It’s been four months since my last blog post

I have not given up on badassery. Rather, I have been trying to be badass in my actual job….

Here’s what I have learned in those 4 months about strength:

1. being strong for the gym helps you feel strong in life, no doubt now in my mind. Standing up straight and tall with my full five foot seven, and now broad-shouldered, self really helped me give a no-holds-barred presentation in which the brief was for us to be honest and direct, for an hour and a half, twice in a week last week. I swallowed all of the potential imposter syndrome feelings and girded my, now strong-ish, loins to say what was needed. Correlation is not causation of course, but I couldn’t help thinking that strength training had helped me with my own feelings of standing in my space, grounded and confident, ‘authoritative’. This felt like it was an important moment for our business.
   
2. having to de prioritise the gym in my mind may have stalled my progress a bit but just keeping going when I could was good enough. Finally, after years of REB Therapy I have managed to say to myself that whilst I would prefer to be able to be 5 star at everything in my life all at once, sometimes you can’t, and that is fine. I feel happy with how I have prioritised things and it’s been really, really good for me to have to concentrated fully on my day job over everything else. My business partner Leyla and I, along with our colleagues, have been pretty badass. This is something that we created ourselves from scratch and when the chips are down we have been able to deliver (despite all of the challenges) as we have had no choice – go badass teamwork.
   
   Unfortunately, for me being effective in work doesn’t seem to help me be badass in the gym in the way that it does seem to work the other way around. Believe me, I have tried channelling ‘Super-confident Presenter Helen’ just before a back squat and it helped not one little bit.
   

3. though not biologically in my prime in other ways (Generation X) I am very much still developing, and in my training I am still very much the adolescent second stage. Shakespeare’s schoolboy ‘creeping like snail unwillingly to school’. It certainly feels like this as far as squats and leg day is concerned. I have still got so much development potential and so often feel very unwilling about the process. But as we are bastardising quotes here, I would say that these days there is no such thing as legs that are too strong, or a back squat that is too heavy (to me more obtainable than being ‘too rich or too skinny’). No downsides to strong legs at all, apart from the actual process that is which often, frankly, sucks. So the squat, once again, is my big focus and the monkey literally on my back. Luckily I will have help here from my coach.
   
4. Finally, I may have managed to quell (or quieten) the voices in my head which think constantly about the size of my abdomen. I know I am not alone in this and it is frustrating to ruminate on something that it is annoying to be thinking about, honestly. In my experience it’s the same for most women I know, whether they go to the gym or not. I always thought before I had babies that the mystery and miracle of giving birth would put such details as the size of my abdomen away forever – no such luck. The answer here, in my new thinking, is the same again – go for massive strong legs, and massive strong shoulders, chest and back and proportionately my tummy will look smaller no matter whether it is flat or not! Basically be an X. So bodybuilding, sort of. Again with some important advice to help me not be on a continuous diet for the rest of life (hopefully). I will let you know how I get on.

That’s it. A lot of leg days and bodybuilding days to come. And most of all – I need to remember it is really just for fun (and health, but that’s kinda dull)…