Dancing Shoes

by Victoria Holt | May 05, 2026

I haven’t been lifting a year yet, but I could tell by the second month that I had found something special. At first, I couldn’t put it into words. I tried explaining to my coach the cocktail of feelings that surged in me when I drove to the gym. Anticipation, anxiety, excitement, trepidation… but as soon as I stepped into my lifting shoes, I seemed to settle into my body.

I’ve worn a lot of shoes in my life. Ballet slippers when I was four, tap shoes when I was ten, basketball shoes when I was fourteen. I always had tennis shoes laying around, of course, and Sunday shoes, dress-up shoes, sandals, flip-flops and running shoes. I even had cleats at 21 for a short stint of softball. My rite of passage fast-food job required non-slip shoes with black leather uppers. If shoes make the man, then my woman shoes meant I had a job to do.

For thirty years however, shoes were optional. I’d taken the stay-at-home-mom route after marriage (and softball), and the extent of my shoe collection involved church shoes and tennis shoes with a once-in-a-lifetime detour to hot pink wedges for a trip to Mexico.

Like a lot of people, I had let parenting and life overtake my once athletic nature, and I found myself in perimenopause with a health practitioner telling me that strength training was the number one way to offset the impending changes that my body was already starting to experience. Even so, it took me another year to make up my mind and start.

A friend recommended a program called Starting Strength, so I read the book, liked the science, and decided to find an online coach. (I live in a region where the nearest Starting Strength in-person coaches are two hours away.)

My lifting shoes were my first purchase after the gym membership. When I slipped them on after they arrived, I felt giddy like a schoolgirl. At 53 years old, that was no small feat.

My coach, Bruce Trout, a certified Starting Strength coach, programmed me for three days a week, starting small. Out of all the sports I’d tried, weightlifting had never been one of them. I began what Starting Strength calls the “Novice Linear Progression,” which involves adding progressively heavier weights to a barbell. Using a nifty mobile app to share information and videos with my coach, I started weight training for real.

The first few months of the Novice Linear Progression are heady if you find you don’t mind the steady hard work, or are of the mindset that you’re not going to quit no matter what. The weight you’re able to lift keeps going up, and watching those numbers rise can be affirming, if not downright addictive. With a great coach like I have, I wasn’t just adding weight to the barbell. He was helping me finesse my technique to optimize my results while making lifting as reasonably safe as possible for a woman of my size and age.

I had setbacks with a minor knee injury from playing outside with my kids and another mishap involving overconfidence in my ability to recover from too many vaccines at once, but otherwise, I haven’t missed any scheduled workout sessions, and my trusty lifting shoes have been with me every step of the way. The other morning when I was tying them and pulling the Velcro straps over the laces, this random thought popped into my head. “I’m putting on my dancing shoes.”

It was silly, of course. Lifting shoes are serviceable tools designed to help you stay balanced when you’re supporting heavy weight. Instead of a cushioned in-sole and spring-loaded bouncy sole, weightlifting shoes have a solid wedge-shaped heel that help the lifter achieve an efficient and consistent movement.

There is no dancing happening. What I’ve been learning is that I want to keep the barbell over mid-foot in every single lift (except the bench press, of course). All of the movement happens in my knee joints, hip joints, shoulders, back, and arms. My feet remain planted on the ground providing a stable base for all of the muscle work.

And yet, there is a certain grace to dipping below the bar to position it on my shoulder blades, and the day I’d had the unexpected thought about dancing shoes, I found myself placing my feet “just so” under the bar, under my shoulders, under my hips, under my knees, the way I usually do. But I recognized the intention in it.

My mind went way, way back to childhood ballet and tap lessons. First position. Second position. Third position. There were names for where I was supposed to place my feet in order to perform the correct dance movement. Satisfied that my analogy wasn’t completely irrelevant, I smiled and stood up with over a hundred pounds on my back, took two steps backward, made sure my feet were the correct width apart and evenly spaced, and began to dance.

While it may not involve the steps of my youth, strength training has become one of the greatest activities of my adult life, in that it gives me joy, strength, inner peace, mental acuity, and emotional grounding like nothing else ever has. Just like dancing, I get to move my body with energy and intention. There are proper positions and techniques, and when I master a weight, there is a fluidity that means all of my parts are working together in concert. That harmony of movement represents balance as well as strength, and there is beauty in a human body that is using its muscles, tendons, and bones to its full potential.

Maybe lifting isn’t technically dancing, but as a woman in her fifties, I rather like the comparison. I’m stronger than I’ve ever been, and lifting gives me confidence in my physical presence and ability that I imagine dancers also enjoy. My lifting shoes aren’t delicate-looking like ballet slippers or glossy like tap shoes, but they’re perfect for how I’m showing up for my body right now. I never would have guessed when I was tapping in a chorus line with other ten-year olds that in four decades I would be lifting more than my body weight on a regular basis and loving every minute of it.

Silly or not, I love my “dancing shoes,” and I hope I get to keep dancing for years to come. Having stronger muscles and bones is one way to make that happen.

Would you care to dance?