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Mary (00:07):
We are talking about two things. So when Kristin and I discussed this topic, two things came to mind for me. It was “wherever you go, there you are.” And Kristin came up with the saying, “obstacles are necessary.”
Kristin (03:09):
Yes, because, okay, so how many of you have experienced… You try to change something, right? Like all of us are athletes in some fashion. And so we’re trying to improve things in our life, whether it be your total, whether it be your mobility or your strength or your technique quite possibly your nutrition, your sleep, all the things that go along with being an athlete. And then also because we’re athletes, we happen to be pretty driven people. So we also have things we’re trying to improve in our lives outside of sports. And I see so often, and I know this has been the case for me too, in the past that an obstacle will pop up and people will see that as like either a sign that they need to go a different direction or they run away from it because, Oh, it’s hard, and I wasn’t expecting this, but the growth happens when you move through that obstacle. When you go over it and get to the other side, that’s when growth and change and learning occurs. So we need those obstacles. We can’t run from them. We have to move through them. And there are times where yeah, maybe, maybe you do need to pick a different direction, but, but I think a lot of times what we need to get really, really good at is facing these obstacles, head on and moving through them, moving past them, to get to the other side and figure out what the lesson was and how do we improve ourselves? How did that experience improve me?
Mary (04:57):
Yeah. And there’s nothing wrong with course correcting. If you are on a path, it would, it would blow my mind. If you continue down that exact same path, exactly the way that you had planned it out in your head on paper, whatever, because life is going to throw challenges your way. And some of those challenges will just make you stick to your guns more. You push through them and you continue on the path that you’re on. Some challenges are going to hit you in a way where it makes you reconsider what you were doing in the first place and turn 2020 this year, I think a lot of us have taken steps back and, and evaluated a lot of things, right from our training and nutrition to our behavior, to our time spent about things that really matter in our life. Things that we thought were on path a, but maybe we have to course correct and make us make an A0.5 like, or a B, or maybe we are on plan D you know, this year I think has taught a lot of us.
Mary (05:56):
And I think it’s to lean into it. A lot of times we have a lot of guilt with ourselves of if path ‘A’ isn’t working out the exact way that we wanted to, like, I experienced this a lot in grad school. I was a horrible grad student because about three quarters of the way through or halfway through, I realized the path that I was on made me really sad, but I was so guilty in that I had already, I’d had my boyfriend at the time, moved down here with me. I’d already gone through all the steps I was here. I couldn’t give up, like, what, who am I to give up? Just keep pushing. It’ll get easier. It’ll get better. I just carried a lot of guilt with that when really I needed to course correct. I should have course corrected halfway through, but I stuck through it.
Mary (06:42):
I finished it. And then at the end it was like freedom being able to step aside from that path. And so I think this happens a lot with fitness and nutrition, right? I feel like a lot of us, when we got into it, maybe we tried something for a while that seemed to work for everyone else. And everyone else seemed to enjoy. And we thought that maybe there was something wrong with us. And so we felt really guilty. And we kept trying to do this thing over and over and over thinking that we were going to get a different result. Well, we all know what insanity is, right? But it’s like you can course correct. There’s nothing wrong with, with course-correcting taking a lesson and applying it elsewhere. The issue becomes when you think a completely different path is going to be magical and effortless, and that’s going to be the right road because no road is going to be magical or effortless.
Kristin (07:33):
Exactly. That’s the really important lesson that, yeah, you might be on the wrong path and you might have to change. But if you keep having the same obstacle popping up, it’s just like Mary said, wherever you go, there you are. If you’re having the exact same obstacle, pop up in every single thing you try, maybe that’s trying to tell you something, that’s, that’s a behavior that you need to learn to correct or learn to deal with or accept or whatever it is. You need to find something that works for you as opposed to running from it and choosing something completely different. I remember years and years and years ago I decided I was like lifting, but not a serious lifter. Cause all I really knew about was like body by bodybuilding style training. And so I think I’ve talked about this on the podcast before.
Kristin (08:29):
At some point I knew I wanted to compete in something because I that’s just my mentality in terms of like holding myself accountable. That’s I don’t want to compete against other people. I want to compete against myself, but I knew that I needed like some sort of competition to push me like a date. And so I at the time was doing a lot of biking and spinning and mountain biking. And that was kind of my thing for a long time. And people around me were competing in triathlons. And that was the only thing that I knew of. There was like, I didn’t even really know that powerlifting existed and it might not have even existed back then, like at least raw powerlifting. Cause I can’t remember what year it started, but we’re talking like back in the nineties. So when Mary was maybe not even born and I thought, well, other people are doing triathlons.
Kristin (09:25):
Maybe that’s what he needed to do because I, I want to compete. And, but I hate running. I hate running. I’m a pretty good swimmer, but I hate swimming for exercise. I mean, I can do it, right. Like I was a lifeguard. I can do it, but I don’t enjoy it. But I kept thinking, well, that must be what I’m supposed to do because I want to compete. And I don’t know about anything else. And so I would try to, okay, I would find a training plan and I’m going to follow this and I would make it like a weekend if that, and I just hated it. And finally it was like, okay, we’re just going to change this path because this is clearly not what I want to do. And once I found competitive CrossFit and then competitive lifting, that was, I was like, okay, this is what I need to do. But it’s just so funny looking back because I felt like that’s what I was supposed to do. And it wasn’t at all what I wanted to be doing. I just didn’t know.
Mary (10:23):
I think what did you like the week before you were going to go all into training and do it? You’d like built this scenario in your mind of, this is what I should be doing.
Kristin (10:34):
Yeah.
Mary (10:34):
I’m gonna do this because it’s exactly what I want. And then you’d make it the weekend. I think like that’s such a red flag for us. These extremes. I talk about it all the time. We, we don’t want to be living in these extremes. Like this all in mentality. I, I get it. Like if that gets you motivated, that’s great. But the totally all in, ignore everything else. Ignore the world, go full force into this thing that you haven’t even evaluated if you like. And that every week it seems like you’re fighting yourself to continue to do. You have to take a step back and recognize is this, is this even what I want to do?
Mary (11:14):
Or maybe it’s too extreme. Maybe I need to do pieces of it. Like Kristin found out with CrossFit. Okay. CrossFit was fine, but the whole cardio thing sucked, but the lifting thing was great. It was just a course-correct. And, and you can see it in how she did it. Right. She went from the triathlon. Well, okay. I want to compete, but not in that. Okay. Let’s find something else to compete in. Okay. We’re competing in this. I don’t like the cardio. I like the heavy lifting. Okay. So now we’re Olympic weightlifting. And then she course corrected to power lifting. So like her journey was still forward. It was still a journey, but she, she had to just change what she was doing because of what she liked. And I think it’s important to also point out like, yes, we’re saying you can’t always jump ships. Right. But some ships you need to jump.
Kristin (12:01):
Sometimes you evolve. Like for me, in terms of like going from CrossFit to weightlifting to powerlifting was just an evolution of me as an athletes. And, and you know, my interests changed a little bit. Some of it was time commitment. Like CrossFit is not as much, at least at the level I was doing. It was not as much of a time commitment is when I was all in, in powerlifting. Like I didn’t train that much in CrossFit. So it, you know, it’s, as you change in your, as your life change, you’re gonna evolve. Things are gonna change. But the one thing that stays the constant is if you have troubles committing to yourself and showing up for yourself in everything that you do, there’s not going to be a magic ticket. You have to learn to love yourself enough, to stay dedicated to something that you say you really want to do. And going way back to the very beginning of the pandemic when we were doing our strength and chaos seminars and we, and we really talked about every week, no yourself, this is why it’s so important to know yourself.
Mary (13:10):
Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s so important in so many ways. And like I was saying with the jumping ship, like some plans, some programs, some shiny things are not worth following. And you will just, we’ll just drive yourself into the ground, trying to stick to these plans that are unspeakable. They’re not sustainable because they’re built on not the idea of habit change, but on drastic changes, we talked about this in our last seminar about drastic changes, lead to drastic results with can, which leads to drastic rebound. Like if you’re going to go to the extreme on one end, you have to expect it’s a rubber band, right? You’re gonna end up on the extreme and the other end, rather than going to the extremes, we need to find like, what’s the happy middle what’s sustainable. And how can I incorporate these habit changes into my life on the daily.
Kristin (14:08):
Right? So if you think about your favorite elite lifter, who say they train 12 hours a day, 12 hours a day, wow. Talk about extremes 12 hours a week and their nutrition is on point and they have all this stuff on point. They have a physique that you would really like for yourself. They didn’t just one day pick up a barbell and start training 12 hours a week and have all of this stuff dialed in. It slowly developed over time. And as their interests built in this, and as they built their themselves up, they didn’t just jump into it, super extreme, say I’m all in and just go a hundred miles an hour. And then suddenly we’re an elite athlete. It was a very slow evolution for a lot of people, especially if they’re in power lifting, they may be came from an athletic background and were successful in college sports or high school sports and had been an athlete their entire life.
Kristin (15:15):
And if you are jumping into powerlifting later in life, it’s going to take you a lot of time, commitment, dedication, consistency, to build up to that point where you can be to the point where you appear all in by like social media standards. You know what I mean? You can’t just, I see this happen with, I work with, you know, lifters on nutrition from all levels. And so I’ll see beginner level lifters wanting to be just like their favorite elite athlete and like, okay, you can get there, but this person has been doing it for 20 years. So it’s going to take some time. And a lot of times, and I don’t mean this in a critical way, because I used to be this way. A lot of times people are unaware of the amount of work that it takes and how long it’s going to take. And they don’t want it to take that long. They want it to happen now, like I’m putting in the work now. So shouldn’t it be happening now? And, and it doesn’t work like that. That person got to where they were because they overcame a lot of obstacles. Maybe they shifted course a lot of times. And, and they, and they got there through the challenges that they experienced along the road. And that’s what makes you better. That’s what provides growth.
Mary (16:50):
Mm Hmm. We’ve talked about this so many times. Like where you are right now and are your goals, actually your goals. And sometimes as we’re going through this, if what you want, you have to have it right now or you don’t want it, those aren’t really the things that you want. If you can imagine for a second, the thing in your life that you want the most, whatever it is, whether it’s a successful career, it’s a total number. It’s, you know, a healthy, happy relationship… If I told you, it’s going to take you 10 years to get there, but it’s a guaranteed. You’re gonna get there. If it’s truly your goal, you’re happy with that. You’re like, okay. I mean, I wish, you know, we’re all going to work harder, so maybe it could be eight years. But if I told you it was 10 years, it was going to happen in 10 years.
Mary (17:45):
If you think, hell yeah, sign me up. I’m I’m on the ride. That’s what I want. Perfect. That’s your goal. That’s what you want to do. And just like we said, you can course correct along the way. So maybe it looks a little different in the end, but you were happy to put in the work because the result is the thing that you want the most. Whereas if it’s a short-term goal, if I say, okay, well you could have, you know, you can, you can look like this person or you can be lean, but it’s, it’s gonna take you, you know, couple years of dieting, reverse dieting, making sure that we’re doing it right. And you say, well, I don’t want this person says they can do it in two weeks. I’m going to go do it in two weeks.
Kristin (18:28):
I was going to say, well, I thought it would only take 12 weeks.
Mary (18:32):
Right. Right. And, and you go do that. That wasn’t really your goal. You’re making an emotional decision rather than a logical decision.
Kristin (18:41):
And that’s one reason why I hate like transformations because it’s not, you can’t transform in 12 weeks, you can have a lot of change and personal growth and development…
Mary (18:54):
Physical transformations, let’s say that those physical things,
Kristin (18:58):
But a lot of the right, because, because in order to get to where you want to go, there has to be a psychological transformation as well, a mental transformation. And that’s the hardest part. And that’s the part that everyone wants to skip. It’s who it’s, who you become in the process.
Mary (19:17):
It’s cause you don’t, it’s not really talked about when we see these really drastic, really quick transformations in terms of like physical transformations, we just see the physical, we don’t get a look into their mental state. Maybe it was done super unsustainably and they are at a crappy relationship with food obsessing about food. And they’re very unhappy even in their leaner body now because they have such a crappy relationship with themselves, or it could be the complete opposite where they did take years and they are in a really good space with food. And they’re just really happy. However, they are, we miss that mental transformation and to have success in nutrition, in training, in life, it takes that mental evolution, that mental training. And that’s not what we see. That’s why like sustainable macro coaching or intuitive eating coaching can be really hard to market because it’s like, yeah. I mean, you might see some physical transformations eventually just depending on what your goals are and how we’re working. But it’s, it’s the mental transformations that we’re really, really focused on. It’s the habits. It’s the, how do we take you from this space to this space in the best logical sustainable way. And yeah, it, it’s just, it’s hard to sell sustainability.
Kristin (20:38):
It really is because it’s not sexy and people want, now we want it now. And I get it. Like, there are many things that I want right now. Like, sign me up if I could just have that thing. I want it. But also throughout the years, because we can’t just have things overnight. I have learned to love the work and the whatever journey you’re on. You have to enjoy the journey. If you don’t enjoy it, you need to recalculate. You need to figure out a different plan. And I’m not saying that every day is going to be easy. Like I, I am an entrepreneur through and through. I have known since I was 16 years old, that I was going to have my own business. I didn’t know what it was going to be. I could have never imagined what my life is now back then.
Kristin (21:28):
But I knew that that was the path I wanted to be on. You can’t just become an entrepreneur overnight. So, so, or maybe like, you’re born an entrepreneur, but you can’t just have a business overnight. And so it’s not an easy path. It’s hard. And there are days that suck in. There are days where you think that you’re crazy and there are days where you want to quit. That is normal. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about is at the end of the day, I still love the journey that I’m on. With whether that’s lifting, whether that’s your nutrition, whether that’s your job, your profession, anything it’s got to, you’ve got to enjoy the work or you’re not going to stick with it. Just like that reminds me of when Mary was a powerlifter and she really didn’t like being a powerlifter. She didn’t like anything about training for powerlifting.
Mary (22:24):
Oh my God. I was so miserable.
Kristin (22:27):
So surprise! You didn’t have the kind of outcomes that you wanted at meets because you didn’t enjoy the work.
Mary (22:32):
Right! And because I didn’t care about, I didn’t care about my work, reflecting in the meet. I cared how I reflected at the meet to other people. And so it’s just, it’s the evolution of training, right? It’s just, it’s my evolution. It’s my journey. And I wonder like sometimes I don’t do this as often now, but I used to do it a lot more often thinking back to a time where something happened and I wish I could go back and change it because it caused all these problems. And I had to go through all these things and it really sucked. And while you’re going through it, you’re like, Oh, if I just didn’t do X, everything would be fine. But the older you get, the more you really go through these things, the more you realize like, yeah, listen, that sucked whatever it was
Mary (23:22):
You went through, it was rough or it was not what you expected, whatever it was, but you don’t want things to change because you don’t know what the possibilities are going to be. For example, the other day I was, I was thinking… It’s been a rough couple of weeks in terms of kittens stuff and business stuff, but I was just, I was like, well, I wonder what would have happened if I had taken the grad position at, in Denver and Denver, Colorado, which is where I’m from. I would still be in Denver. I’d probably have this other life. I’d probably be super into science. But then you think about all the things that I miss. Sure, I hated the grad school I went to. I did not enjoy it one bit, but I got to come down here and I got to, you know, be better off financially,
Speaker 2 (24:13):
I got to meet Kristin, I got to start the podcast with her, I got to rescue kittens, I got to evolve into this community and I get to coach athletes like that one seemingly small decision, right? Where do I go to grad school? Even though the grad school I did choose sucked for a while, I wouldn’t change it. Would I leave myself notes along the way that says it’s going to get better? Absolutely. If I could go back and walk through it, tell myself it’s going to be okay. I would, but I wouldn’t change it.
Kristin (24:46):
I mean, that’s, that’s all of the, all of our collective experiences make us who we are. Right. I wouldn’t change anything about my life and listen, there are things that are worthy of change, but I wouldn’t change any of it because it’s made me who I am today. And I think that it’s those very obstacles and challenges. When you come out on the other side, if you allow them to change you for the better they will, you have to let them though. And resisting that can cause a lot of trouble.
Mary (25:22):
Yeah. And if you don’t ever have challenges, you’re just the blob of a person. You’re not even a human. You don’t have anything to contribute to this world. You’re just, you have everything handed to you and whatever, you know, you have to, as Kristin said, like, you have to have obstacles to grow. If you don’t have obstacles, you don’t grow. But if you jump ship every time that an obstacle comes up, you don’t grow either with the caveat being that the plan you are following is working on, you know, we’re in fitness and nutrition, right. We have to always make that caveat. If the plan that you’re following is not sustainable, it’s very drastic and promises drastic results. Yeah. You need to change courses, jump that ship. Find a better ship because we need to make sure that the plans that we are on, the things that we are following are sustainable and realistic.
Kristin (26:15):
For sure. We can talk about the research of weight loss, but I know we’ve mentioned before, but it’s always really, I it’s one of my favorite pieces of any collective research is that the research shows that the faster you lose weight, the less likely you are to keep that weight off. And the more likely you are to have quick rebound weight gain. Why? Because anyone can do anything for a short period of time. You can put your nose to the grindstone, work really hard and starve yourself for a short period of time. You didn’t learn anything. You didn’t change your behaviors for the long term. So the opposite is true. The slower you lose weight to a point, right? The slower you lose weight. The more likely you are to sustain that weight loss. Why? Because you had to make behavior modifications for the long haul and you had to learn healthier tactics. There’s also a physiological reason in terms of metabolism. But a lot of it I believe has to do with behavior modification. And so the same is true with anything like the longer we’re in it, the more we’re going to learn from ourselves, the more we’re going to improve and grow. And you might come out on the other side completely different than what you imagined and we have to allow for those possibilities.
Mary (27:47):
Mm Hmm. And I think a lot of us are going to be faced with another big challenge here, as things potentially shut down again, I know that a lot of States are contemplating if not already going forward with it. And so this is going to be a new set, a new, but similar set of challenges. Like we’ve done this before, but this time you’re a little bit better equipped. Like you’ve already gone through the first round of this, which was rough and it was hard. But now hopefully that time that was spent going through those rough and difficult things you are, you’re like, okay, this is how it’s going to be. I need to make sure this, and this is set up for my success. I need to do this, this and this. Like, it’s going to teach you things. So when it happens again or something similar happens, you can work your way through it rather than what we all did at the beginning, which was like, we’re fine. It’s two weeks. And then we’re like five months in and like oh god, I went through a lot of personal growth. I wasn’t expecting this time. It can be a little bit more chill
Kristin (28:50):
For sure. For sure. Every time that you overcome an obstacle, you have new tools in your toolbox for the next obstacle.
Mary (29:01):
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Kristin (29:04):
And, and don’t forget to enjoy things after you’ve climbed the mountain. Right? Don’t forget to enjoy like you, you did all this work and you got here. Don’t forget to enjoy here before you go to the next one. I just had that conversation with my mom about something I’ve been working towards for a very long time. And finally it was like, Oh my gosh, I’m here. I did it. Like I did it. And I was scared about it. And my mom’s like, well, possibly that’s forcing you to look at your goals and figure out if that’s, if that’s actually what you wanted. And I was like, yeah, like the next thing, like, what’s the next goal? I didn’t think past here. And she was like, no, I mean, enjoy, enjoy. Like, can’t you just be content? And the, and I laughed really hard because the idea never crossed my mind.
Mary (30:02):
Well, wherever you go, there you are. Right. Good and bad. You’re driven. You’re always looking for the next goal. So now that that’s happened, you’re like, I’m confused. The wherever you go there you are can be applied to other things too. Like if you have commitment issues, if you can’t commit to things, or if you haven’t really worked on habit changes, no new plan is going to be magic for you. If you don’t fix the things that are inside of you are habits or whatever, it doesn’t matter. If you move across the country to start a blank slate life quote unquote, or you can be whoever you want to be, you’re going to grow into the same person that you were before, just in a different location, because you never fixed or worked on any of the things that you wanted to work on habitually.
Kristin (30:50):
100%. That’s such a good point, Mary. Yeah, we can’t. We have to work on ourselves. We can’t. I think about like young Kristin was, was always like program hopping and doing different things. Why? Because honestly, I didn’t believe when I was young that I, I didn’t know this. I didn’t know that I believe to this, but I figured out later on that I believe this. I didn’t, I really didn’t believe I was worthy of success. I would self-sabotage and then like hop to the next thing and then hop to the next thing. And then finally I realized like… The problems, me, the problems that I don’t believe in myself and nobody else is going to believe in you more than you believe in yourself. They won’t, they’re not going to do it. If you’re looking for someone to believe in you so that you can start believing in yourself, you’re going to be waiting your entire life. No, one’s going to believe in you till you give them proof that they can believe in you and that they should believe in you. And by the time you get to that point, you don’t even need anyone else to believe in you.
Mary (31:58):
Hmm. It can be. It’s a very sobering experience, right? To think that maybe I’m the problem. Maybe I’m doing this to myself. That’s a hard, that’s a hard thing to admit. That’s like, you know, sometimes after me and my husband get in a little bit of a tiff and me having to apologize is a very hard thing to come up to recognizing that I’m wrong is hard. And recognizing that maybe you’re, the problem is a big slap in the face. But the good thing about recognizing it as you can fix it, you can, you can correct it. You can figure out what you need to do so that you are no longer the problem.
Kristin (32:35):
Exactly. Exactly. And now I’m to the point where I think that dedication to my goals is the ultimate form of self-love sticking it out through really hard things. I’m not like, like I said, in the beginning, we’re going to have challenges. You’re going to be tested. You’re going to have times where you quote unquote fail, but it’s not a failure. If you keep going, pick yourself up, keep going. And that is the ultimate form of self-love and self-care
Mary (33:07):
Precisely,
Kristin (33:09):
We hope you guys enjoyed today’s episode. We are not going to be releasing episodes in the month of December. We are taking that off from releasing podcast episodes, but you can still hear from us if you are a Female Strength Academy member. So go to our website, become a member. We’re going to have three seminars. The first three Thursdays in December, like we do every Thursday right now, we do seminars live over zoom. You can ask questions, interact with us, have discussion and bonus! We’re doing a zoom holiday party this year, which we’re super excited about.
Mary (33:51):
I’m so excited. I’m going to create games. It’s going to be great. I’m very excited. It’s just a little get together to say thank you so much to our members for being a member. And honestly, just to have a good time because it’s 2020 and we need to celebrate the end of it.
Kristin (34:09):
Yes, we do. So with that head to the link in the show notes to become a member and we’ll see you there.
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