Where to Start with Sara Martinsson
Sara Martinsson is a Swedish freelance journalist and competitive weightlifter from Lenhövda in Smaland. She writes about music, culture, and training for publications including Dagens Nyheter and Arbetet. Her book “Knäböj: om kvinnor och styrketräning” (The Squat: On Women and Strength Training) traces the history of women in strength sports, blending cultural criticism, personal memoir, and reporting into a work that Dagens Nyheter called “weighty, crisp, and amusing.” She brings the perspective of someone who has both competed under the barbell and investigated the forces that have kept women away from it.
Start here
The Squat: On Women and Strength Training
Sara Martinsson · 210 pages · 2021 · Easy
Themes: women in sport, strength training history, feminism, weightlifting culture, body politics
A sharp, personal account of women’s long fight to be allowed to build their own bodies. Martinsson, a journalist and weightlifting coach, traces the intellectual history of female strength training from 19th-century strongwomen to today’s fitness influencers.
Why Start Here
This is the book that explains the culture surrounding strength training from a perspective most books in the genre ignore entirely. Martinsson writes with the authority of someone who has both lived the experience and reported on it, drawing on research, fiction, and her own journey as a competitive weightlifter growing up in a working-class Swedish town.
The book documents how women were excluded from strength sports, how grassroots pioneers pushed back, and how the current fitness industry both empowers and commodifies female strength. It is a book about barbells, but also about bodies, power, and resistance.
What to Expect
A narrative work blending cultural history, personal memoir, and journalism. Originally published in Swedish as “Knäböj: om kvinnor och styrketräning,” the book moves quickly through its 210 pages. Martinsson’s writing is crisp and occasionally funny.