How The WNBA Star Got Stronger
The WNBA’s reigning Rookie of the Year Caitlin Clark has been going hard in the gym this offseason—and she’s ready to show the world what she’s been working on.
Fans noticed back in March that Clark had gained a significant amount of muscle in her arms, thanks to a viral tweet from photographer Bri Lewerke of the Indiana Fever guard cheering on her alma mater, the Iowa Hawkeyes, at the Big Ten tournament. “Well someone’s been in the weight room👀😮💨” Lewerke observed, to the tune of 3.2 million views.
Then, when retired WNBA legends Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi asked her about the photo on ESPN’s Bird & Taurasi Show during the NCAA championship game, Clark downplayed the moment. “It was the camera angle!” she joked. “AI is getting out of control, c’mon.”
But the reality is that Clark has been working hard during the seven-month offseason. Before that, she’d barely had a moment to catch her breath—she competed in the national championship with Iowa in April, was drafted to the Fever a week later, and went straight to her first WNBA training camp all in the span of a month.
While technically Clark was taking some well-deserved time off from the highest level of competition (and even taking in a few rounds of golf), she was also regularly hitting the weight room with Sarah Kessler, PhD, CSCS, the Fever’s head athletic performance coach. Their “biggest focus” was building strength, Clark explained during her first media availability since returning to training camp earlier this week.
“I certainly feel a lot stronger,” Clark said. “It’s going to help me offensively, it’s going to help me defensively, it’s going to help me not get as tired throughout games. So yeah, definitely one of the focus points of my offseason is just getting stronger, and even through these two practices I can certainly feel it.”
Lest you think Clark was merely pumping out biceps curls for several months, Fever head coach Stephanie White provided a bit more intel into everything that goes into her star player’s workouts. “Being able to address getting in the weight room, getting stronger, being able to stay on balance, better time under tension, core stability, all of those things, and then to be able to get in the gym and really hone in on some nuance of her game, that’s going to help her get to another level,” White said.
Clark may be an elite superstar athlete, but these are all concepts that can (and should!) be incorporated into anyone’s strength training program, says Lauren Kanski, CPT, a kettlebell coach on the Ladder app and a Women’s Health advisory board member. “She’s doing the same things that I have my 60-year-old menopausal women doing at home,” Kanski says. “We all need to be training the same, it’s just going to look a little bit different.”
Time under tension, for example, is a form of progressive overload that increases a muscle’s strength and durability by keeping it under resistance for a greater period of time. Take that biceps curl—you could quickly curl the weight up (the concentric phase of the exercise) and back down (the eccentric phase), or you could slooowly release the weight and teach your brain to produce more force at a different part of the muscle contraction. Kanski employs this in her program, Body & Bell, to allow at-home exercisers to increase the challenge in their reps without necessarily needing to purchase heavier weights.
For someone like Clark, increased time under tension can make her muscles more resilient (and protect them from injury) when she’s spending close to 40 minutes on the court every night. “People get so wrapped up in aesthetics and size and all these things, when really the most important thing—especially with the brain and in sport—is it’s a neural adaptation,” Kanski says. “Time under tension is a wicked tool for increasing overall strength.”
Kanski says balance and functional core work should also be pillars of a well-rounded strength program, even for everyday athletes who may not quite be at Clark’s level (yet). “Everyone should be training those concepts,” she says. For Clark, better stability on the court may look like the ability to effectively change directions at a second’s notice. For regular folks, that could mean the difference between a sprained ankle if you step off a curb the wrong way or a nasty fall if your dog takes off after a squirrel on a walk. “The sport and the game, for her, that’s unpredictable, right? But it’s also life, for us, that’s unpredictable.” (Don’t mind me, just adding a core challenge into my workout routine.)
If you can’t wait to see Clark’s strength gains in action, you’re in luck, because the Fever have two preseason games this weekend. They’ll first play the Washington Mystics at 1 p.m. ET Saturday on NBA TV. Then, they’ll take on the Brazilian National Team in Clark’s old stomping grounds of Iowa City at 4 p.m. ET Sunday on ESPN.
The WNBA regular season officially tips off on Friday, May 16—plenty of time to get your merch order in to cheer for these strong women.
Amanda Lucci is the director of special projects at Women’s Health, where she works on multi-platform brand initiatives and social media strategy. She also leads the sports and athletes vertical, traveling to cover the Paris Olympics, Women’s World Cup, WNBA Finals, and NCAA Final Four for WH. She has nearly 15 years of experience writing, editing, and managing social media for national and international publications and is also a NASM-certified personal trainer. A proud native of Pittsburgh, PA, she is a graduate of Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. Follow her on Instagram @alucci.
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