I was at a wedding last weekend. It was my cousin’s, and the first one I’d been to in ages. Such a beautiful day.
The maid of honour got up to give her speech, and told a story about her grandfather. Before the wedding, she’d asked him what the secret was to his sixty year marriage.
His answer. Love the woman your wife is and the woman she’s becoming. Because she was never meant to stay the woman you married. That was just one version of her.
The room went quiet. I got actual goosebumps. And my brain, which is always half-listening for something I can bring back to my work, went straight to this.
Because that’s not just marriage advice. That’s the exact conversation I have with women in clinic and inside GLOW10 constantly. Just usually about someone else instead of about themselves.
Here’s what I mean.
We expect the people we love to change. We expect our kids to need something different from us at seven than they did at two. We expect a friend going through something hard to not be quite herself for a while, and to maybe come out the other side shifted.
We very rarely extend ourselves that same grace. Especially with our bodies.
When our bodies needs something different than it used to, most of us don’t think, of course, this is just a new season. We think something’s gone wrong. We focus on what we’ve lost. Sometimes we try to push through it like the old version of us could.
I think we are now very aware of the comparison trap when it comes to other people. We know better than to measure ourselves against someone else’s body, someone else’s program, someone else’s highlight reel (even if we still catch ourselves doing it sometimes).
But we’re much less aware of the version of that trap we do to ourselves. Comparing who we are now to who we used to be. Or to some future, fitter, more consistent version of ourselves that, if we’re honest, we secretly doubt we’ll ever actually become.
And look, I’m not saying this is easy. Especially when there’s no clear horizon in sight.
If you’ve been fitter or stronger than you are right now, and let’s be honest, we’ve all been younger, you’re being asked to do two things at once:
Accept where you’re at.
And grieve what you’ve lost.
Not one after the other. Both, at the same time.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a new version of training, a new way of looking after your body, that actually supports the woman you are right now.
I’ve been sitting with this in my own training too, if I’m honest.
In my twenties I trained five times a week without blinking. Around the time I had kids, that dropped to one or two, and I spent more mental energy feeling guilty about the sessions I missed than I ever spent actually training. I was comparing myself to a version of me that didn’t exist anymore, and wondering why it felt so hard to get back to her.
Took me a while to realise she wasn’t coming back. Not because I’d failed at something, but because I wasn’t her anymore.
I see this play out with the women I work with too, just from opposite directions. I’ve got women in my world who had never lifted a weight in their life, picking one up for the first time in their 50s and building strength they didn’t know was possible for them. And I’ve got women who used to lift one and a half times their own bodyweight, now working with a health condition or a different season of life, whose version of strength training is a set of dumbbells in their living room doing GLOW10.
Neither woman is doing it better than the other. They’re both just finding a way to give their bodies what they actually need right now. The same way we do for our kids, or our parents, or even our pets, as their needs change.
That’s actually why I built GLOW10 in the first place to be honest. I built it for myself, and my new season of life. I thought – Who says we have to cram all of our exercises into 2-3 long gym sessions each week? Who says we have to do them in a gym?
If your training doesn’t look like it used to right now, I don’t think that means you’ve lost the plot. I think it might just mean you’re allowed to build strength for the woman you are today, rather than only the one you used to be.