What 24 Years of Training Taught Me About Lifelong Health and Fitness

I started exercising 24 years ago, three days after giving birth to my son, when I was released from the hospital. I was in my late teens and had no athletic background. I hadn’t played sports growing up, and I certainly didn’t possess some sophisticated understanding of exercise science. I simply knew that I wanted to get in shape.

My First Trainer was Essentially Television

I started exercising with FitTV, which probably ages me. I would do two workouts a day. At that point, my objective was straightforward: I wanted to be skinny. I quickly reached that goal and discovered that being skinny bored me. It seemed commonplace, and I wanted something extra. I became interested in developing muscle and started gravitating toward trainers such as Cathe Friedrich. Her workouts introduced me to more serious resistance training and gave me an early foundation for what would eventually become a much deeper interest in strength and muscular development.

Before entering the Air Force in 2004, I combined that training with fitness information I had found for Marine preparation. I had chosen the Air Force because I was a new parent and felt it was the wiser decision for my circumstances, but physically, I wanted to perform at the highest level I could, so I trained for the Marines’ requirements. That mindset paid off.

During Air Force basic training, I achieved Warhawk status and ultimately earned top PRT recognition. At graduation, there was one top male and one top female PRT performer. I was the female. For part of the graduation ceremony, the two of us marched in front of everyone.

That experience taught me something that has stayed with me ever since. I had never been an athlete. I wasn’t coming into the military with years of organized sports behind me. I had simply prepared with the intention of performing at my highest possible level. That showed me very early how much mindset, preparation, and consistency matter. A person can possess physical advantages and still be outperformed by someone who prepares more seriously and who wants to embody their vision of hard work.

Becoming a Personal Trainer

Around 2005, I became a personal trainer. That began another stage of my education.

Certification taught me the fundamentals of exercise programming, nutrition, strength training, and general fitness. I followed those principles myself, but after several years, I became frustrated. I was working hard, yet I wasn’t developing the physique I wanted. I wasn’t even developing the level of muscularity I saw in some of the women whose training videos I followed. That discrepancy made me curious.

I started realizing how generalized much of the information available to ordinary consumers was. Fitness personalities could show impressive physiques while giving their audiences workouts and nutritional advice that didn’t necessarily explain the complete process behind those physiques. I encountered books that contained beautiful photographs of accomplished fitness competitors, like Corey Everson, accompanied by extremely general advice. I encountered workout videos that attributed impressive muscular development to routines that seemed inadequate to explain the result. I became increasingly interested in what happened behind the scenes. What did these people actually do? Who trained them? What did their coaches know? Where did the coaches learn it?

Questioning became important. Instead of simply following another person’s workout, I started studying the principles underneath the workout. I also became skeptical of the culture surrounding fitness information, particularly the tendency to guard useful knowledge. At the time, I sometimes felt that women in the industry were reluctant to reveal everything they were actually doing. There seemed to be a “don’t train your competition” mentality in certain corners of physique culture.

Eventually, I started looking toward the men who were training many of the successful female competitors. If a male strength or bodybuilding coach possessed the information that helped create the result I was looking at, I wanted to know what he had studied. It was a shortcut to knowledge. Asking who taught you is a life hack I follow throughout my life now.

Finding the Missing Pieces

Around 2006 or 2007, after reading numerous books, I discovered Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle. That book had an enormous influence on how I approached nutrition. I began thinking much more systematically about calories, protein, lean mass, body-fat percentage, energy expenditure, and adjusting nutrition according to a specific goal. I also learned to pay attention to individual differences rather than treating every person’s nutritional requirements as identical. Eventually, especially during my 20s, I became very good at controlling my body composition through nutrition. My education in resistance training was developing at the same time. Championship Bodybuilding became another major influence. For years, I had been accustomed to workout videos where you performed a few sets, felt the muscle burning, and moved on. I hadn’t fully understood how important the relationship was between resistance, repetitions, effort, progression, and adaptation.

I began learning more about progressive overload, different repetition ranges, training intensity, and the amount of effort required to stimulate muscular development. I had spent years wondering why I could consistently complete strength-training videos without developing much muscle. Once I began applying more sophisticated bodybuilding principles, my body finally started responding the way I had wanted it to.

Roughly six months after reading Championship Bodybuilding, I was on the stage, competing in a figure competition.

Competing in Figure

Around age 30, I combined what I had learned about bodybuilding with everything I had learned about nutrition. I continued studying subjects such as nutrient timing and eventually prepared for a figure competition. The experience also helped clarify what I wanted from fitness. I decided I didn’t want to compete again.

My long-term priority was health, and some aspects of physique competition conflicted with that priority for me. I also had a history of disordered eating during my teens, which made extreme dietary control something I had to approach carefully. My teenage relationship with food had been complicated. Body image was part of it, but there was another psychological element that people around me at the time probably didn’t understand. As a teenager, I had encountered the philosophy of Stoicism and became fascinated with the idea of controlling impulses and emotional reactions. I grew up dealing with circumstances that made emotional control feel extremely important to me. I developed my own misguided version of Stoic training, and food became one of the basic impulses I tried to control to develop discipline.

Looking back as an adult, I can appreciate ideas about discipline and self-command while recognizing that some of the behaviors I developed around food were unhealthy. That history mattered when I evaluated figure competition. I knew there were places I didn’t want to take myself again. So I competed once, learned from the experience and continued training. Fitness had become a lifelong pursuit rather than a competition preparation cycle.

From Bodybuilding to Athleticism

By my early 30s, my interests were changing again. I started studying information from professional strength coaches and listening to discussions about how athletes were assessed. I became interested in unilateral training, weak-point training, and identifying deficiencies rather than simply building individual muscles.

I started testing myself. How strong was I on one leg? How many bodyweight strength skills could I master? How flexible was I? Could I develop balance and coordination? Could I tumble? Could I learn gymnastics skills? For roughly the next six years, I devoted a considerable amount of attention to calisthenics, unilateral exercises, flexibility, gymnastics, and athletic movement. This gave me abilities that traditional bodybuilding hadn’t emphasized. It also taught me another lesson: specialization always has tradeoffs.

My training environment complicated the process. The gym where I trained frequently rearranged its facilities. Areas that had been safe for practicing particular skills disappeared. Padding was removed. Rooms changed purposes. Movements that had once been reasonably safe became impractical. I tried gymnastics facilities as well, but finding serious instruction for an adult proved difficult. Many gymnastics programs understandably concentrate heavily on children and competitive youth athletes. As an adult attempting to develop skills, I often felt like an afterthought.

Then I moved. COVID happened. Training environments changed again. Over time, I lost some of the gymnastics abilities I had developed because I no longer had a safe place to practice certain inversions and tumbling movements consistently. That period taught me how important environment can be. Discipline matters enormously, but certain skills require the right physical environment. A person cannot safely practice every movement anywhere.

Bringing Weights Back

After roughly six years of emphasizing bodyweight training and calisthenics, I noticed another change. My legs weren’t as muscular or robust as I wanted them to be. Calisthenics had given me tremendous benefits, but my own body responded better when I incorporated more loaded lower-body resistance work. So I changed the program again. This is one of the advantages of accumulating years of training experience. I don’t have to pledge allegiance to a particular training philosophy. I’ve used bodybuilding, traditional resistance training, running, calisthenics, unilateral training, gymnastics, flexibility work, and mobility training. Each tool has a purpose. I can select among them according to what I’m trying to accomplish during a particular period—or if I’m bored and want a change.

What Training Clients Taught Me

During these years, I also spent roughly a decade training other people. That experience was another form of education entirely. I worked with dozens of people across different ages, body types, and backgrounds. I trained both men and women, and I saw enormous variation in how individuals responded to exercise.

One observation became especially important to me because of assumptions people sometimes make about my own physique. Over the years, people have occasionally looked at me and attributed my muscularity or physical condition primarily to genetics or racial background. Yet some of the women I trained responded to the same types of training I follow much faster than I did. They were coming to me for help. I was designing or teaching the training. Yet their bodies could sometimes respond more readily than mine. This reality exposes how people without experience with, or dedication to, a consistent training regimen or fitness lifestyle can view these matters through an overly simplistic and naïve lens. They make assumptions and treat them as fact, sometimes with enough confidence to state those assumptions directly to you, the trainer or athlete who has firsthand experience with the complexities of pursuing and reaching fitness goals. In short, no one should look at someone’s race and assume how much work was required to build a specific physique or achieve a particular level of physical performance. Broad stereotypes obscure the enormous variation among individuals and cheapen the complexity of human physiology, individual response to training, and the years of work that may lie behind a physical result.

My own physique represents more than two decades of training, experimentation, nutrition, and adjustment. Coaching other people reinforced just how individual the process can be.

Your Body Will Change

Perhaps the most valuable thing I’ve learned from training for 24 years is what happens when your body changes. Mine has changed several times. When I first began exercising, I experienced significant trapezius discomfort. I had spent much of my childhood relatively sedentary, often sitting at a computer, playing video games, or doing other seated activities. Once I suddenly began training regularly, I dealt with trap pain that could become severe.

Eventually, as my body adapted and became stronger, most of that problem disappeared. During my early and mid-20s, maintaining the body composition I wanted was relatively straightforward. Around my late 20s, I began noticing subtle changes. I needed to pay somewhat closer attention to nutrition. Then my training changed dramatically during my calisthenics and gymnastics period. Years later, I saw the consequences of deemphasizing loaded lower-body training. My legs had changed, so I adjusted again. Then, in my late 30s and approaching my 40s, I noticed another significant change in how my body responded. Even while remaining relatively lean, my shape and body composition began changing. Maintaining the look I preferred required more attention than it had in my 20s. This adjustment was harder—the hardest of all so far.

It took me roughly a year of observation and experimentation to determine what worked well for my body at this stage. Fortunately, I had decades of experience available to me. I could change a variable and observe the result. I knew how my body had responded to weights. I knew how it had responded to calisthenics. I knew what happened when I ran regularly. I understood nutrition. I understood my historical activity levels. I had a baseline. That accumulated information may be one of the greatest benefits of lifelong fitness.

Building a Personal Operating Manual

After enough years, you develop an extensive record of how your body responds:

• You learn how you gain muscle.
• You learn how you lose it.
• You discover which movements improve your body and which ones irritate it.
• You learn how much food you need under different circumstances.
• You see what happens when your daily movement declines.
• You learn how much training volume you tolerate.
• You begin recognizing when recovery needs more attention.

You Become Harder to Fool

After 24 years of testing different approaches, a person’s physique alone isn’t enough to convince me that a particular program works. I want to understand the entire training picture. Experience gives you a reference point when a new diet, exercise, or fitness trend appears. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve followed approaches for years and later changed them. I’ve specialized too heavily in certain areas. I’ve lost skills that I previously developed. I’ve had to rebuild aspects of my training. All of that information has value.

My Training Today

Today, my approach combines lessons from virtually every phase of the previous 24 years.

• I strength train.
• I use bodybuilding principles.
• I incorporate calisthenics.
• I work on gymnastics skills.
• I train flexibility and mobility.

I incorporate cardiovascular exercise and daily movement. And I structure these elements more deliberately through different macrocycles and mesocycles rather than trying to maximize every physical quality simultaneously. Recovery has also become a larger component of my routine. I incorporate lower-intensity days, mobility, walking, planned training breaks, sauna and red-light therapy alongside more traditional recovery fundamentals such as nutrition and sleep.

My overall activity has increased as I’ve gotten older. At one point, five training days per week worked extremely well for me. Now I tend to be active all seven days, although those seven days differ in intensity. Some are demanding strength sessions. Others emphasize skills, mobility, flexibility, or recovery. I expect this system to continue changing. That’s part of what makes the next stage interesting.

I still want to find a gymnastics environment where I can pursue adult skill development seriously and safely. I still have things I want to improve. After 24 years, I haven’t reached a point where I consider the process finished.

The Long-Term Advantage

People often talk about exercise in terms of immediate outcomes: losing 20 pounds, building muscle for summer, preparing for a wedding, completing a challenge.

Those goals can get someone started. The much larger payoff appears over decades.

When you’ve trained through your 20s, 30s, 40s, and eventually beyond, you have a history with your own body. Changes become problems you can investigate rather than completely unfamiliar territory. That is one reason I think younger people should take their health seriously while their bodies are more forgiving.

• Build muscle
• Develop strength
• Learn to move
• Work on flexibility
• Build cardiovascular capacity
• Learn about nutrition
• Pay attention to recovery
• Most importantly, learn your own body

Someone beginning at 40, 50, 60, or later can still gain tremendous benefits from exercise. Starting later simply means beginning the education later. There is value in starting whenever you can. For those who are already young and healthy, however, those years offer an opportunity to build knowledge and physical capacity that can serve them for decades. Twenty-four years ago, I started exercising because I wanted to change how my body looked. That simple goal eventually became an education spanning most of my adult life.

I’ve trained myself. I’ve trained other people. I’ve competed. I’ve run. I’ve lifted weights. I’ve practiced calisthenics and gymnastics. I’ve focused on flexibility and mobility. I’ve watched my body change and repeatedly modified my approach in response. Long-term fitness teaches you how to live in a body that will continue changing throughout your life. The program that served me at 20 evolved by 30. My training in my late 30s required another evolution. I fully expect my 40s, 50s, and 60s to present new problems to solve and new things to learn.

Share your health and fitness experience in the comments.