make life more active and functional for the ones who aren't in nursing homes by preserving strength.”
I mentioned to Barb that I use 15-pound weights in each hand every day now and do these arm curls, 3 sets of 12. She wasn’t impressed. “Better than nothing, I guess,” she says with a slight sniff. Badass, indeed.
DeAngelis started lifting weights 3½ years ago when a bone density test showed she had age-related osteopenia. She was losing bone mass. DeAngelis was no miracle. She didn’t suddenly regain gobs of bone mass with weightlifting, but here is what happened: pumping iron shut off the decline.
“It shows a little bit of improvement, but what it does show is that I stopped losing bone,” Barb said. “They've done studies that show that weightlifting supports bone health, and you're not talking about little dumbbells, talking about a heavy weight that increases stress on your bone.”
Barb was a Physical Therapist. She understands the body and the forces at work. You can improve bone density when you lift heavy weights because you're putting compressive forces on the bone.
The refrigerator guy found out about Barb’s might. She needed some repair work done, which required the fridge to be yanked out of its setback into the cabinets. The man said he would have to call the shop and get another guy to come help. Nothing doing, Barb said, let’s do this. And she and the man moved that fridge.
“One of the best things about weightlifting,” Barb said, “is that it increases your confidence and it increases your independence and mental sharpness.
“Older women are pretty much discounted. Madison Avenue doesn't really appeal to older people very much, except medications and health insurance and, and those little personal medical alarms. They're not appealing to our fashion sense or cars we might like to drive.
“I'm just a five-foot tall little old lady, and I just really want to get other little old ladies involved.”
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