Julianna King, MVS '23
10:39 a.m.
Julianna King (MVS ‘23) rushes into a huddle room in the School of Kinesiology Building, breathing heavily. She has a meeting with the other MWrite fellows who grade the papers in MOVESCI 110, the introductory movement science class at Kines. Having been a fellow for five semesters, King leads the group, making sure the students understand the rubrics and getting them comfortable with the process. They can’t start without her.
“Usually, I’m a pretty prompt person, but U-M parking today…” she says, shaking her head as she sets her water bottle and a Starbucks iced coffee on the table.
She and the other three fellows don’t waste any time, picking up where their discussion left off from their meeting with the MOVESCI 110 professors the day before. As a course that participates in MWrite, MOVESCI 110 is set up as a write-to-learn class, in which students submit an initial version of a paper and then have a chance to revise it based off of feedback from the MWrite fellows and anonymous peer reviews from other students in the course.
The group goes over a couple of sample papers, with King asking the rest how they would grade each section. After they give their takes, she says things like, “Normally, this is how I would do this,” and “I generally agree, but let’s flip the perspective here: What would the student think if they got this feedback?”
At one point, she asks whether they’d all had to answer the prompt for this particular paper themselves. They nod. She goes to the whiteboard in the room and starts diagramming what her response would have been.
“This is so helpful,” one of the students says.
At that moment, Pete Bodary, the associate dean for undergraduate education and a clinical associate professor who’s co-teaching the MOVESCI 110 course this semester, sees King drawing from the hallway. He opens the door and pops his head in.
“Boom, baby!” he exclaims, gesturing to the whiteboard.
***
King is no longer a Kinesiology student, and she’s not technically staff. And yet, within the movement science realm of the school, she pops up quite a bit. In addition to her MWrite responsibilities, she works half-time as an instructional aide for Bodary and part-time as a research aide for movement science associate professor Melissa Gross.
And she’s still connected with many current students, given her status as past president of Phi Epsilon Kappa (PEK), the kinesiology fraternity on campus, and vice president of the U-M powerlifting club. (She’s been running her own powerlifting coaching business since she was a sophomore.)
“She’s like the face of Kines,” movement science undergraduate Ariana Ravitz once told me.
My job is to write about people and programs connected with our school, so King seemed like an ideal candidate for an alumni profile. Given her hectic schedule, I thought I could spend a day shadowing her to showcase all the interesting initiatives she was working on and to better understand how she managed it all.
What I didn’t expect (outside of how tired I’d be at the end of the day) was how open King would be about the challenges that shaped her as a person — and helped her become the kind of mentor and coach that understands that nothing is more important than well-being.
***
11:35 a.m.
Someone else has the huddle room reserved at 11:30 a.m., so we pack up and go on the hunt for another place to hang out. King explains that she runs her own powerlifting business, Fortitudo Fitness, through which she creates lifting programs for clients, does video analysis of their lifts, and occasionally coaches them at meets (see above photo). Today is a designated check-in day where she messages them to see how they’re doing and provides feedback on their videos.
We find an empty conference room, and she pulls out her laptop.
“I quite literally have to flip profiles because this work is under a different email,” she says. “But I don’t mind it. I thrive on some variability and having multiple roles and moving parts.”
She pulls up a detailed spreadsheet. Though she’s maintained her own company, she also now works as a coach under The Strength Guys.
“You know how people know Jim Harbaugh or Ryan Day as household names?” she says. “That’s the case with this company in the powerlifting world.”
“I have an athlete now who’s from Malta,” she continues. “I didn’t know Malta was a country a year ago. And the coaches — one’s from Slovenia, one’s from France. The whole thing is more global, which is something I really appreciate.”
She watches some videos of a client who’s getting ready for a meet in a few weeks, which means she’s looking at their lifts more closely to make sure they’re performing “to standard” (what would pass within a competition) without making too many technical adjustments.
“This week looks consistent for this individual,” she says.
She plays back a clip.
“Do you see how there’s some movement at her ankle when she lifts? It’s really tiny, but it’s there. I might tell her to push down more through her whole foot.”
We watch another video in which the lifter starts pulling from her back once she gets to mid-thigh in a deadlift. I cringe, given my own history of back troubles. King empathizes — she’s injured her back before — and says it could be something to watch out for at the meet. But she cautions that putting too much of a priority on form can inhibit people.
“If they’re consistent with a movement and they can tolerate it, I don’t worry about it,” she says. “Where it becomes an issue is if somebody’s not used to it, and you add more of a load.”
King moves on to another client who’s commented that he’s feeling tired lately and that he’s dropped a couple of pounds.
“In those types of situations, I always start by asking, ‘Have you eaten enough? Have you drank enough water? Have you slept enough? For women, are you near your menstrual cycle? For the under 21s, did you go out last night?’” she says. “It’s about balancing general recommendations with knowing what’s outside your scope and when they need to make an appointment with their doctor.”
She watches a few of the client’s videos and sends him a WhatsApp note about which lifts look the most comfortable for him. Then she sends out her question of the week to the group chat for the 16 or 17 personal clients whom she brought along to The Strength Guys. Last week, she asked what music they were listening to; this week, she’s wondering what their favorite cooler-weather food is.
The point, she says, is to open up the conversation and help people find their common ground.
***
12:55 p.m.
As we walk to the Modern Languages Building across from the Thayer parking structure, King explains that we’re heading to Bodary’s MOVESCI 241 class, “Exercise, Nutrition & Weight Control.”
The work she does for Bodary is partially funded by a grant he received over the summer from the Center for Academic Innovation, to try to increase in-person attendance for this course. Students have been allowed to attend the sessions remotely for several years, and the classroom becomes emptier as the semester goes on as a result. But Bodary’s seen good attendance and high engagement in another MOVESCI class with a similar set-up, so he and King are trying to see if they can replicate the team activities in that course to incentivize more students to show up. King is in charge of collecting and grading the new team assignments, whose points are only available for in-person attendees.
The large lecture hall is fairly full, and the students are still abuzz with fall semester energy. Bodary goes through slides on thermoregulation, asking the class periodic questions (“Why would sweating while you’re exercising cool you down?”) that try to make the content more relevant to them.
The TAs then hand out notecards, and the class breaks into groups and talks about Monday’s session, which featured a guest speaker who was the former acting commissioner of the FDA and an expert on supplements.
Bodary comes over to chat with me while the students are brainstorming.
“There’s maybe twice as many people here as on Monday,” Bodary says, pleased. “The question is, are they learning more?”
King collects the notecards and starts noting down who turned them in. The class comes back together to discuss the stakeholders around supplements and how the United States manages supplements compared to different countries.
“Who would care about the regulation of supplements?” Bodary asks. “Julianna, being a powerlifter, would care. Who else might care?”
***
2:30 p.m.
We’re only halfway through King’s Wednesday, and I’m wondering if her other days are this busy.
“It’s just Wednesday that’s like this,” she says, and then proceeds to outline the remainder of her week, which sounds, at least collectively, just as full. Monday is dedicated solely to the check-ins with her Fortitudo Fitness clients we were doing earlier. Tuesday is prep for Wednesday and business content work; she tries to put out educational content on social media and on her website, and her roommate and she record a podcast, Powerful Perspectives, on which they talk about powerlifting and life after graduation.
On Thursday, she writes fitness programs, grades for MWrite, and hangs out with her boyfriend, who’s in law school at Wayne State University, on his day off. On Friday, she’s also writing programs, prepping for Monday meetings with The Strength Guys, and attending one-off meetings.
This Friday, she has a PhD admissions interest meeting with a university in a different state. She graduated from U-M with dual degrees in movement science and psychology, and she’s now interested in pursuing a sport psychology doctoral program (“or a social psychology program with sports in it,” she says), where she’d like to examine how an individual’s perceived gender role impacts the sports they choose and how long they participate in them.
The particular program she’s meeting with has an option to get a concurrent master’s in counseling psychology, and King thinks it’d be good to have that accreditation if she decides to become a psychologist down the road or incorporate those ideas into her coaching business.
By this point, we’re sitting in an anatomy classroom, watching the 3D printer zing back and forth as it builds up tiny layers of snow white filament. King has to 3D print some extra bones for Gross’ Art of Anatomy mini-course, in which students reexamine their perceptions of the human body and depictions of it.
I ask King if she’d like to go out of state for her PhD, and a look of longing comes over her face. She nods emphatically.
“My original intention was to go out of state for undergrad,” she says, having grown up in Rochester, Mich. “But I was a Stamps Scholar, which at the time meant that I got a full ride. My first year, I really struggled with my decision because I felt like it was a financial one instead of what I really wanted. And I crave some element of adventure and variety. I naturally want to explore and discover things.”
That first year at U-M was tough, but once she decided to join PEK, she met more people with common interests and felt better about her decision. By junior year, she had taken on leadership roles for both PEK and the university’s fledgling powerlifting team, which her extroverted introvert self couldn’t believe.
“I was never a big partier,” she says. “I would rather go home and sit with my cats.”
She shares more about her backstory. The summer before 8th grade, her dad, who worked in construction, had to go to another state for work. One week of him being gone turned into two turned into a month. As someone who’d always had a stable-two parent household, she felt unmoored. She’d already been focused on her eating and exercising habits, but the change in situation tipped her too far toward the extreme. She was eventually diagnosed with an eating disorder.
Luckily, it didn’t take that long for her to get help and recover, although she did start going to the gym as an alternate way to get the physique she was looking for.
“My intentions were not great at the beginning,” King says. “But I did flip from wanting to be smaller to wanting to be stronger.”
She connected with her first powerlifting coach through an online program. After the first two years, she knew she wanted to become a coach herself, but she had to wait until she was 18 to get licensed. Now, at 23, she’s been powerlifting for nine years and has been coaching for five.
“My boss always says that I’m young in years,” she says, “but wise in experience.”
***
If this were a movie, there’d be a montage of King getting tattoos to commemorate overcoming these various obstacles.
She’s been inked four times. One of the tattoos, on her rib cage, is a little house, a symbol of her family’s trade and the strong foundation her family gives her. Another, on her left wrist, says, “Keep your head up,” in an elegant script handwritten by her mother. She got it after her first powerlifting meet, when she wasn’t keeping her head up during a deadlift, and people were yelling the phrase at her.
“As someone who’s struggled with mental health issues, that struck home for me,” she says.
The most visible one, on King’s left forearm, is an elaborate design of a torso with muscle on one side, flowers woven through the ribs on the other and an olive branch intertwined throughout — a nod to her experience in Gross’ Art and Anatomy in the Italian Renaissance course. For her, it represents the intersection of strength and beauty.
The remaining one, of mountains bedecked by edelweiss and honeysuckle, King got on her right shoulder after visiting Banff National Park. Her first time to the rocky paradise was in 2018, when she was competing in the International Powerlifting Federation world championships in Calgary, and her parents suggested driving to Banff. She couldn’t hike that day as she didn’t want to risk hurting herself before the meet, but, she says, “The weirdest calmness came over me.”
She chose the honeysuckle as a tribute to her brothers, with whom she played near a honeysuckle bush as children. And the edelweiss? “It only grows in the highest of points,” she says, “so it has to endure.”
***
3:50 p.m.
“Julianna, hey!” students keep saying as we walk past clusters of them on our way to a large classroom on the second floor of the School of Kinesiology building.
King’s final commitment of the day is Bodary’s KINSTUDY 100 course, which introduces new Kines students to various topics they might need to keep in mind as they make the transition to college. Today’s topic is nutrition, and an alum who’s now a registered dietitian is the guest speaker.
King fiddles with the settings on the computer, trying to make sure the Zoom microphone works as the students filter in. When she takes her place at a table in the back of the room, the TAs for the course are talking about that day’s subject.
“I learned I had an eating disorder in high school just last year,” one says. “I was a wrestler.”
King’s eyes widen, and she nods her head knowingly. “That makes sense,” she says.
When the class wraps up, the TAs linger behind for instructions. King is divvying up the responses from an upcoming assignment for them to grade.
“Do you have any exams coming up?” she asks one.
“Just one, then I’m chilling,” one responds. “I’ll have time to help out.”
“Oh, no, that’s not it," King says. “We can handle it. I’m just asking for your well-being.”
I flipped from wanting to be smaller to wanting to be stronger.