TRAIN FOR THE PHYSIQUE YOU WANT

1. Training vs. Exercise: Quality Over Quantity

Training focuses on improving performance and achieving specific goals. It’s about lifting heavier, running faster, or mastering a skill. The quality of your efforts and the progressive overload are key. In contrast, exercise is more about general movement and burning calories without a specific goal in mind. While both have benefits, training with intention and purpose leads to more significant body transformations and performance improvements.

Why It Matters: Understanding the difference helps you prioritize the type of effort that yields better results. Instead of just aiming to finish a workout, aim to improve and challenge yourself continuously.

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2. Intensity Matters: The Secret to Real Results

Intensity is the game-changer. It’s about how hard you push yourself in each workout. High-intensity training means working close to your maximum capacity, whether it’s lifting weights, running, or performing HIIT. This type of training recruits more muscle fibers, increases cardiovascular demand, and stimulates greater hormonal responses.

Why It Matters: High intensity = results. but use the right tool for the job. If a lean physique is the goal. you want to make your TRAINING intense, effective & smart. Rest between sets. long enough that you are ready to go intense the next go

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3. The Role of Recovery: Fuel and Rest for Growth

Recovery is where the magic happens. After intense training, your body needs time to repair and grow stronger. This includes sleep, proper nutrition, and active recovery practices like stretching or light activity. Skipping recovery leads to overtraining, injuries, and burnout.

Why It Matters: Recovery ensures your muscles heal and grow, reduces the risk of injury, and maintains your motivation and energy levels. Proper recovery practices optimize your performance in subsequent workouts, leading to consistent progress.

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4. Beyond Calorie Counting: Focus on Stimulus and Adaptation

Simply tracking calories burned doesn’t account for the quality and effectiveness of your workouts. High-quality training stimulates muscle growth, hormonal changes, and metabolic adaptations. This means engaging in workouts that challenge your muscles and cardiovascular system to adapt and improve.

Why It Matters: Focusing on the stimulus and adaptation process leads to sustainable changes in your body composition and performance. This approach goes beyond short-term calorie burn to create lasting improvements in strength, endurance, and muscle tone.

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5. Personalized Nutrition: Supporting Intense Training

Your nutrition should align with your training goals and intensity. This means consuming enough high-quality protein for muscle repair, carbs for energy, and fats for overall health. Hydration and micronutrients are also crucial for performance and recovery. Tailor your diet to your body’s needs, considering your training volume, intensity, and personal health factors.

Why It Matters: Proper nutrition supports your body’s demands during intense training, helps prevent injuries, and optimizes recovery and performance. Personalized nutrition ensures you’re fueling your body effectively for the best results.

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How Do I Know If My Workouts Are Intense Enough to Drive Real Changes in My Body?

1. Monitor Your Progress: Track your performance in each workout. Are you lifting heavier weights, running faster, or completing more reps over time? Consistent progress indicates that your workouts are challenging enough to stimulate growth and improvement.

2. Measure Recovery Needs: After an intense workout, your muscles should feel fatigued, and you might need a day or two to fully recover. If you’re never sore or tired, you might not be pushing hard enough. However, excessive soreness and prolonged fatigue can indicate overtraining, so find a balance.

3. Check Your Heart Rate: During high-intensity workouts, your heart rate should be elevated to 70-90% of your maximum heart rate (220 minus your age). Use a heart rate monitor to ensure you’re working within this range.

4. Perceived Exertion: Rate your effort on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being maximal effort. Effective high-intensity workouts should feel like a 7 or higher. You should feel challenged and pushed out of your comfort zone.

5. Observe Physical Changes: Notice changes in your body composition and performance. Increased muscle definition, strength gains, and improved endurance are signs that your workouts are intense enough to drive changes.

6. Variety and Progression: Incorporate variety in your workouts to keep your body adapting. Progressive overload, where you gradually increase the weight, intensity, or volume, ensures continuous improvement and prevents plateaus.

7. Listen to Your Body: Pay attention to how your body responds. If you feel stronger, more energetic, and notice improvements in your physical abilities, your workouts are likely intense enough. Conversely, if you

Workout feeling like sh*t?

Having a weak session?

Down about your performance?

this is something that comes up somewhat regularly with many women

I like to go through a little bit of a check list to see if there is anything that could be an immediate and simple explanation for why things aren’t feeling great.

PHYSICAL:

Youre in the menstrual flop stage of the month – about to start your period

Did you go harder in any of your prior sessions that week?

You’re doing way too much exercise but under training because of this… Recovery matters

You’re focusing more on burning calories or being the smallest version of yourself versus chasing performance

LIFESTYLE:

Did you get enough sleep? Was it quality? Were you over stimulated the day prior?

Were you more active than usual the prior day or on your feet all day?

Is there anything going on in your life that is causing you a lot of stress

Is your mind elsewhere? Are you overthinking or hyperfixating on other things?

NUTRITION:

Your breakfast was just coffee… or better yet, nothing (except maybe a pre workout) aka you didn’t fuel enough

You don’t eat enough carbs EACH day (&consistently)

Are you eating enough in general?

You lack quality nutrition (if you’re low on any vitamins & minerals…)

OTHER:

…. Life, its normal…

You aren’t weak, doing anything wrong, broken or failing.

Not every workout is a home run

YOU WONT PR YOUR LOG BOOK EVERY WEEK!

80% is just showing up and doing the work

FEELING UNMOTIVATED is normal… even for fitness professionals and coaches

Stop relying on it

Having bad body image days is also normal, don’t let it impact how you show up to the gym.

YOU WILL FEEL WEAKER some days, sometimes NOT EVEN MEET your log book.

Strength fluctuates. Maybe you slept like crap or maybe you’re in your emotions. Some days your warm up weights will feel HEFTY, other days youll smash em

This is SO DANG NORMAL – you just don’t want it to keep happening over the long run and make sure you address the above checklist.

Too many women are doing TOO much work that’s low quality, and not doing the work that creates the results you want. End result = more fatigue, more frustration

Need someone who can work with you and work on your approach to training

WHAT TO DO:

Well, you have a couple of options:

1. Sack it off, walk it off for 30+ mins in the treadmill instead and reflect on the session and your week… any lessons to take away? Is it your mindset? Are you being a d*ck to yourself? Go home, eat some food, recover for the next day.

2. Drop the weight, ditch the pursuit of perfection or log book beating & really tune into how it feels. Just give your best for each set and marinate more tempol

3. Take extra time to warm up, more warm up sets, move around with some dynamic body flow in between sets, etc… and just get the session done while you moan about but CELEBRATE your efforts after so you end it feeling proud you got through

4.  Throw a fit, cry to your coach, and tell yourself you’re going to quit, youre weak, you never improve blah blah all the BS you KNOW isnt true

WHAT NOT TO DO:

No.4 from above.

Don’t make up for missed volume or work by tossing in drop sets, extra sets, extra work…

Don’t do finishers and burn outs or some random circuit bc you don’t feel you worked hard enough, did enough… even if you “fuelled yourself” before your session and you “don’t want to waste it” I would assess your relationship with food, calories and this process… (+ your body)

Its so easy to feel frustrated… like youre reversing, losing progress  (& for some of you, fearing “gaining fat” – irrational beliefs can rear their head if you haven’t yet worked through them)

REMEMBER:

Not every workout is a home run

YOU WONT PR YOUR LOG BOOK EVERY WEEK!

80% is just showing up and doing the work

10% will be stellar

10% will be pretty💩

Welcome to real life 😊

Bad training days & mediocre sessions happen

Maybe you don’t feel great physically today

Maybe your cramps are trying to rip your insides out.

Maybe you’re feeling all the emotions today, kids are acting up, work was hard

Maybe you just feel off, not focused…

Sore, tired, overwhelmed, frustrated or just low energy.

whatever.

Stop stressing or getting down about not hitting top reps schemes or not being able to add reps or weight – this is an overtime thing not an overnight thing

When you start training to proper intensity you most likely will not progress every week. it can fluctuate

the goal is to SEEK progress simply by giving your 100% FOR THAT DAY

now when they do happen – first accept they WILL & the stress you usually get over it will disappear.

Look at the MACRO not the micro.

Its not so much about dealing with our bad training days as it is dealing with our mindset and how we allow being HUMAN to hit us so hard.

Give yourself permission to have bad training days. You WILL have them. ESPECIALLY if you experience the symptoms of PMS week or your period hits hard.

your self talk here is VITAL

improvement isnt about your output but about your INPUTS. Your best effort. Which looks different each day. Don’t be blinded by a lower than expected end result with no credit given to the effort applied, or the training effect of that effort. Its effort not results that determine long term improvement. Remember that.

Leave the training session at the gym and go do what actually matters in all of this.

LIVE YOUR LIFE! Don’t forget WHY youre doing this. To live a higher quality life and improve over time. To build a better more resilient you!

When you zoom TF out and realise this… the game changes

You enjoy it more

you make MORE progress

AND IT STICKS!!!

give yourself permission to move even when it doesn’t feel awesome

the hard truth about the body & life you desire…

A Fuller, thriving life probably needs you to be eating a couple hundred more calories

 most women (thanks social media)  have lost touch with what a healthy “lean” looks like…

 we become obsessed with obliterating anything that jiggles.  but mate,  we ain’t made of wood nor are we skeleton sam (skeleton gif here)

 THERE ARE TRADEOFFS to everything  (especially at the extremes) and remember the goal is living a happy, fulfilling life. (health + fitness should be there to enhance your life + LONGEVITY vs taking over your life with food thoughts or calorie burning obsession)

YOU CAN do both – live life and look freaking badass

its just not going to be like that fit chick’s photoshoot photo

EVEN SHE DOESNT LOOK LIKE THAT!!!

you obsessing over being your leanest 24/7

VS

you shifting your mindset to HEALTH, GETTING STRONGER, building muscle & THRIVING in life (which ironically will have you build a body you love for life too_

The best thing you can do for your health fitness and longevity is to build muscles not only the muscle itself but the whole process of building muscle and the mindset you gain

That all takes a lot more energy than salads, juices and shakes

“But I’m scared to gain weight… What will I look like, how will my clothes fit?…What will so and so say or think”

I asked myself the same.. especially knowing I had compliments on my progress…

Little did I know then, what I know NOW…

When I stopped thinking “small” my progress in EVERYTHING – my physique, performance, MY COACHING, education my LIFE.

I got my personality back, CONFIDENCE!!

I almost forgot how obsessed I was with it all and just how LOW my life was trying to get by on 1600 calories trying to “get lean enough to get to a place my metabolism was good enough to eat a lot and built muscle”