How Lioness Fitness Is Rewriting Women’s Relationship with the Weight Room
Like many women, I have tried a lot of fitness programs. Spin class, Pilates, yoga, running, you name it. I had a hard time committing to a routine and grew impatient with not “seeing results” fast enough. Last year, I was working a demanding job and felt my energy slowly draining while knowing intuitively that I needed to change my habits. I was carrying a lot of stress with nowhere healthy to put it. I needed movement that felt intentional, something that would challenge me, boost my confidence, and give me a real outlet. I signed up for a class at Lioness Fitness, a women-led strength training gym in Fitchburg, Wisconsin. They say they turn gym-haters into gym-junkies. I went in with an open mind, and now, after 10 months of going to classes consistently, I can say that I’m a convert.
Not Your Average Gym
Lioness has been operating since 2019 and opened its current Fitchburg location in November 2023. The gym offers several class formats to fit different goals and schedules. Strength is their signature small group lifting class, capped at 10 people so every member gets real coaching attention. Express is a 30-minute circuit designed for busy days. Sweat is a higher intensity bootcamp format, and Power is for members ready to go heavy on the compound lifts like bench press, back squats, and deadlifts. There is also a Family Strength class for members who want to bring along a tween or teen, and a Strength and Stretch option for unwinding after a hard session. The first class is free.
The coaching team brings serious depth. Staff credentials span personal training certifications, exercise physiology, physical therapy, public health, holistic nutrition, and yoga instruction. These are not just trainers. They a
More Than Muscles
One of my favorite things about Lioness is how coaches break down what is happening in your body during each move. Which muscle groups are firing, how the mobility work supports the strength work, why a particular stance protects your knees. It reframes the whole experience. This is not about burning calories or shrinking yourself. It is about keeping your body upright, functional, and feeling good for as long as possible. No more shrimp mode hunching over a screen. No more feeling like a deer on ice when you try to move with any real intention.
Before Lioness, I had a hard time feeling genuinely connected to my body. Strength training, with good coaching, has helped me build what I can only describe as a real mind-body connection. There is something grounding about learning to move with purpose, about noticing the moment a weight that once felt impossible starts to feel manageable. Owner and coach Kelley puts it plainly: strength training is not a 30-day fix but rather “the consistent boring space.” The strength training that Lioness coaches “is for longevity, more independence, and fully functioning selves later in life,” she says. That re-frame changes everything about why you keep showing up.
Creating a Third Space
Here is the thing about Lioness that is hardest to explain until you have experienced it. The community is real. Not in a performative, cult-like way. Just genuinely, warmly, surprisingly real.
Early-morning regulars head to breakfast together after class. Members check in on each other between sessions, remembering the small details from conversations weeks before. There is a running thread of what the coaching team calls “Non-Scale Victories,” like celebrating the moment someone carried the dog food from the car without struggling or grabbed something off a high shelf without thinking twice. Kelley says she really should start a journal of these victories.
The gym also holds space for conversations that do not always find a home elsewhere. Discussions about perimenopause, postpartum recovery, hormonal cycles, and how all of it intersects with training happen openly and without embarrassment. “Women have so many other things that we’re fighting against aside from stress and sleep and nutrition,” Kelley says. “We get to add cycles to it. It doesn’t have to be an excuse for not working out. It just is another factor in the mix.” That kind of acknowledgment, that your body’s experience is specific and worth accommodating, is rare in most fitness spaces.
Lioness attracts women at many life stages. There are members in their 70s who report that they feel steadier on stairs. There are moms who bring their kids to Family Strength classes. Kelley loves it when kids are surprised by how much their moms can lift and want to bring some competitive spirit. She tells them, “First, you need to put the time in that your mom did and learn the skills, and then we’ll work on increasing the resistance.”
The space also works for introverts. Some members come, work hard, and leave without much conversation, and that is completely fine. Nobody expects a certain personality. High fives are available but never mandatory. There is something genuinely refreshing about a gym where the chatters and the quietly focused types feel equally at home.
What Lioness has built is the kind of third space that is getting harder to find, somewhere between home and work where community forms naturally around a shared purpose but without pressure. “Community is absolutely our second pillar,” Kelley says, “running right alongside building strength. Those are our two big ones.” For a lot of women at Lioness, it has become that home away from home.
What Actually Changes
I came to Lioness looking for a healthy way to handle stress and found something bigger. The anxiety that used to build up with nowhere to go now has somewhere to go. I sleep better. I feel more confident. I am also, for the first time in my adult life, a morning person. Or close enough. I look forward to my 6am Lioness class now, even when my first few moves are a little sleepy. That shift, from dreading exercise to genuinely craving it, and feeling proud to be amongst like-minded women who are sharing in this journey, is exactly what Lioness is built to create.
By By Liz Sidor
