Getting into shape means reclaiming a body that is wired, tired, and numbed out. And yet wellness keeps lacquering on additional expectations, chasing the next diet, performing the latest protocol, piling more onto bodies that are already overwhelmed.

I’ve learned to read the patterns: how we work, whether we still play, and all the emotional baggage we schlep around. How to take a body that is out of whack, reset its posture, reframe its relationship to effort, and actually get stronger. Strength training is as much undoing as it is doing. It’s simple but not easy, because we are humans.

The Loads We All Carry

Every body carries loads. Every body solves physical problems every day, and every body has deeply ingrained patterns for getting the job done. The dentist hovering over mouths, the warehouse worker pulling ten-hour shifts on concrete, the desk jockey grinding through Microsoft Teams meetings for hours: the shoulders tense up, the eyes narrow, the breathing gets shallow, the hips stay locked in flexion. After a few decades in the same postures and perspectives, specific parts of the body get stuck, too tight, overstretched, and numbed out.

Feeling drained at the end of the day, at the gas pump, at the grocery store checkout, makes sense when daily life is inherently extractive. But we don’t all carry the same loads. The nurse working overtime to feed her family is not the same an executive with a staff of people managing his life. We don’t all carry the same metabolic and mental burdens.

Unpaid (Emotional) Labor

The invisible loads are often the heaviest. We are constantly pummeled with news that is baffling and heartbreaking, while the kids need to get to practice and the car needs an oil change and there’s email and meetings and dishes to be done. As an average American who is working, paying attention, and actually gives a damn, the expense of daily life plus the unrelenting existential toll accumulates and begins to thwarts our movement.

We down the coffee, build up the defenses, and eventually hit our threshold. We contort around our deepest insecurities, calcify around unresolved traumas, and keep going anyway, walking around with open wounds, which honestly all of us are. Too wrung out to stay open, we clam up around whatever feels protective, showing up and acting like we have our shit together.

Armored Up

Armor isn’t only a survival strategy, it’s also an identity. The strongman mentality takes it to the extreme, downing peptide stacks and banging out chest presses. Just punish yourself with exercise, adhere to strict dietary regimes, track every biomarker, follow the YouTubers who seem to have it all figured out. The promise is that you can escape your insecurities and lack of security by achieving the image.

Whether it’s masculine coded as muscular, feminine coded as skinny, or the current hybrid: extremely thin and also visibly muscular (as typified by Lauren Sanchez Bezos and Demi Moore). Male, female, or anywhere in between, the message is clear: your body needs a lot of work. Beyond eating healthy and exercising regularly, you can be endlessly injected, implanted, and botoxed until you look cartoonish. Dressed up as extreme self-care, the pursuit of “wellness” has morphed into systematic armoring. In times of uncertainty your body can become a specimen of predictability and imperturbability.

But you can never be perfect enough. Most of our insecurities are a marketing scam and our lack of security is a policy decision. As ecosystems and institutions collapse around us, take an anti-inflammatory supplement. Feeling powerless? Up the protein. Feeling confused and overwhelmed? Follow the nearest self-appointed wellness guru, who will tell you exactly how to eat, move, and sleep while constantly selling you something else to obsess over. You won’t even notice the jet stream collapsing. You too can be perfect and immune.

Conclusion

What if deconditioning was just finding our power under all the BS? Regularly reminding ourselves our power actually lives, regardless of whether you have visible biceps.

Despite living in an inherently extractive economy and contending with crumbling institutions, we can practice what is simple and regenerative. We can be disciplined without being blindly obedient. We can tend to ourselves without being self-absorbed. We can move our bodies without punishing them. We can stay anchored and energized when everything feels like too much. We can build community in at every squat rack and at each yoga mat along the way.

My next post gets more practical: how to train tension skillfully, why movement patterns matter more than muscles, and what it actually looks like to get stronger without armoring up further.

I began studying and practicing strength training in 2001 when I ventured past the elliptical machines and into the weight room at my local 24 Hour Fitness in San Francisco. I entered into gym bro culture: grunting through bench presses, downing protein concoctions, and preening in the mirror with each biceps curl.

Here’s what I’ve observed over the last 25 years: You can look very strong and still not move well. You can be completely ripped and still too weak to deal with hard conversations and adult responsibilities. Despite age or body type, almost every body can get stronger with the right support. So how you define strength determines how you strength train.

Like so many of the strongmen, you can appear super buff but still be ruled by insecurity, terrified of vulnerability, and desperately crave belonging in a hierarchy. I’ve seen extremely muscular guys fail grueling kettlebell certifications and a bodybuilder quit the yoga teacher training because it was too emotionally confronting. Strength training can be all about beefing up- adding muscle as an armor against big feelings and vulnerability. Or we can train to stay open, aligned, and still able to get shit done (even when it feels like everything is falling apart.)

During my thousands of hours of training folks, I’ve studied how they get stuck, how they get out of pain, and how they get stronger. Getting strong always demands liberating ourselves from years of conditioning, from too much sitting, from old injuries, from trauma, from ingrained insecurities. It’s as much about undoing the patterns and postures that have limited us as it is about lacquering on more reps, more muscle, and more defenses.

Now as I approach 50, the pressure to shrink and conform is louder than ever. Pressing a 55 lb kettlebell overhead with one arm or deadlifting over 200 lbs feels extraordinary. The stronger you are, the more immune to bullshit, especially your own.

The Flat Muscle Man

Before the Wellness Strongman found his first podcasting mic, he was doing “guns and buns” workouts and trying to look like the poster on the wall. The muscle anatomy poster hanging somewhere behind the dumbbell rack in virtually every gym. He has a front: biceps, pectorals, quadriceps. A back: glutes, lats, hamstrings. No skin, minimal connective tissue, no organs, no nerves, no feelings. Usually expressionless, no depth. (Kinda like a date I went on 15 years ago.)

His job is to demonstrate muscularity, and for decades that defined what it meant to be strong. The sport behind him is bodybuilding, built around hypertrophy: isolate discrete muscle groups, make the most visible ones as large and symmetrical as possible. It demands, hours of training, rigid dieting, and strategic dehydration and it’s also entirely subjective. Contestants aren’t judged on strength, speed, or endurance.

It’s about appearance, not function. That distinction is what this whole series has been circling.

Fitting the Mold vs Moving Well

While most folks aren’t dedicating themselves to bodybuilding, a lean body with pronounced muscles is now trending as the perfect body du jour. Of course women, have been bombarded for years by the fitness, diet, and ever increasing wellness industry with constantly shifting and shrinking aspirational standards. But now, thanks to social media trends of looksmaxxing, and the manosphere, guys get to have widespread body dysmorphia too!

Over two and a half decades in wellness. I’ve watched an endless rotation of diets to “trick” our hungers and exercise packaged as atonement. Trying to “achieve” the current idealized body type is more likely to lead to torn hamstrings and disordered eating than lasting health. I’m constantly reminding my students the difference between trying to fit the mold and sustaining yourself.

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Hollow Power

Throughout my entire career in wellness, I’ve watched the same idea resurface in different packaging: the body can and should be dominated. Your body should conform and you should obey. The bro podcasters amplify this idea of wellness as shredding your pecs, torching your abs, and obsessing over every ounce of macronutrients. Self-care gets reduced to following exact instructions: what to eat, which supplements to down, which peptides to inject. But remember, these rules are written by young, able-bodied, already-basically-healthy guys, often trying to sell you supplements or off-market peptides. The standards are not set to include folks but to create impossible aspirations, like staying forever young or maintaining an unnecessarily oversized muscle mass. Health and functional strength are beside the point.

Looking and presenting like an exaggerated version of “a real man” is a hedge against insecurity, a shield against vulnerability. And when that performance goes mass-market, as Wilhelm Reich articulated, it becomes the breeding ground for something darker. As if doing a hot take on the manosphere, Reich nails it:

The Little Man does not know that he is little, and he is afraid of knowing it. He covers up his smallness and narrowness with illusions of strength and greatness, of others’ strength and greatness. He is proud of his great generals but not proud of himself. He admires thought which he did not have and not the thought he did have. He believes in things all the more thoroughly the less he comprehends then, and does not believe in the correctness of those ideas which he comprehends most easily.

Deeply conformist, invested in hierarchical pecking orders, desperate for belonging and approval. The manosphere playbook is to project as much of the image of strength as possible: flashy cars, big bank accounts, and bulging quads. You can be jacked AF and still be desperate to follow the leader, falling for every get-rich-quick scheme and the next diet trend, treating Huberman or Asprey like they’re preaching gospel. It’s like those lifted F-150s I see on my country road around my home in North Carolina: huge wheels, shiny paint, looks like they’ve never spent a day on a job site or gotten any real work done.

The Real Work

Beyond being able to carry loads or maintain our stamina, the hardest work we face is often more emotionally challenging than physically demanding. Getting through a busy work day, showing up to support a family, taking care of ourselves, and enduring so much upheaval requires fortitude not just a bombastic veneer.

Real strength means you wrestle with your insecurities instead of projecting them onto the nearest trans person, immigrant, or woman. Instead of being spooked by shadowy desires, you own them. Instead of fortifying against vulnerability you are able to stay open. It’s about living in a body that can show up, not just show off.

Every day in the gym I practice and teach folks how to ground, organize their skeleton, and breathe skillfully and leverage heavy weights. Instead of trying to look like a Marvel character, it’s about how we can carry, squat, push, and pull. These physical practices keep us aligned, especially now, when the patriarchal puppet show is falling apart. A strong body with a clear mind is its own form of resistance.

When we walk into a yoga class or a gym, we are searching for something. Not just a place to hang out, not just an exercise routine or some camaraderie through the sweating. We are often seeking something more foundational. Belonging in our own skin.

I understand what it feels like not to belong, because my body has been scrutinized, judged, and eventually vilified by fitness, diet, and even wellness culture itself. As a fitness trainer and yoga teacher for more than twenty years, I’ve moved through this world in a body bigger than the typical yoga teacher and thicker than the standard trainer.

I’ve been consistently and exceptionally healthy, yet navigating this field means enduring relentless hostility toward my phenotype. It’s a daily effort to find belonging within myself. But that effort has also been the key to my success. When I’m teaching, I’m aiming at more than relieving neck pain, perfecting triangle pose, or improving squat mechanics. Ultimately I want my students to feel more at home in their bodies. Less pain. More ease. More skill. More joy. Less believing they are never enough.

It starts with how I stand in front of the classroom and the spaces I create.

Limping Along, Pushing Harder

If belonging feels hard, it’s because most of us aren’t starting from neutral. Just getting through the workday, through the news, and through the caregiving, we often numb out. We brace with mostly unconscious tension, bury grief, and get stuck in autopilot. Self-care slips to the bottom of the list. As the grid grinds us down, the body can feel abandoned, neglected, or abused.

Yearning to feel better, we seek out the structure and support of wellness third spaces.

Fitting In

I remember when I first started yoga in my neighborhood studio in San Francisco. Struggling through sun salutations, I glanced around and clocked that I was the fattest person in the room. In that moment it felt like there were only two options. Leave to avoid the humiliation or push hard enough to earn my belonging. Stay home or pummel myself with intensity.

That all-or-nothing pattern shows up everywhere in wellness culture. Abandonment or overboard. It has become my mission as a teacher to help folks step out of that mentality.

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Don’t Even Try

I understand why folks are nervous to step inside a gym, a studio, or any kind of third wellness space. Exercise can feel performative, punishing, or clicky. People tell me all the time, “I’m too inflexible for yoga. I’m too weak or too broken for strength training.” These spaces can be notoriously unwelcoming to anyone in a bigger body, differently abled, dealing with injuries, or simply not naturally athletic.

I’m grateful I didn’t give up before kicking into my first handstand or realizing my knack for backbends. I had the pluck to figure out the weight room even when it was packed with bros. Because hiding out, trying not to be judged, and protecting ourselves from vulnerability keeps us away from all the good stuff.

Finding my home in these third spaces gave me access to so much healing, agency, and a deep sense of belonging to myself. But I also know that belonging has a dark side.

Never Enough

To stick around in these “healing” spaces is to immerse yourself in a culture of constantly changing diets and pushing physical limits. Already limping along, we are told to whip ourselves into shape. Lose weight, fight aging, push harder, restrict more. No excuses.

You belong in a CrossFit gym if you can max out your deadlift and keep up with constant competition. You belong in the spin studio if your skinny butt fits the seat and you are sweating your balls off to the trendy playlist. You belong in the barre studio if you look cute in your Lulus and endure endless reps with the pink weights. I have spent many hours in these spaces feeling like an outsider and still showing up for the benefits of a solid workout.

There is a fine line between pursuing health and chasing the workout, the diet, and the body that fits the brand. Under the aspirational ideal and collective zeal lives the belief that the body always needs to be fixed, perfected, and performing.

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In the frenzy of self-optimization, trying to fit the mold can, and often does, compromise long-term health. I’ve known yoga teachers who pushed so far into flexibility they needed hip replacements. I’ve known gym junkies who trained so hard they ended up with knee, back, or shoulder surgeries. I’ve watched too many health-conscious friends teeter into orthorexia.

Looking the Part vs Belonging

Being entrenched in wellness culture, I’ve found a middle ground between bailing out and going overboard. I push myself through deadlifts and am equally skilled at recovery. I trust myself to eat well without dieting dogma. I stay committed without slipping into obsession.

The real resistance training has been navigating the years of messaging that tells us we are too fat, too old, too weak, too injured, too uncoordinated, too stiff, or too much of a loser to ever belong. To belong again we are supposed to buy into the next big trend, push ourselves to exhaustion, or micromanage every bite and biomarker.

I never arrived at the promised land of results advertised by every fitness brand. I never found eternal youth, got my foot behind my head, completed a marathon, or sculpted six pack abs. I also never pledged allegiance to a single method, found a guru, went down a dieting rabbit hole, or handed my identity to a tribe. After grueling kettlebell certifications and intense yoga teacher trainings, I didn’t even get a tattoo. I never needed that mark of belonging because I already had a sense of it within myself.

I never achieved the constantly changing body ideal. After decades of intense and varied exercise I haven’t wrecked my joints or my metabolism. I’m still me. Healthy and steady in my routines. Built like my mother and grandmothers. Built like a brick shithouse, as we say back home in West Virginia.

What I’ve learned is simple. You can do everything right and still never fit the mold because the mold was never designed to include the range of healthy bodies that actually exist. I’m not a bulletproof body positivity warrior. I have insecurities like everyone else, and those insecurities often stand between us and the belonging we want. Every day I contend with the idea that our only options are to isolate or to overdo it.

My own definition of wellness is having the ability to show up, imperfectly and consistently. That’s what I’ve been able to do for myself and for thousands of classes and training sessions. As the principal emotional architect of so many wellness third spaces, I’ve shaped what abilities are celebrated, how we push ourselves, how we relax, and how we support each other. Breaking the mold gives us far more room between hiding out and burning out.

This has been my work for years. Shaping how we belong in these spaces, how we belong to each other, and how we belong in our bodies.

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Rage, overwhelm, anxiety—they’re not just in our minds; these feelings live within our bodies. The shoulder tension, the insomnia, the sore back, the headaches, the restlessness, the tight hips, the exhaustion—it’s all here, right now. When stuck in overwhelm, we default to fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.

• Fight/Flight: Muscles locked in semi-contraction—jaw, shoulders, belly, and glutes tight. Hypervigilant. Doom-scrolling. Sleep is elusive, relaxation feels impossible, and burnout is right around the corner.

• Freeze: Dissociation. Numbness. Stiffness. Escapism. Struggling to move or take care of ourselves. Depression creeps in.

• Fawn: Over-accommodating. People-pleasing. No boundaries. Vulnerable to manipulation. Conditioned to defer our power.

Sound familiar? It’s not a coincidence. These responses keep us paralyzed and disempowered—but they also hold the key to our strength

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Where we hold tension, we can build resilience. Where we numb out, we can wake up. Where we lose ourselves is where we reclaim power.

That’s why I created Movement Medicine—a practice that goes beyond fitness to help us move with what’s happening, not against it. It blends yoga, strength training, and relaxation techniques, but at its core, it’s a language of movement that helps us process emotions physically. Some days that means shaking out anxiety, other days it's yoga for insomnia or a squat session to remind ourselves of our badassery. Instead of letting that nagging hip pain or exhaustion keep us from moving, it becomes what we move with.

This practice—and the community that comes with it—has kept me strong and sane through the last few very challenging years. As I head into perimenopause, I feel lucky to be pain free, to have great energy, and to be reminded of my resilience everyday.

Movement Medicine isn’t just about keeping muscles strong—it’s about keeping minds clear and hearts steady. Our raw emotions can paralyze us or they can be the fuel to keep us moving, thinking, and creating a better world.

If you’re interested in learning more about my Movement Medicine classes, I have a new series staring on Monday, March 3rd. Sign ups close on Saturday, March 1. Check out all details are here.

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1. Find the Antidote to Working Making a living usually requires doing the same thing for hours. For a lot of folks that means being parked in front of a screen and not moving much. Despite all the “sitting is the new smoking” messages, you aren’t a bad person if you need to be at a desk to do your work. You just need the antidote to your work life: to unravel the tech hunch, unwind the mind, and release the grind from your system. Beyond tech workers, I’ve worked with a truck driver that knew how to release his low back and recently my dentist who spends her work days rounded over open mouths. Moving out of habitual postures is key to both our mental and physical sustainability.

2. Release Your Wiggle* Let’s admit it: we are all a bit too uptight. Trying to hold it all together all the time makes us a little too stiff (and not very fun.) A big focus of Movement Medicine is getting unstuck and loosening up (especially the tight ass.) In class we e roll out neck tension, unclench the shoulders, and wag our tails. Especially during warm-ups, we are not concerned with perfect poses, instead we remember how to squirm. Joint mobility is such a relief. (*Thank you, Beyonce!)

3. Be an Upstanding Citizen Groceries, endless meetings, family schedules, the email inbox, we all have loads to carry. Our responsibilities can feel like crushing loads or challenging stimulus. In Movement Medicine we do lots of lunges, squats, & plank variations to unlock the power in our hips and stabilize the spine. We remind ourselves that we a lever of bad-assery. We align to get sh*t done.

4. Take the Minimum Effective Dosage How much exercise should you do? Just enough. You don’t have to go to the gym 8 days a week, sweat through brutal intervals, or lift hundreds of pounds. Mostly you just need to show up, do a little something, and stop being so hard on yourself. When it comes to exercise, consistency if always more important than intensity. I like small, frequent doses of Movement Medicine so my online classes are 30-minutes, 3 days a week. Sometimes its sweaty, sometimes it more mellow. The lower the expectations, the more likely we are to keep showing up. Instead of maxing out, mostly we stay with just enough

5. Expand Your Range of (E)motion The body is not just a sack of unconscious meat. We are all schlepping around old wounds, anxieties, and layers of insecurities. In Movement Medicine, we move with, not against, our emotions. With somatic exercises, we shake out anxiety, ring out angst, and infuse joy into our tissues. We feel it to heal it.

6. Play > Punishment Exercise doesn’t have to suck. If you are feeling old and out of shape, how about more recess? Movement Medicine is a chance to play again. Swinging our arms around, twisting into funny poses, and doing weird things makes us feel younger. Moving out of the box and being silly reminds us of our playfulness, resilience, and our adaptability.

7. Increase Your Movement Appetite Warning: Practicing Movement Medicine will make you hungry for more movement. Side effects include more frequently taking the stairs, squatting with your kiddos, biking, hiking, and increased frolicking outdoors. Students have reported higher lifting PRs, faster runs, and more fierce pickleball games. Movement Medicine is stand-alone exercise program and baseline for more skillful and joyful movement. Its enables you to do what you most love as frequently and sustainably as possible.

8. Dial the Intensity Often in the middle of a plank variation, we realize that we are sweating. A lot. Raising the heart rate and pushing cardio limits feels so good. But we aren’t always pushing maximum intensity. In Movement Medicine classes, we learn to respect and tend our inner fire to avoid burn out. Instead the all-or-nothing, we dial the intensity up and down.

9. Take a Chill Pill Just as important as learning to exert, we need to learn to relax. In Movement Medicine we practicing down regulating. We hold poses longer, practice breathing exercises, or roll around on the floor work to release stress. Just standing and focusing on the breath for a few moments minutes without getting distracted settles our frazzled nervous systems. We always end class with savasana. It makes us better people.

10. No Body Shaming, Guaranteed. Shame paralyzes us, shackles our potential, and completely screws up our ability to move. So in Movement Medicine classes you will never hear about fixing your flaws, burning off calories, or any of that BS. We push but never punish ourselves. Your body is not a problem to be solved, its a party so let’s enjoy it while it lasts.

Today, I’m teaching my final Movement Medicine class before signing off for Thanksgiving. The theme? Guts, Glutes, and Gratitude.

I’m excited to sweat and push the class a bit harder than usual. I have to admit, I love a challenging class before the holiday—a chance to feel my muscles quiver and lean into the effort. There’s something satisfying about being a little sore, knowing a well-earned rest is coming.

But I make a hard stop on any talk about “burning calories” or “earning the pie.”

As a fitness professional, I never cue atonement for eating. I never frame movement as punishment. I’m so damn tired of that narrative.

Instead, today we’ll focus on gratitude—for these strong, capable bodies that carry us through hard things. Lord knows, we all need as much grit as we can muster these days.

Tomorrow will be about feasting, gathering with family, and savoring how fleeting and precious this all is.