Pursue Your Strength: Christina Leonatti

Note: This year marks a decade since REP hired our first employee. It’s time to tell our story in a different way than we ever have before -- the real reason we’ve dedicated our lives to bringing high-quality, innovative gym equipment to the world.  

Our purpose is to empower people to improve and own their lives.  

We created Pursue Your Strength to share real stories about how strength training can change the world, one life at a time. Because when you start to feel strong on the outside, it changes you on the inside, too. That opens more options in life. In that, strength is a type of freedom. That's why we do what we do. 

We do this for you. 

Now here are your stories. 

Christina Leonatti stands on one side of the barbell. A curious stranger faces her on the other side.  

Behind them: a white trailer full of gym equipment, punctuated by a sign that reads You Are Strong.  

“Put your hands here,” Christina instructs, bending over the bar resting on the pavement. The relentless Colorado sunshine at the Cherry Creek State Park paints them with sweat. “And pull the bar into your shins like this. And stand up.”  

The deadlift moves quickly for her – which is only expected for a world-record-holding powerlifter. But she’ll never mention that to anyone, not even if you ask her about her proudest fitness achievement. For Christina, it’s always and only about the people she has helped.  

And today, it’s Jesse.  

He has more tattoos than unmarked skin. But then, so does she. He's shocked by how easily he pulls his first ever deadlift. His smile glows.  

“You’re built for this.”  

Although they just met minutes ago -- when he stopped on his walk to see what she was doing with stacks of bumper plates in the grass – he spills his heart. He’s a newly recovering addict. He heard somewhere that weightlifting can help addicts. He wonders if it can help him.  

It can. In fact, that’s how this story starts. But not how you’d expect. Not at all.  

Jesse reminds Christina of another young man she knew 14 years ago.  

The Big Bet 

Christina’s fitness journey begins with a bet.  

It’s 2010, and she is a caseworker in New Hampshire. Her job, funded by a grant, is the last resort to try to find a way to help high-risk students graduate high school. These are the students most people have given up on, from those with severe learning disabilities to abusive homes to ones who’d simply gotten lost in the system. Today, she’s sitting in her office with Cody. He’s brilliant. He’s also an addict.   

“What is something you’ve always wanted to do that would require will power?” he asks her.  

She doesn’t need to think. “I wish I was jacked,” she says. “So strong that no one would ever mess with me.”  

Never again, at least. Christina is fighting to pull her life together after being stalked for months and ultimately assaulted on her own property. The man was found guilty, but the aftershock of the trauma has left Christina wondering whether she wants to continue living.  

“I knew I needed to get strong,” she says. “If not, I was afraid I was going to die, at my own hands or someone else’s." 

Cody doesn’t know the context, but he knows a good bet when he hears one. He leans forward. “OK,” he smirks. “I’ll get off drugs if you do a bodybuilding show.”  

Christina puts out her hand. “Deal,” she says, sealing the bet with a handshake. “I'll do it if you will.”  

Heavier Stakes 

Cody is cheering from the audience when the judge slips a second-place medal over Christina’s head. It’s been six months, and everything is different.  

Cody quit smoking. He is sober. He did it; he graduated. At the same time, Christina decided to make this her last year of teaching and move to Colorado for a new start. She looks completely different – muscular, lean, a tall posture even with her 5-foot-3 frame. But the real changes are inside her mind. 

In the weight room, she learned to take risks, to fail and to fail well. To pivot when needed and train weak points. She learned that when you have something heavy on your chest, you have to keep pushing. Over and over. Not to push it away, but to harness it to make you stronger, she says.  

Christina has never felt stronger. But Colorado has another challenge awaiting her. 

This time, Christina is the one sitting in the audience, overwhelmed with awe. She’s watching a powerlifting competition, and she had no clue it was even possible for people to move that heavy of weight. Talk about strength.  

She has to try it. She tells her powerlifting boyfriend, who laughs and says no way, she’d never be good at something like that.  

That feels like a different kind of bet.   

At her first powerlifting meet in 2017, that boyfriend is long gone -- and she wins. And again. And again. Christina takes the gold at her next eight sanctioned meets. But of course, she’ll never talk about that. She wants to talk about Liz.  

Small But Powerful 

You see a lot of weird stuff in a powerlifting warm-up room, but Christina has never seen anything like this before. Between attempts, a bald, tattooed woman crouches in the corner, violently vomiting.  Most people look away, visibly alarmed, but Christina approaches the woman and her bucket.  

That’s when she meets Liz, a powerhouse of an equipped lifter who is battling stage 4 liver cancer. Her vomiting is a side effect of chemotherapy. Lifting weights is the anchor that is keeping her grounded through her battle. Christina gets it; lifting saved her own life, helping her reclaim her strength and purpose after trauma.  She wonders how many other lives it could change or save.  

She weaves that question into her background of helping at-risk and low-income people. Inspired by Liz, Christina starts a nonprofit to provide gym memberships, training, and equipment to people in need.  

Pull Your Heart Out is small but powerful – like Christina herself – and raises enough money to buy more than 100 gym memberships. It offers prize money to female lifters in competitions where men are disproportionately paid out. And it provides equipment and enrollment for people who want to compete but can’t afford it, like a high-school junior named Cheyenne. She found powerlifting after recovering from addiction and an eating disorder. Christina coaches her for free.

Cheyenne leaves her first meet with a state record.  

But something is missing.

Christina thinks back on another teenage girl who applied for a gym membership to help process her mother’s fatal motorcycle crash, leaving the teenager alone to raise her 10 siblings. Even with a gym membership and free training, just getting to the gym was insurmountable. If only someone could bring the gym to her. 

Refusal to Quit 

It takes years to build Pull Your Heart Out’s mobile gym. A few pieces come from a REP Fitness raffle Christina wins. Donations help but aren’t enough; she uses money left to her by a deceased relative and sells her house to help pay for more equipment.  

She thinks back on the other lives she’s seen weightlifting transform. Her now-successful student Cody. Young Cheyenne just beginning to pursue her own strength. Determined, bald, beautiful, unstoppable Liz.  

At the same time the mobile gym is finally ready to hit the road, Liz loses her five-year battle to cancer.  

The sun is a spotlight at Cherry Creek State Park, as Christina gives Jesse a high-five. After lifting together, they no longer feel like strangers.  

“Want to try more weight?” she asks, nodding down at the barbell loaded with two plates.  

“Hell yes,” he says. He looks down at his shirtless torso and back up at her. “Do you really think I’m built for this?” 

“Hell yes,” she says. She points to the sign on the trailer: You Are Strong.  

“Will you be here next week?” he asks.  “I’ll come back.”  

The question stings, because as much as Christina wants to, she doesn’t know. But she does know how to grind through the tough spots. To keep pushing. Over and over. She still needs more help to bring the mobile gym to its full potential, and she doesn’t know where it will come from, but weightlifting has helped her discover and continue pursuing her strength. And today, strength looks like hope. 

She meets Jesse’s eyes. She wants him to feel that hope, too.  

“Hell yes,” she says. “I’ll do it if you will.”