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 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.
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