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

Grief in the Gym: How Weight Rooms Are Becoming Spaces for Mourning

Activelifezero.com – Thirty people stood in a dimly lit New York City studio, tears still streaming down their faces before a single rep had been lifted. Instructor Sylvia Borowska, who has spent five years teaching Liftonic weight-training sessions, asked each participant to select the heaviest dumbbell or barbell they could manage. Then she offered a simple reframe: hold the weight as though it were resting 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 told the room. “That can represent either the months or years you’ve been grieving.”

That session was the centerpiece of Grief, Sweat & Tears (GST), a monthly pop-up initiative launched in December 2025 that pairs structured strength training with the raw emotional work of mourning. Priced at $30 per class, the program markets itself as the intersection where grief meets fitness, and it has drawn roughly 400 participants across its first six months of operation in New York.

A Personal Origin

The concept was born from absence. Betsy Kaplan, now 29, lost her father to suicide eight years ago and found that New York offered no comfortable “grief space” where she could simply move her body without being expected to narrate her pain. She wanted what she calls a “no-pressure zone” — a room where showing up meant lifting, not performing vulnerability on command.

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

At one of the earliest GST gatherings, Kaplan met Jake Montiel, who had lost his mother three years earlier at age 30. By GST tradition, participants speak the name of the person they are mourning at the start of every session. Montiel described being terrified the first time he voiced that name aloud in a room of strangers. Yet the woman beside him had also lost a mother, and the shared silence that followed broke into something resembling friendship. They bonded over the workout itself as much as over the words.

“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 said.

What the Research Says — and Doesn’t

The emotional logic of these classes is intuitive: movement metabolizes stress hormones, communal effort builds belonging, and symbolic resistance (a barbell standing in for loss) gives abstract pain a tangible shape. But the empirical literature remains thin. 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 studies specifically examining grief- or rage-themed fitness interventions are scarce.

“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 broader fitness-and-social-science literature does support is the value of structured group activity for adult friendship formation. The social-networking platform Meetup reports more than three million registered members spread across roughly 2,200 fitness groups worldwide, a figure that has climbed alongside the popularity of run clubs, pickleball leagues, and group cycling. Emotion-centered classes sit within that same ecosystem but add a layer of shared vulnerability that generic group workouts lack.

For adults who find traditional grief counseling or trauma support groups overwhelming — the closed circle, the mandated sharing, the clinical setting — a weight room where the primary task is physical can lower the entry barrier. Martin framed it as a graduated exposure: you are connecting with others’ similar experiences, but the connection is mediated by the workout rather than sustained solely by the pain itself.

“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 said.

Beyond the Barbell: Rage Rooms and Recovery Spaces

The GST model is not the only expression of this trend. In Westminster, Colorado, E-motion Fitness operates as a hybrid venue part rage room, part gym, part quiet sanctuary. Clients decorate a wall with a single emotion word — rage, fear, grief — then smash paint-filled glass bottles against it. Trainers follow the destruction with a 45-minute full-body workout, after which participants migrate to a separate room furnished with art installations and low-volume music, designed as a decompression space.

Elisa Thurston booked an engagement party at the venue, wanting her family to channel last-minute wedding jitters through controlled physical release before the ceremony. The format mirrors what GST does in New York: name the feeling, externalize it through movement, then transition into stillness.

Why Now

The timing of these initiatives tracks several converging shifts. Loneliness among adults in their thirties and forties has become a public-health concern, and conventional social channels — workplace, neighborhood, faith community — have thinned. Simultaneously, the stigma around emotional expression in fitness spaces has eroded; men and women increasingly expect gyms to accommodate more than calorie expenditure. Add a post-pandemic hunger for in-person ritual and a cultural moment in which naming grief openly is no longer taboo, and the conditions for a class like Borowska’s deadlift-for-mourning session become not just possible but expected.

Borowska, who opened that first GST session by telling the room how her own mother died of lung disease, closed it with a line that captured the class’s underlying thesis:

“Let’s keep going. Grief is heavy, but we’re stronger than that, so let’s prove to ourselves and each other how strong we are.”

Whether the science will eventually validate the practice in formal terms remains an open question. What is already observable is that hundreds of New Yorkers have chosen, month after month, to walk into a gym, name a dead person, and lift something heavy — and to find that the act of showing up for the weight was itself a form of care.