All in coaching
What I DO want to discuss today, is that the "it" - YOUR "IT" - the thing your subconscious won't let you drop - is not just a looming, unreachable, would-be-nice goal, but a thing toward which we can take steps. Every day. All the time.
Not just when we're "ready," but also now.
NOTE: We're revisiting hinging strategies today, at the request of a few of you who want to learn how to alleviate back pain, keep your spines safe, and feel awesome when you pick things up. Feel free - always! - to email at any time with topic requests, questions, or concerns.
For a moment, consider that what we’re really doing when we “go on a diet” is utilizing a tool to get to a goal. It’s a means to an end.
Allowing for that, our goal is the goal (as in, the diet is not the goal; the dress or 400lb deadlift or feeling at peace is the goal.). And the tools we have (current pattern of eating) are not the right ones for the job (we can’t hammer a nail with a phone charger), so we’re looking to find the right tool for the job. Nothing over which to get too distracted; we just need to find the one that’s good enough for us to use consistently to get the job done. With me?
Gathering all this data, a year or so ago, after reading one from Dr. Brooke Kalanick (good resource for female hormones, particularly PCOS and Hashimoto’s, but also general mindset reading, if you’re into that.), I created my own body change manifesto. Rather than a bunch of rules, I wanted a way of approaching food that made me feel empowered, rather than defeated; that gave me permission to explore, rather than ascribing to any particular 12-week plan; that looked at me as a whole person, rather than just the foods I eat. Going back to the concept of active acceptance, knowing that we can choose to accept our bodies while still wanting them to change, our thoughts surrounding food become different: they become a declaration of independence, guidelines to our goals with a healthy dose of freedom. If you’d like to know what that would look like, mine is as follows:
Our worth isn't wrapped up in our dietary choices, our goals, or our appearance. We're meant for more than to obsess over these things, and, for some of us, the way out is to try many methods before we arrive at what will work for us to find our freedom. In the quest for personal development, physical and otherwise, we are all sojourners navigating our stops.
I'm not sure we ever truly arrive and stay. But I am sure that it's always our duty to accept and own where we are and allow others the space to do the same.
Before we continue, I’d like to point out that the scale isn’t always a measure of our progress. So many of us wrap our worth up in that number (been there), and it’s a far more fun (and lasting!) process to realize that we’re in these bodies for life. Fitness, whatever that may mean to each of us individually, is about exploration: we’re learning what movement we love, what foods serve us, how we can balance rest/relaxation/exercise/food to yield the greatest – and biggest! – possible life. Much like Mother Teresa, Wonder Woman didn’t sit around worrying about the size of her thighs; she had shit to do (and probably wanted them to be huge anyway). And so do you. So, before we go into what many of us worry about, I’d like to take a moment to pause, reflect, and get to the bottom of what we say we want: is our body change about feeling good, or about some arbitrary number we think will lead us to happiness, once we get there?
Nailing down the real reasons for our goals will help us sort out this dissonance- promise.
Knowing that I can choose be happy right this second, despite my circumstances, allows me to be grateful for all opportunities to improve. Knowing that I can choose to accept my body while still wanting it to change allows me to relax into the process and take an objective look about my methods.
Knowing that what I’m trying to do is feel more energetic, and certain foods make me feel bloated and tired, will help me to avoid those foods (dairy, nightshades, gluten, whichever potential allergen) to choose not the pizza (full of all 3, coincidentally) but a turkey burger instead. It doesn’t feel like deprivation (“I’m trying to get skinny, so I can’t have pizza” is a sad, sad statement.) but a benefit (because, “I’m trying to not feel like a beached whale every time I eat something I enjoy and would rather find something that I can enjoy and feel normal afterwards” is a much more fun mission). Hence, the exercise here: getting to the nitty gritty.
Today, I wanna address a few concerns that have come in to me from a very specific population…pregnant ladies and new mamas. There’s a fair amount of info in here, from answering whether or not we should lift during pregnancy to addressing a few body changes to a couple of exercises to begin healing the abdominal wall and pelvic floor starting from a few days postpartum. Buckle up!
Most importantly, embracing the post-baby body is a major key. The experience of pregnancy allows us to be more in tune, more fully aware, and more selfless with our bodies than we have ever been before, most likely. The experience of motherhood allows for weakness and vulnerability, for sure, but also for immense amounts of strength we never thought possible. Check out a few stories here that will hit you right in the feels on this one. Because, this experience is #WonderWomanLoading if I’ve ever known it.
I’m honored to be a part of your journey to create a bigger, more fulfilled, more honest life. The day I decided to step into my purpose not as a shrinking violet, but as a loud, muscular, direct (nasty? ;) ) woman was the day my life changed forever. I went from wondering how I could keep everyone happy to making sure I was happy and adding value from my overflow, from maintaining a job where I wasn’t appreciated or effective to designing my work and my life, and from doing hours of cardio on the elliptical that made me want to gouge my eyes out with a rusty butter knife to lifting heavy things and finding empowerment in the hard stuff.
This is available to all of us, so time to get steppin'.
To train for physical strength is to train for mental strength. The iron is a proving ground, and it never lies to us: we can either lift the weight or we can’t. And when we discover that we can – and that we can do more than we imagined we could – we begin to discover that we can do other hard things too.
Every moment of every day presents a choice. We get to see it for what it is whenever we want to, and there’s no judgment: at every challenge, do we embrace our new #WonderWomanLoading mentality and expand, or do we stay small and safe? The time is right for either; we just have to choose. If we choose small one day, that’s okay, because we know that a new choice is right around the corner, and we’ve chosen big – and succeeded! – before, so we can do it again.
We can learn new skills. We can smash PRs. We can get to know who we really are and what we really want. We can deepen our intimacy and trust in relationships. We can pursue our passions. It’s all available to us; the door is wide open. We have to cultivate the courage and create the space to step through it.
There’s literally nothing I love more than the camaraderie amongst true fitness people in the gym. I’m not talking about the meatheads that slam things around (although I do my fair share of that) and bicep curl all day (in the squat rack…that’s not what it’s for, bro) and grunt and slam NO-Xplode and rub orange self-tanner all over the bench you wanted to use.
Not to knock them, because, do your thing, but my people are the ones who strive to improve every day. Who see the gym as a training ground for life, and who are there to motivate themselves and celebrate the accomplishments of others. They’re there – I promise! I know, because I’m one of them. And I have a few people that come at my same time of day, and every time we’re there together, we ask how the program is, how the goal is, how work is, how life is…everything.
And when one of them hits a new PR? Or has a business success? Or proposes to his girlfriend? FIREWORKS, MAN. We’re on this Earth to cheer each other on in this relentless pursuit of expansion. We’re all trying to do better, have better, and be better, so it’s important to find the ones who support our mission and push us to keep on loading, reminding us every time we stop or burn or almost quit that we are powerful and worthy of growth.
Few lifts will prove this as thoroughly as the deadlift.
The bench press has taught me what God has been showing me basically my entire life: the dreamers, the doers, the problem solvers, the hippies – we aren’t meant for a life of mundane. We aren’t meant to uphold the status quo, to go with the flow, or do what someone tells us to do just for the sake of doing it. We’re meant to change the world, one step at a time, and to do that, we’ve gotta get in the mud and find out where the pain is and why it hurts. Embracing the suck means more than just acknowledging that it’s shitty; it’s loving every second of it, knowing that it’s useful.
Ultimately, our lives are up to us. We get to choose to be glad for even the things we hate, and we get to choose to make them better, if that’s how we’re so called. The iron can teach us that, and, if we look, so will the rest of life.
Ah, the squat.
It’s humbled everyone out there, in one way or another.
We’ve all seen videos of huge dudes with 58 plates loaded on a bent bar amping themselves up, Lebron-ing some chalk around, and looking like their heads are gonna explode somehow go down and come back up with those hundreds of pounds.
An impressive feat, to be sure, but also unlikely to be any of our goals here in real life (cool party trick, though); it’s far more likely to cause a bunch of anxiety surrounding what is, at the bottom of everything, a fundamental movement pattern for life.
We look at the bar, we remember the intimidating videos, we remember that we’re new – that we’re in the conscious incompetence or conscious competence stage of learning – and instantly feel that, because we aren’t yet masters, we’re unworthy. We talk ourselves out of great things every day, team, because of this feeling, and, a lot of times, overcoming this in bigger, more impactful areas of life starts with giving ourselves a smaller victory to build momentum: overcoming this in the gym (or on the yoga mat, or deep in meditation, or if we somehow find ourselves on a treadmill, fill in the blank.).
We’ve cultivated awareness, we’ve gotten our breath under us, we’ve accepted our situation, and here, in the barbell squat, we have our first challenge.
So! I’m gonna walk you through it, from a form perspective, step by step. Because if some meathead dude can do it, so can you (also, hello to any meathead dudes that may be reading this, and sorry you’re on the back burner rn.).
Getting our awareness and breath down is key to quieting down our brains and focusing on the task at hand. This practice carries over to juuuuust about everything: in any challenge we face, taking a few moments to reflect, reframe, and hone in our stability will create a launching pad from which to succeed. #WonderWomanLoading, every moment of every dang day.
![[#WonderWomanLoading] 8w Program!](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/575ab1663c44d8a71ac717dd/1490646909215-MRLMMUQAQFRSV1LMST4F/morning_warmup_by_nebezial-d8prdrj.jpg)
