Krissy Cela did not grow up loving exercise. She hated PE at school and never felt confident taking part, and it wasn’t until much later, while studying for a law degree, when she started weight training, that she found her own love of fitness. Looking back, she wishes she had discovered it sooner, for the mental clarity and self-belief it might have given her through her teenage years.
That regret became the seed of Project Power, a school initiative she created to tackle how many teenage girls drop out of sport. The idea is straightforward: go into schools, provide supportive workout clothing and teach the fundamentals of strength training, with the goal of boosting girls’ confidence and showing them how genuinely mood-lifting movement can feel.
The programme grew out of research Cela read on women’s confidence, which pointed to something she recognised in her own story. Many of the challenges women face around body image and self-belief begin early, in exactly the teenage years when girls are most likely to walk away from sport. Reach girls at that stage, the thinking goes, and you can change the trajectory before those doubts harden.
What sets the approach apart is its focus on strength rather than appearance. Framing fitness around what a body can do, lifting, getting stronger, feeling capable, rather than how it looks is a deliberate counter to the pressures that push girls out of sport in the first place. It reframes movement as a source of confidence instead of another arena for self-criticism.
For Cela, it is personal as much as professional. Project Power is essentially the intervention she wishes she’d had, delivered to the girls most likely to benefit from it. If it works, the payoff isn’t just fitter teenagers but a generation of girls who learn early that being strong, in every sense, is something within their reach.
