My name is Krista Scott-Dixon, better known on Stumptuous.com as “Mistress Krista”. It might sound like I’m some kind of weird dominatrix (and yes, I joke that I push people around for money), but in fact I’m just a normal woman who likes the smell of iron in the morning.
I started Stumptuous.com in the mid-1990s, back when the web was a collection of ugly gray backgrounds and Times New Roman fonts; when most people didn’t have email and we sat waiting for dial-up modems to sloooooowly download a few KB of data. My goal was to spread the gospel of women’s weight training in a way that was simple, easy to understand, and most of all… fun.
I was lousy at almost all sports.
Good at sprinting until everyone else hit puberty and I stayed short. Good at gymnastics, but in North America we didn’t do much of that. Good at cycling, but that wasn’t really a “sport”… at that time we thought cycling was for fruity Europeans who didn’t know what baseball was. (Yep, we were idiotically egocentric as a continent.)
I liked skating, but wasn’t allowed to wear hockey skates. We didn’t know what speed skating was back then either, and in the 1970s girls weren’t permitted to play hockey. I failed swimming lessons. I liked smashing people in tackle football, but wasn’t allowed (and besides, I could only manage to throw the ball, not catch it). And girls wrestling or roughhousing? No way!
So “fitness” back then was all projectile sports — hitting and throwing balls — which I was terrible at, or things that seemed boring to me. Girls did aerobics and ballet and figure skating. I was abysmal at all that, so I spent my first 16 years of life convinced that physically, I was a loser.
Until I discovered weights.
Suddenly I found my world.
Weights don’t care how old you are, how short or tall you are, whether you’ve got one hand or one eye, or no coordination. You lift them up and put them down and move them around in whatever way you can. Whatever you can lift is whatever you can lift, whether that’s a soup can or a car. Free weights are the ultimate democratic physical activity. You don’t even have to be able to walk to use them.
This is a philosophy that I now apply to all my clients, and the people that I reach through my website, Stumptuous.com as well as the year-long body transformation program that I designed, Lean Eating coaching (http://www.precisionnutrition.com/products/consultation-coaching). If you can move, you can move against resistance. Even if that’s one finger.
The most important key to success: Do what you can do with what you have.
If you don’t have barbells, lift dumbbells. If you don’t have free weights, lift a knapsack or a suitcase or a sandbag or your furniture. (I had a student client once who couldn’t afford weights, so he just lifted his furniture. You can get pretty darn strong and functional hauling a dresser around.) Walk or run outside… maybe while carrying something. One of my favourite activities is just to grab something heavy and go for a walk. I’ve taken my wheelbarrow with a sandbag in it out on errands with me. (People just assume I’m a handyperson, and nobody’s yet stolen the wheelbarrow while it’s parked outside the bank or coffee shop.)
Be creative and flexible. Look for opportunities to move against resistance. Get out of the gym and look at your world as full of chances to move your body.
The second key to success: Be consistent.
You don’t have to be perfect or even all that great. My numbers wouldn’t impress anyone. I’m neither unusually strong, nor lean, nor muscular. Again, I’m just a regular Jane. But I’m in darn good shape comparatively, just because every day I do *something*.
Sure, some days are kinda pathetic. Whether I’m not feeling the mojo, or I’m tired, or the moon is in retrogade… whatever… some days you just don’t have awesome workouts.
Who cares? You’re there. Even if it’s five minutes, that’s more than zero. If you do 5 minutes a day, that’s 35 minutes a week that you’re not sitting on the couch. Next week try 10 minutes a day. Wow, now you’ve racked up 70 minutes/week. Not too shabby. If you add 5 minutes of purposeful movement each week, pretty soon you’re up to an hour a day and that’ll seem totally normal and easy.
The third key to success: Think sustainable.
Anyone can kill themselves with Navy-SEAL-meets-suicidal-ninja workouts. Anyone can come up with a workout that’ll crush an elite athlete. So what? Can your athletes and clients (and you) walk away from that training session and come back the next day? What about next week? Next year?
I’ve had a few minor injuries but almost nothing major. (My one major injury — a disc herniation and smashing my SI joint out of alignment — came from falling on ice, not the gym.) Considering I’ve been lifting seriously for over 15 years plus training other sports such as climbing, cycling, judo/BJJ/wrestling, that’s a pretty darn good track record. How many gym rats can say the same?
My training partners in BJJ/judo are covered in so much surgical tape they look like mummies. The worst I’ve gotten are a couple of sore fingers and a few calluses from grabbing the gi. And most serious weight trainers are always nursing some overuse injury because they didn’t know when to back off, and they bought into the idea that you must always smash your limits.
Folks, how are your shoulders? Your low backs? Knees? Wrists? Do you have “bench presser’s posture” or “biceps curler’s elbow”? Do you move well and smoothly, with a full range of motion? Do you view always being sore and run-down as “just another part of training”? You need to get real.
I used to push as hard as I could, hammering at heavy weights and max lifts and killer workouts. That was a bad idea. Now, I always leave something left “in the tank” so I can live to fight another day. I want to be doing this when I’m 100, so it’s stupid to burn myself out in my 30s. If you train clients, you want them coming back. Not overtrained, sick, and injured.
And you want them to say “Gee, that was kind of easy!” Great: We’ll add a little weight next week. Now go home and recover. Enjoy your healthy adrenals, pain-free joints, high energy, and normal cortisol levels.
When I say “move every day” I don’t mean “train every day”. I mean MOVE. Mix it up. Sometimes, move against resistance. Sometimes, go for a walk. Or a climb. Or dancing. Or skiing. Or… well, there are a zillion ways to move, so try to enjoy as many as possible.
Ultimately, weight training helps us to move and function better. It’s not there to serve our ego, or to crush us. It’s there to improve us, for the long haul. Respect the weights and treat your body like a partner, not an adversary that you have to abuse into submission. And hey… remember… have fun!
Cheers Krista
