All in coaching
Rigidity in our programs keeps us uninformed: it keeps us enslaved to a program or a personality dictating our goals to us and promising that their methods are best. We don't give ourselves the opportunity to be our own best teachers—to explore, to experiment, or to say, "that's not my jam."
Allowing my body the space to not be perfect showed me that I actually don't have to be perfect anywhere. I know what's best for me, and I can change course at any time.
If you're a woman, it's highly likely that you've spent at least some time training to shrink.
The gym is male-dominated territory, and in no place is this more prominently displayed than in the weight room.
The free weight area is often full of grunts, stringer tanks, gallon jugs, backwards hats, and egos, with the women relegated to the 5-pound dumbbells (you know, for toning.).
We've all paid our dues: every woman I know has spent hours on a treadmill, elliptical, or stair stepper, not feeling a workout is complete until there are puddles on the floor, wrapping ourselves in waist trainers and sweat bands to hasten the process, always hoping to...get smaller.
An exercise I do with many of my clients is an examination of the words we choose to describe ourselves.
Many women come to me feeling things like, “gross,” “large and in charge,” and/or, “disgusting.”
I've been there, too, impugning my thighs for spilling over the sides of my chairs, deriding my stomach for flowing over my waistband, slamming my shoulders for ripping the seams of my shirts.
You're not alone in this shadow, but you also don't have to stay there.
The moment we let advertising & its victims tell us what’s best for us is the watershed moment for many; what follows is a trickling stream – and eventual downpour – of shame. We're told that certain foods are bad, or that lifting heavy makes us bulky & that we shouldn’t want to “look like a man."
Hear me clearly: NO ONE knows what’s right for you better than you do.
When we give ourselves the space to play, we find things at which we aren't very good. The rub is, thought, that we're in a low-stakes environment -- who cares if I need a wall for this handstand? It's not a competition, and no one else is in the gym measuring my progress but me. In low-stakes environments, we're free to get curious, to ask exploratory questions, to fail, to learn, and to improve.
Fitness is a means to an end: a way to get connected with ourselves. A way to learn what we're capable of and a place to push boundaries, explore limits, and surprise ourselves.
While I find nothing inherently wrong with the pursuit of physique goals (and I'm not interested in telling you what to choose for yourself), I would like to look back on my life someday and say I was striving for more than just an ideal body.
I had a coach who repeated a refrain that has stuck with me since I was 12: “quitting during training only makes it easier to quit when it counts. All you’re doing is practicing quitting when things get hard.”
I’m not sure I got the depth of that message when I was 12, but it’s been reinforced countless times in the 17-plus years since.
Quitting during training only makes it easier to quit when it counts.
Waiting to get started on our goals until "the right time" only makes us better at waiting.
Putting ourselves last on our to-do lists only makes us better at neglecting ourselves.
I once had a client who had yo-yoed through a few different numbers (weights, sizes, however you like to measure your physical progress).
Before I continue, I’d like to point out that most of us have done this. It’s totally normal. Expected, even. Different seasons of our lives require different levels of commitment to our goals, or even different goals altogether. It’s all okay. You (and your body) are still deserving of love, care, and respect, no matter the size, shape, or degrees of bending to your will it is doing. Moving on.
She was going home to spend time with her high school friends, who had known her at her heaviest, and had also seen pictures of her at her leanest, and she was somewhere in between, at that moment. She was distraught at the prospect of being seen in a bathing suit around people who hadn’t seen her in years, for the first time without a shirt over her swimsuit.
When she got home from her trip and I asked how it went, she was still in mild shock to report that the only comments people had to make about her body were…positive.
My relationship with movement changed again when I was in my early 20s. I found lifting, and even the EXACT workouts from my swimming days took on a new life: I could feel how my workouts fit together. I began to decipher what my body was trying to tell me. I could challenge myself, having hard evidence that I had it in me to achieve difficult goals.
If I had continued to believe that movement was nothing more than a credit card, giving me a balance to have extra fries, I never would have learned how to express my deepest truths through the activities in which I engage.
My power would have stayed hidden in the cupboard under the stairs.
For me, it was lifting. For you, it might be walking in nature, competing with a Crossfit team, or taking a dance class.
Freedom: it’s yours.
If you've been around here for a while, you know I'm big into exploration.
Experimentation.
Using fitness as a means of empowerment: for getting honest about who you are, for getting clear on what you want, and, ultimately, for getting to know yourself.
We’re urged toward dogma. Ads and commercials and authority figures scream that there is one path to success and one best way to go about it, and theirs reigns supreme. We believe what we’re told, constructing a timeline, molding our lives around it, rubbing our noses raw on the grindstone.
When was the last time you looked up?
Embracing the idea that we will get it wrong comes with the freedom TO get it wrong. When we sit with the idea that we won't hit a home run on our first (or second, or even third) at-bat, we come to see that the attempt is where the magic is, and the results are nothing more than data.
We're encouraged to take a step forward on the scraggly, winding path to change, as opposed to lacing up our boots and consulting the map for the zillionth time at the outset (and never actually moving). We know it won't be perfect, but it will be motion that produces some sort of result. We know we will know more after an effort, even if we don't succeed, than we would if we stayed stuck. We learn to trust ourselves to course correct along the way.
What's so wrong with wanting to get big? Why can't we take care of ourselves because we're worth being loved on? Why can't we agree with a compliment? Are we not allowed to feel our damn selves?
We put in work. We show up. We come through. We do our best. We make magic.
Why hide it?
