People are exercising away their grief. What does the science say?

When the Barbell Becomes a Grief Tool: The Growing Movement to Lift Emotional Weight Through Physical Training

Goldlaner.com – In a dimly lit New York gym, thirty people stood in silence, tears streaming down their faces before a single rep had been completed. Their instructor, Sylvia Borowska, asked each participant to select the heaviest free weight they could manage. Then she offered a simple reframe: hold it as though it rests on your shoulders, your back, or your chest.

“Do as many deadlifts as you can for the amount of time that the person you’ve lost has passed,” Borowska instructed the room. “That can represent either the months or years you’ve been grieving.”

The session belonged to Grief, Sweat & Tears, a monthly pop-up initiative launched in December 2025 that stages workout classes specifically designed for people navigating loss across New York City. Priced at $30 per session, the program markets itself on social media as the intersection where mourning meets movement. For Borowska, a Liftonic weight-training coach with five years of experience, this particular evening marked a departure from routine. She opened the class by disclosing that her own mother had died of lung disease — a vulnerability she had never previously brought into a training session.

“Let’s keep going,” she urged as the room worked through its sets. “Grief is heavy, but we’re stronger than that, so let’s prove to ourselves and each other how strong we are.”

A Trend With No Clear Research Backing

The phenomenon extends well beyond one instructor’s evening class. Rage cycling studios, anxiety-focused yoga sessions, and dozens of comparable programs have proliferated over the past several years, inviting participants to select their workout based on the emotional state they wish to process rather than the muscle group they wish to target. Yet the scientific literature has not kept pace with the cultural moment.

Dr. Ryan Martin, a psychologist, author, and dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay, noted that peer-reviewed evidence on emotion-targeted fitness remains sparse.

“It’s not unusual for pop culture to be a little bit further ahead than psychologists are when it comes to advocating some of these things,” Martin observed.

What the research does support, however, is the social dimension. Fitness activities have become a primary venue for adult social bonding in an era when pickleball tournaments and running clubs have surged in popularity. The networking platform Meetup reports more than three million registered members spread across roughly 2,200 fitness groups worldwide. Within that broader ecosystem, emotion-centered classes carve out a narrower, more specific channel for connection.

Lowering the Barrier to Grief Community

For many adults, walking into a traditional grief support group feels daunting — the expectation of verbalizing trauma in a circle of strangers can be overwhelming. A weight room, by contrast, offers a structured, activity-mediated entry point. Martin pointed out that shared physical exertion paired with shared loss creates a community where participants recognize parallel experiences without being forced to narrate them at length.

“This might provide a community where you know you’re connecting with other people’s similar experiences, but you’re not just doing it over that experience, which could be too much,” Martin explained.

Betsy Kaplan, 29, built Grief, Sweat & Tears precisely around that principle. Eight years ago she lost her father to suicide and found no existing “grief space” in her New York neighborhood that felt accessible. She wanted a no-pressure environment where sharing was optional and the primary obligation was simply to show up and move.

“We’re here to work out,” Kaplan said. “We’re here to meet people who get it and just make new connections.”

Personal Bonds Forged Under the Bar

At an early GST event, Kaplan met Jake Montiel, who had lost his mother three years earlier at age 30. A house rule of the program requires participants to speak the name of their deceased loved one aloud at the start of every session. Montiel described being terrified the first time he voiced that name in front of strangers. What steadied him was the young woman beside him, who had also lost her mother. They formed an immediate friendship, anchored not only by shared sorrow but by the physical work they performed together.

“It’s really an honest, open safe space to basically open up and get that weight off your chest just from saying those powerful words of who you’re grieving,” Montiel recalled.

According to Kaplan, approximately 400 individuals have attended a GST class over the program’s first six months of operation.

From Rage Rooms to Recovery Spaces

The emotion-fitness model is not confined to grief. In Westminster, Colorado, Elisa Thurston chose E-motion Fitness for her engagement party — a venue branded as a hybrid of rage room, gym, and sanctuary. Guests smash paint-filled glass bottles against the walls, each bottle decorated with an emotion label such as “rage” or “fear.” Trainers then guide participants through a 45-minute full-body workout before the group migrates into a separate recovery room furnished with visual art and quiet music. Thurston wanted her family to experience the session as a way to release last-minute wedding jitters before the ceremony.

What the Evidence Actually Says

While dedicated clinical trials on grief-specific exercise programs remain limited, adjacent research offers context. Regular physical activity is well established as a modulator of cortisol, a contributor to improved sleep architecture, and a reducer of depressive symptom severity. Group-based exercise has shown modest benefits for social isolation in adults over 50. What remains untested is whether layering explicit emotional framing — naming the deceased, assigning the weight to the loss — amplifies or merely parallels those physiological effects.

For now, the answer lives in the gym itself: in the thirty people who cried before their first rep, in the name spoken aloud at the start of a deadlift set, in the friend made over a shared squat rack. The science will catch up, or it won’t. The participants, for their part, have already decided that the weight on the bar is lighter than the weight in the chest — and that proving otherwise, one rep at a time, is worth the $30 ticket.