Why Harvard Professor Annette Yoshiko Reed Started Fighting at 49

A chat about strength training, aging, martial arts pedagogy, and learning to become a better teacher.

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I’m really excited about our guest today, as she was one of the people I was most eager to talk to while I was sketching out HEAVIES and what it could even be.

Annette Yoshiko Reed is an author and a professor at Harvard Divinity School, where she’s a leading scholar on ancient religions. (At one of her old jobs, she taught a course on the apocalypse and anime, the syllabus of which included Neon Genesis Evangelion and Princess Mononoke.) At 51, she’s also one of my favorite people to talk to at our home gym Five Points Academy, someone who thinks deeply about pedagogy and how people learn. 

What’s cool about Annette is that she started her Muay Thai journey in her mid forties, and now she has three fights under her belt as well as a StrongFirst kettlebell certification, so yes… she’s strong like an ant. She was gracious enough to grab lunch with me recently at Lan Larb Chiang Mai (terrific lunch specials) and the conversation was highkey inspiring. 

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Onto the chat!

Chris: How long ago did you start at Five Points? 

Annette: I started at Five Points six years ago when I moved to New York for work, but I started Muay Thai in my mid forties. 

Do you remember what the thing was that drew you in?

I do! I was in Philadelphia at the time and one of my closest friends knew some people who were starting a gym, 8 Limbs Academy. I was going through a difficult divorce and everyone kept saying, “Oh, you should do something relaxing… like yoga.” And then a friend who actually knows me said to come to the 6:00 a.m. women's Muay Thai classes to punch things. It was fantastic. 

That sounds ideal when you’re going through a divorce.

Everything turned out fine with the divorce but it was still such a change. It was an opportunity to reprogram my body, and I hadn’t really exercised in like 30 years. 

Oh wow. Really? 

I was a competitive gymnast when I was young and I injured myself very badly. I just injured out. There was no way I could do anything. 

How old were you when the injury happened? 

I was 12. And I didn’t do anything after that. Nothing. I had no capacity.

And we had no conception of recovery back then.

No, no. And in gymnastics in particular, they expected you to age out. They expected you to age out and nobody really cared. They're just like, “Okay, onto the next. You're old anyway. You're 12.” 

The other thing that kept me from working out was people always associated exercise with thinness, and I just had such a negative concept with that whole association—the whole “women need to exercise to be thin.” Or when people talk about “earning” food.

Rewards-based eating. 

It was horrible. We were strong. But they would make us go to ballet classes so we could learn to be more elegant. And it was a shock back then when the ballet people would talk like that. 

So you take your first Muay Thai class in Philly. Did it click for you right away?

I immediately went from not having exercised for 30 years to going at 6:00 a.m. every day. I’m still close to the women from that first 6 a.m. class, too. I invited them to my wedding, which was nice, especially since I’m an academic and most academics only know other academics. I’m like, “These are my people.”

When did you start eating mostly vegetarian?

It was when I converted to Judaism. That was fun. But I eat meat as needed. Like if I’m training for a kettlebell certification, I've decided that if I crave meat, I'll eat it. 

One of the things about the strength stuff is it really changes the way you eat. If you don't change the way you eat, you just feel so hungry or empty all the time. You really have to pre-configure your eating pattern. And I have this difficulty where it's like, usually when I write, I won’t get up from my seat. I can write for 10 hours at a time and forget to eat.

We’ll come back to the strength stuff in a second, but what drew you to the gym here in the city? 

One of the owners of my old gym is a woman, and she really made space for people of all genders. You go in, you see people of all shapes and sizes, people who are strong in different ways. Then one of my coaches there, Mary, recommended Five Points to me.

So I came one morning. And it was terrifying because I was like, these people are assassins. But I remember one of the early things that I liked about it was feeling very awkward. I find I tend to seek that out. And then [our head coach] Steve [Milles] was like, “Oh, you're small, so you should fight small.” And I really liked that.

He noticed what you were doing. 

Yeah. It also presented the idea, the concept, that there isn't one right way to do things. You fight as you are. You're going to maximize the way that you are going to do this well. And if you think about it, it makes sense. Everyone at the gym is completely different.

Honestly, that was the most transformative thing for me as a teacher. To realize I want everyone to feel like that when they come into the classroom. I'm not telling them how to come into the fullness of themselves. I'm just trying to help them say, “Okay, you may think of something as a weakness, but it's a strength.” 

When you first started, was there anyone at the gym whose approach you admired? 

I was a bit shy. I started in my mid forties so I always felt very awkward. 

And now you're fighting every year. 

I think that's the other thing about different gyms. There's definitely ageism. People don't like the idea of getting old, so they tend to avoid ways of thinking about it. But I think Steve fought when he was 50 and he broke someone's arm.

So what made you want to add kettlebells to the mix? Why’d you decide to get a StrongFirst certification? 

At a certain point I dislocated my shoulder holding pads. When I was a gymnast, my coach used to always say that every injury is trying to teach you a lesson. I think that was just a way of them allowing us to get hurt a lot. But I think he was right in this case. You often get injured when you're in a plateau. You’re improving and your body isn't ready for it yet. You know what I mean? You push just a little bit too hard. 

I didn’t want to stop training, so that's when I started doing private lessons with Steve. And I actually got a lot more serious with training because of the injury. He started me then on kettles and I was miserable because I'm small. I'm not good with strength. Conceptually, I don't think of myself as strong, probably because I’m a tiny woman. And then the pandemic happened, so I started doing kettlebells a lot at home. 

What were you doing during lockdown?

It was a pretty basic routine. Very, very basic at first. But then it was really during my second and third fights where I started to really feel the benefits. I realized I would not have been able to fight were it not for kettlebells. They’re miraculous for aging. 

You’ve gotten a lot stronger. I can feel it when we spar.

Completely, significantly. I feel like everyone who ages, but especially women, should be doing some kind of strength work. I went from someone who hated strength training to someone who’s like… I need a kettlebell certification.

Have you noticed any other benefits to being strong?

I notice the balance training every once in a while, say if I’m running down the subway stairs to catch a train. Like you slip a little, and then there's a point where you just catch yourself and you realize, if I hadn't done all that strength training I would not have been able to stabilize myself. 

So what made you decide to fight? 

I think it's a weird personal tick. First of all, I like goals, but I also, I like the concept of doing something that seems impossible. I started thinking about it when I turned 49. And I was thinking about why I got the itch, and I was like… why? I'm a professor at Harvard. I have a very stressful job. Most of my colleagues only do that, their jobs, and nothing else. 

But doesn’t academia tend to attract people who have obsessive personalities? 

That might be true. Most people really just go all in and don't have any other kind of life.

And then you're adding new dimensions with fighting, which is kind a cool unexpected thing

Someone at the gym, Gianna, said this very offhand thing to me. She was like, “You're here all the time. You work really hard. You should think about fighting.” And I think that planted something. Then when I talked to Steve about it, he was very, very positive.

The other thing I love about our gym is the orientation. It's fighting to learn. I was thinking about this. Like when I give a paper exam, the point isn't the test. It’s the activity that focuses you to really learn a lot faster. That’s what fighting does. It makes you learn a lot, and fast.

I mean, you must have this experience, but the amount you learn in the ring is completely bizarre. It's just a few minutes but you come out the other side having learned just this ridiculous quantity. 

That’s something you don’t realize until you actually do it. It’s like, actually, the fight is everything leading up to the fight, not the fight itself.

And I loved fighting. There are very few experiences where you can really say there's nothing like this experience. But there's nothing like the experience, period. You also feel very vulnerable. It's not even just facing the fear of failure. It's like you're facing the fear of failure with very little clothes on in front of a bunch of people. So you couldn't possibly be more vulnerable. You're actually physically vulnerable, and there's this incredible strength in that. 

I lost my fight, but I had a big black eye. And I was so happy to have a black eye! I came back to the gym embarrassed, though. Like, oh, I should have done better. Kept my hands up. But everybody was like, “Congratulations! I'm so proud of you!” 

That's the way the rest of the world should go. But it isn't. When the rest of the world sees you fail, nobody wants to talk to you. Versus saying good job, you put yourself out there. When you see somebody fall down and get up, there’s incredible power in that. 

Like if you fail at your job it’s like, welp, time for a new job.

All of this has made me a better teacher too.

How so?

Well, there's one level when someone's trying to teach you how to do something. For example, my right cross, which I’ve never been able to do well for years. Steve will very kindly try to tell me in different ways the same thing over and over again. I think that’s made me more patient with my students, because I realized that learning is a lot of feeling like you’re not doing well. 

For me, it’s also trying to make a space for my students to come into the fullness of themselves without me just saying, “Oh, this is the right way to do it. This is not the right way to do it. Oh look, I'm talking. I'm so smart.” 

That's not teaching. Now, I try to make sure everyone feels seen. You think about the ways in which every weakness is a strength and every strength is a weakness. It's true in fighting. Sometimes when you're getting hit, that’s actually the best time to throw your shot.

Totally.

The concept of academia should be that it’s a space where we’re allowed to fail and that we can talk about it. I’ve noticed sometimes that when the best students don't do well in something, they don't know how to get back up. And it's our fault as teachers. We haven't given them the space to feel like they're okay. But it’s actually part of the process. I mean, I could write a whole pedagogical essay on Steve’s coaching and the ways that I've picked up and implemented things.

Do your students ever approach you and are like “Oh shit, you fight?”

Once in a while. I try to keep those worlds apart kind of by design, but Instagram makes it tricky. Like when the TBA tournament was happening, someone messaged me and was like, “Wait, what are you doing? You're flying to Iowa right now?” I even told my colleagues, “I'm going to a conference in Iowa, so I may be a little slow answering your email…”

I guess a Muay Thai tournament is technically a conference. 

I do that during my private lessons with Steve, too. I’m like, “Sorry! I have a meeting.”

Last question, mostly for my own curiosity. How many hours a day do you spend reading? Upwards of two? 

Oh, no doubt. It's my job. 

So you're in at least two super deeply focused zones a day between training and reading and writing.

That's the other thing that I like about this sport. There's nothing, no better space for writing. You get all tangled in yourself. So in the summer, there's always a time where all I'm doing is writing and training and it's heaven to me. It's actual heaven. 

I love going to the gym when I'm stuck writing. I’ll be walking down the stairs to train and I’ll realize something… it unlocks something in my brain. So I run back up to type it into my phone.

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