街头举重：给引体向上绑上 100 多磅是什么运动

Doing one pull-up is hard enough. Now, imagine doing one with 132 pounds strapped around your waist. It may sound almost impossible, but for 32-year-old Danae Morgan, it’s just another day of training. And considering pull-ups are often viewed as a movement women aren’t always expected to excel at, Morgan’s ability is all the more remarkable.

Morgan competes at the highest levels of streetlifting, a unique, new sport built around a deceptively simple idea: take four of the most common bodyweight exercises—pull-ups, dips, muscle-ups, and squats—and load them with as much weight as an athlete can handle. Competitors get three tries to up their weight as much as they can handle, while judges determine whether their form is passable. Weight gets added up at the end of competition to determine a winner in each weight class.

The goal, then, is to move extraordinary amounts of weight while keeping every rep clean and controlled. In this arena, a pull-up is no longer a simple test of whether an athlete can handle their own bodyweight. It’s a measure of how much additional weight they can carry through already demanding movements—a challenge that has produced female athletes capable of extraordinary feats of strength.

The extraordinary difficulty is part of what makes streetlifting so distinctive.

The sport grew out of the street workout and calisthenics (the fancy name for bodyweight training) scene that took hold in Eastern Europe in the early 2010s, says Théo Marques Lopez, a streetlifting athlete and the vice president and director of judging for the USA Streetlifting Federation. Calisthenics has long been a popular way to train because it’s accessible, affordable, and requires little to no additional equipment. But eventually, as athletes became stronger, some began looking for ways to turn those movements into more formal measures of strength.

According to Lopez, one Ukrainian athlete helped spark that shift when he strapped a 105-pound kettlebell around his waist and started doing weighted pull-ups. The feat caught the attention of other athletes, and before long, adding weight to bodyweight movements became a challenge of its own.

From there, the niche offshoot of calisthenics caught fire. Social media helped spread the sport to a wider audience, as communities in Germany, France, and Italy embraced it as a new take on traditional bodyweight training. Informal contests then gradually grew into a more organized sport, complete with standardized rules, weight classes, and judging, says Lopez. In 2017, the International Streetlifting Federation was established in Russia, giving the sport an international platform. Six years later, in 2023, streetlifting made its way more prominently to the United States, where athletes like Lopez began working to introduce the sport to a new audience and grow a community around it.

Morgan completing a muscle-up.

Although the sport grew out of calisthenics, competitors tend to borrow more training characteristics from powerlifting than traditional bodyweight workouts. Training programs vary, but according to Morgan, who is also a streetlifting world record holder, the focus is typically on a handful of extremely heavy sets of the sport’s four core movements. An athlete might perform three or four sets of weighted dips, for example, using enough additional weight to make six to eight reps a serious challenge. The result? A style of training designed not just to build strength, but to demand it from nearly every part of the body.

The sport’s evolution has also created space for a new generation of athletes—particularly women—to make their mark.

Streetlifting’s early years were largely male-dominated, but women have become an increasingly visible presence in competition as the sport has quickly grown over the last few years. And for athletes like Morgan, a big part of that visibility is about challenging long-held assumptions about what strength looks like—and who gets to claim it.

Morgan’s own journey into strength sports began in late 2019, when she discovered calisthenics workouts on YouTube and started training in her bedroom with push-ups, squats, pull-ups (special thanks to the beloved doorway pull-up bar), and core exercises. She quickly found she had a knack for the movements and began competing in calisthenics. A few years later, she discovered streetlifting, which she calls “the powerlifting of calisthenics,” and saw an opportunity to build on the skills she had developed, creating a new benchmark for her strength. She entered her first U.S. streetlifting competition in early 2023. Just months later, she traveled to Europe for the World Championships, where she represented Team USA and became the first American woman to compete.

Since then, the numbers have only underscored what Morgan is capable of: she can perform a muscle-up with 55 extra pounds and back squat 315 pounds. For her, the significance of streetlifting extends beyond records, competitions, and plates on a weight belt. It’s also about showing women that strength is something they can pursue on their own terms. “My goal is to normalize the fact that women can be strong,” says Morgan. “I often see people comparing a woman’s strength to a man’s strength, and what we can or can’t do in comparison, but my strength has nothing to do with a man. I’m just strong, period.”

That same sense of empowerment is what drew Kelly Sorge, another member of Team USA and a streetlifting record holder, to the sport. Two years ago, the owner of her local gym noticed her crushing pull-ups and suggested she give streetlifting a try. Sorge had never even heard of the sport, but after attending a workshop the following weekend, she was hooked. “My own strength has always been a source of empowerment for me, so when I saw there was a new sport where women were doing muscle-ups and weighted dips, I just thought it was so cool and knew I needed to represent women.”

“I often see people comparing a woman’s strength to a man’s strength, and what we can or can’t do in comparison, but my strength has nothing to do with a man. I’m just strong, period.”

Now, Sorge trains at least four days a week and can complete a muscle-up with 16.6 pounds of added weight, a pull-up with 55 pounds, a dip with 96 pounds, and a 275-pound squat. But much like Morgan, Sorge says the appeal of streetlifting goes far beyond the physical challenge. As she became more involved in the sport (she’s now the co-chair of the Colorado streetlifting board), she found a community of women pushing themselves alongside one another—and, in the process, discovered another source of motivation. “There are so many super strong women out there that are competing in streetlifting in the U.S., Europe, and other countries across the world, and it’s been so inspiring for me to be a part of this community,” she says. “I can’t even fathom what my life would be like right now without it.”

That sense of pride, community, and discipline is part of what makes streetlifting so compelling for athletes like Morgan and Sorge. The sport retains the accessibility of its calisthenics roots, but adding weight transforms familiar movements into a demanding test of strength. There are no complicated machines or flashy equipment required—just a bar, a weight belt, some plates, and an athlete willing to find out what their body can do.

Perhaps that’s also what makes streetlifting so striking. The movements are simple enough to understand, but the numbers these athletes are putting behind them are anything but ordinary. Morgan’s 132-pound weighted pull-up, Sorge’s 96-pound weighted dip, and the performances of women joining them on the competition floor are helping push those movements into a new realm while breaking previous conceptions of female strength. And as streetlifting continues to grow in the United States and beyond, the women helping shape it are doing more than building a sport; they’re expanding the mainstream picture of how strong a woman can be.

Andi Breitowich is a freelance writer who covers health, fitness, relationships, beauty, and smart living. She is a graduate of Emory University and Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. Her work has appeared in Women's Health, POPSUGAR, Food & Wine, What To Expect, Cosmopolitan, Men's Health, and elsewhere. As a former collegiate pole vaulter, she loves all things fitness and has yet to meet a group workout class she doesn't like.