Why I choose to focus on movement patterns and strength over weight loss.

I feel like it’s important to start this podcast off by saying that I don’t have anything against aesthetic goals. I typically have a few aesthetic goals myself. But I address those goals through performance goals that I know will yield the aesthetic changes that I might be wanting. So this is not to shame anyone who wants to change their body. Especially by adding muscle to it. I personally think it’s amazing that we can manipulate the human body via what we do with it. It’s fairly fascinating and what drew me to this field in the first place. But more from a performance standpoint, rather than an aesthetic one.

I get asked a lot if I ever competed in bikini or fitness competitions as well as powerlifting. So I get questions on both sides of the performance and aesthetic spectrum. And the answer to that is that I’ve never done either nor have I wanted to. My answer has always been that I wanted to lift for life. And I’ve been asked dozens of times in the gym over the last decade or more what I’m training for. This tends to be a common question when someone witnesses a woman lifting weights, or training with any intent beyond doing cardio and abs. I hope that that becomes less of a thing, and that training for life via intentional weight training just becomes the norm. Within the health and fitness industry anyway. I don’t know that it will ever be the norm and main stream.

So today’s episode is going to mostly be about the importance of training movement patterns and skills.

As well as the focus on performance goals over aesthetic goals. And What I’ve seen from having that focus with my clients over the past seven years.

I was extremely intentional in choosing the name of my signature 12 month training program back in 2017 - Built by Annie. I wanted it to be known that we were building things. We were building your body, building muscles, building movement patterns, building your work capacity, building efficacy in the gym. Much more went into choosing the name of that program then it just sounded good or making sense.

I don’t have science to back this up, but what I’ve seen anecdotally is that when people have a performance score, or a skill that they are invested in learning, their adherence and joy with that process increases. And I think that’s missing when we only focus on aesthetic goals or wanting to change our body.

Again, even if your main goal or objective is aesthetic, I encourage you to look at certain performance goals that might lead to the aesthetic change that you are wanting. For instance if you want a bigger butt, maybe your goal is to hip thrust two times per week, increasing your capacity one of those days with high reps, in increasing your strength or working towards a strength goal on the other day, say for six reps. Maybe you want to hit 300 pounds for six reps. That’s going to be a lot more of an enjoyable experience than just focusing on growing your butt.

If your goal is to get bigger deltoids, the same thing applies. The performance goal of getting a pull up, or a certain number of inverted rows for your rear adults, and reaching a performance goal for your overhead pressing is going to be some thing you will be far more invested in and proud of than simply growing your delts.

Now, I don’t coach or focus on nutrition but really the same thing applies there. Your performance goals with nutrition if you want to lose body fat would be around getting a certain amount of vegetables in per day, or drinking a certain amount of water, or practicing a certain habit.