If I hadn’t struggled with my own fitness at some point, I wouldn’t now be a coach and gym owner for over 15 years. It’s been a while since I’ve shared about my own personal experience, and I realized that there are likely quite a few people who have never heard me talk about how I became a fitness coach who prioritizes strength.
As a teen, I never lifted weights at all. A handful of times I found myself in a traditional gym as a guest of a friend, but never felt like it was a place for me. I was a sprinter in track for a bit, did some gymnastics and dance, lots of hiking, but no real strength training.
I went to college to study music, and throughout my 20s while I was focused on singing, my fitness routine consisted of dance classes, jogging (which I hated but forced myself to do anyway), and using an elliptical machine I had at home. Maybe once a week I would do what I thought was a “strength” workout by following along with exercise videos that would focus on high-rep, muscle isolation type moves. These were mostly bodyweight, or with very light 5 pound dumbbells. You know, the kind where you “feel the burn” the whole time, and are sore for days afterwards so it must be good?
In my late 20s, it became clear through a perfect storm of events that I needed to do something very different. The trouble began when I was away from home for three months for an opera program. I was a vegetarian, and we were in an area where food options for me were very scarce. After several months of under-eating, I came home sickly skinny. My clothes were falling off me, and I was weighing in at double digits.
When I returned home, I started eating normally again. Although I’m sure my portions and indulgences were greater than before because I was happy to be home and able to enjoy food again. Over the next year and a half, my bodyweight steadily increased past the point of returning to what my normal weight had been. My metabolism had been slowed down drastically by the decreased nutrition intake while I was away, and I had now entered my 30s where metabolic changes start to happen anyway.
When I had to buy a pair of jeans a size bigger than I had ever had before, I knew I had to make some changes. I had gained about 10 pounds beyond what I was before I unintentionally lost weight. It wasn’t a big amount, but I could see that this was only going to continue if I stayed on the path I was on.
It wasn’t just that I was uncomfortable with how I looked. I also felt slow, tired, and weak – and I was far too young to be feeling as crappy as I did. I wanted to feel strong, energetic and capable of accomplishing anything.
Nutrition was the first place I needed to start. At that time, Caleb and I were not very functional in the kitchen. We did a lot of take out, and if we did cook at home it was usually pasta, or something else that required very little skill! So we committed to learning how to prepare healthier meals, and understand how to get more protein.
At the same time, I began a daily routine of doing my elliptical machine every day for 30 minutes, or one of my high-rep, “feel the burn” workout videos. After the first few weeks of making these changes, I had lost a couple of pounds, but then my progress completely plateaued. I increased my elliptical time to 45 minutes… but nothing changed. So, I started doing the elliptical twice a day for 30 minutes in the morning, and 30 minutes in the evening… and again nothing changed, except that I was getting very frustrated and depressed that I was putting in so much effort and wasn’t seeing any results.
I thought that if I was sweaty, breathing hard, and almost exhausted by the end of my workout, I was doing what I needed to do. I had always heard through various sources that if you want to burn fat, you have to do cardio. Why wasn’t it working?!
I started doing some research beyond what gets fed to young ladies in magazines like Cosmo and Marie Claire, and found people talking about strength training being the key to building muscle mass and charging up your metabolism. Like many women can probably relate to, I didn’t really know what to think about all this at first. I thought I was doing some strength training with all those endless donkey kicks, ab bicycles, and triceps extensions? I don’t want to look like Arnold, so do I really need to “build muscle mass”?
I knew I had to try something different, so I started favoring more of the workout videos that used dumbbells instead of doing the elliptical everyday. They were still the kind of workouts that focused on higher reps and really light weights, but I did start to notice some small changes in how I was looking and feeling. But once again, after my initial results, I was at another plateau.
It was at this point in 2008, that through his martial arts training, Caleb had heard about a kettlebell seminar happening at the Inosanto Academy. I didn’t know what a kettlebell was, but I did know that I had reached the limit of what I could do with the information and tools I had. I was very nervous, but my curiosity won the day. Up until that point the heaviest weight I had used consistently was 8 pounds, so I was shocked to discover that the lightest bell available at the seminar was 8 kilos (about 18 pounds)!
I thought my arm might snap trying to do a Turkish Get Up with the 8kg that day, but something inside me knew I had found a missing piece of the puzzle I had been trying to put together. After that seminar, we hired a coach to come train us at our home regularly, we purchased some kettlebells, and started following a program our coach created for us.
Over the next several months, I finally started to see the big results I had been trying for so long to achieve. I lost fat, and had definition in my muscles but didn’t look like Arnold. I had more energy. I felt strong for the first time in my life. I had more confidence about other things in my life because my strength training was showing me that I was capable of way more than I thought.
As happy as I was to be feeling better, I was also a little angry and annoyed at the plethora of misinformation that exists concerning fitness. When we decided to prepare for our first kettlebell instructor certification in 2009, I didn’t really think then that we would end up coaching people full time and eventually open a gym. That certification lead to more certifications, courses and continuing education over the years. And a big part of that for me personally has been the desire to help people who struggled like I did – especially us ladies who are constantly fed lies, and are preyed upon by the fitness industry.
Because of that, I’d like to shed some light on some fitness misconceptions and questions I had myself for many years:
- 1. If I want to lose fat, I need to do cardio. Hours on the treadmill, step aerobics classes, and of course my elliptical are often what is thought of first when it comes to losing weight – especially for us ladies who came from an era when that’s pretty much all that was shown to us. Our bodies adapt to what we expose them to. When we prioritize longer sessions of steady-state cardio training at a moderately high intensity (as I was doing with my elliptical machine) we do burn a lot of calories during the workout, and our bodies become efficient at burning fat. However, while you want your car to be fuel efficient, you don’t actually want your body to be efficient at burning fat. Over time as our bodies adapt to this type of training, it takes more and more in order to burn the same amount of calories, until you eventually reach the point that it’s an unsustainable level of effort for little to no results (remember my twice a day elliptical sessions?!) Another component to this is that this type of cardio training on it’s own does nothing to preserve muscle mass, and can actually prevent you from building muscle. Muscle building through strength training should be our top priority for most goals, and certainly where fat loss is concerned. Muscle is more metabolically active than fat, meaning that your body burns more calories just to maintain muscle compared to fat. This is also partly why a strength training session will have you burning more calories after your workout is complete than a cardio session.
- 2. Lifting heavier weights will make my muscles get bigger. I just want to look “toned”. Can’t I just lift lighter weights and do more reps? Firstly, to achieve a bodybuilder style appearance you would need to be training in a very specific way most days of the week. It’s a really hard lifestyle, and not one that the average person wants to adopt. So have no fear that 2 or 3 strength sessions a week will result in a hulked out appearance. Secondly, relatively heavy weights for lower reps helps build the myofibrils of your muscles, while lower weight and higher reps builds the sarcoplasm of your muscles. A well designed training plan should have both – so no, you can’t just opt for lighter weights and more reps. I finally started to get where I wanted to go when I switched my training to focus on lower rep/heavier weights, and switched the higher rep activities to things like kettlebell swings instead of endless triceps extensions and leg lifts. This way the higher rep activities are using more muscle groups and joints at once instead of isolating, not only creating a more “functional” workout, but one that also charges up my metabolism more.
- 3. If I’m not drenched in sweat, completely exhausted, and sore the next day I didn’t work hard enough. Ah yes, it was hard for me to adjust to not “feeling the burn” with every exercise, and being wiped out at the end of a training session. The truth is that if you are training in a way that is leaving you constantly sore and pushed to the point of exhaustion every workout, you are likely working at cross purposes to the results you want to achieve. When you start a new phase of your program, or learn a new challenging exercise, you may experience a couple of days of soreness. This is also true when you are starting a fitness program for the first time, or coming back after even a couple of weeks hiatus. When you train regularly, you may feel some muscle tension and possibly some fatigue after working hard, but extreme muscle soreness is not an indication of a good workout.
These are really just a few examples of the seemingly endless amount of incorrect fitness information out there. And any time I get to clear up some of these falsehoods, help someone see they can work smarter and not harder, and show another lady she can lift more than she thought is a great day indeed!