if you think about it, what usually gets in the way are the rules we carry around in our heads, far more often than a lack of willpower or discipline. we picked them up from years of diet culture and bad fitness advice, and they quietly decide what we eat, how we train and how we feel about ourselves at the end of the week.

the frustrating part is that you can’t think your way out of those rules, no matter how much you know about nutrition and training. you can read every article about food freedom and still feel guilty after a slice of cake, because a belief that took years to build doesn’t move just because someone tells you it’s wrong.

what moves it is experience. doing something differently, seeing what happens, and doing it again until your brain has enough proof to update the old story.

in this guide, i’ll walk you through a 12-week framework built around concrete actions. each week, you’ll focus on one small thing, simple enough to fit into a normal life and chosen to challenge the most common rules we carry about food and training. by the end, you’ll have new habits, and you’ll also have your own experience to back them up, which is what makes them stay.

the rest of this guide is for paid members

here’s what you’ll work on over 12 weeks:

• phase I (weeks 1–4): build a stronger foundation by questioning old rules, rethinking progress, and making small changes to how you eat and train.

• phase II (weeks 5–8): build strength, find more balance with food and exercise, and learn to make training and recovery work together.

• phase III (weeks 9–12): make your habits work in real life, change the way you think about food, and build an approach that feels right for you and lasts beyond these 12 weeks.

why become a paid member?

the paid tier is for readers who want to take things a step further and turn what they learn into something they can actually use. alongside the free posts, you’ll get:

• 2 in-depth guides every month: the tools, frameworks, & resources to help you put what you learn into practice.

• the logbook: a monthly training journal where i share the exact program i’m running. it’s a real-time look at how i set goals, adjust my training, and track my progress along the way.

• member perks: exclusive offers, ready-to-use workout templates & workbooks.

Read more

i’d been strength training and doing other sports for a few years already, just never with the consistency i have now. somewhere along the way, while following that program, something clicked. i consider that period the real beginning of my fitness journey because it’s when i learned how to train properly and, more importantly, how to enjoy it. i'm telling you all this because training at home didn’t just help me stay active while gyms were closed. it made me fall in love with lifting weights, helped me build muscle, and taught me how to stay consistent.

and yet, there’s still this idea floating around fitness culture that home workouts are for cardio, sweating and “toning”, but if you want to build real muscle, you need a gym.

a fully equipped gym does give you more options when it comes to exercises and progression, but you don’t need a membership to build muscle. you absolutely can do it at home. the catch is that your sets need to get progressively harder over time, and this is where many home workouts fall short. they keep you moving, get your heart rate up and leave you sweaty, but they don’t necessarily challenge your muscles enough to keep them growing.

📝 in this article: what your muscles actually need to grow, where training at home gets tricky, and which (few) pieces of equipment make the biggest difference.

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your muscles respond to effort, wherever you train

your muscle doesn’t know where you’re training. it doesn’t know whether you’re lifting a barbell in a gym, a dumbbell in your living room, or your own body weight on the kitchen floor. what it responds to is how much effort you’re asking it to produce, and more specifically, how close you get to the point where you couldn’t complete another rep with good form.

if you've ever followed a training program, you've probably noticed that almost everything is written in sets of 8 to 12 reps. that range has been considered the "hypertrophy zone" for decades, even though we now know that muscle can grow with anywhere from about 5 to 30 reps per set, as long as you take those sets close to failure.

the reason 8 to 12 stuck around is mostly practical: the more reps you do, the longer each set lasts and the more tiring the whole workout becomes. a set of 25 or 30 reps burns, leaves you out of breath and takes a lot of mental effort to push all the way to the end, and if you do that for every exercise, your session gets long and exhausting pretty quickly. using a heavier weight for fewer reps gives your muscles a similar stimulus in less time and with a lot less suffering, which is why it makes sense as a default.

but it's mostly a matter of convenience, and when the heaviest dumbbells you own are the ones you have at home, doing more reps is a perfectly valid way to build muscle. studies comparing heavy and light loads find very similar muscle growth across a wide range of weights, as long as the sets are taken close to failure.

where training at home gets tricky

training at home comes with a few limitations, and understanding them can make the difference between spending months exercising without seeing much progress and actually building muscle with the equipment you have.

the first problem is progression

at the gym, when a set gets too easy, you grab the next dumbbell or add another plate to the bar. at home, especially if you’re relying on bodyweight alone, you can hit a ceiling pretty quickly. this is particularly true for your legs and glutes, which are already used to carrying your body weight around all day. thirty bodyweight squats might feel challenging during your first week, but a few weeks later, your muscles have adapted and the same set no longer provides much of a stimulus for growth.

the second problem is your back

pushing movements are relatively easy to do at home (think push-ups for your chest and triceps, or pike push-ups for your shoulders). pulling movements are a different story because you need something to pull against. without equipment, it’s much harder to train your back and biceps effectively. a program built mostly around push-ups, squats and lunges can leave important muscle groups undertrained, and over time that imbalance shows up in your posture.

the third problem is effort

most home workouts you find online are designed to make you sweat. they often combine short rest periods, lots of jumping and high reps of relatively easy exercises, leaving you breathless and feeling like you’ve worked really hard. and you probably have worked hard. but feeling exhausted isn’t the same as giving your muscles a strong stimulus for growth. your heart and lungs can be working overtime while your muscles still have plenty left in the tank. if you finish a set of squats and could easily do another ten reps, that set probably wasn’t very challenging for your legs, even if you’re sweating and breathing heavily by the end of the workout.

how to make it work

𖥔 train close to failure. if you only remember one thing from this article, make it this one. end most of your sets when you could have done one, two, maybe three more reps with good form. the closer to failure a set ends, the more muscle it tends to build. an easy way to check yourself: if you finish a set of squats and could easily do another ten reps, that set probably wasn’t very challenging for your legs, even if you’re sweating and breathing heavily by the end of the workout.

𖥔 make it harder without adding weight. when there’s no heavier dumbbell to grab, you change the exercise instead. you can take three or four seconds to lower yourself during a romanian deadlift, pause for two seconds at the bottom of a squat or at the top of a hip thrust, or switch to single-leg variations — the bulgarian split squat, for example, is one of the best exercises you can do at home to train your legs and glutes. you can also simply add reps, which builds about as much muscle as adding weight, as long as your sets still end close to failure.

𖥔 cover the basic movements. make sure your weekly training covers these movement patterns: a squat or a lunge, a hip hinge (like a romanian deadlift or a hip thrust), a horizontal push (like a push-up), a vertical push (like an overhead press), a horizontal pull (like a row) and a vertical pull (like a pull-up or a band pulldown). together, these movements give you a solid foundation for training all your major muscle groups. as a starting point, aim to train each major muscle group at least twice a week and work toward around ten challenging sets per muscle group per week.

if you’re not sure how to structure your workouts, this article will help you plan your sessions.

𖥔 write everything down. track your reps, tempo, and the variation you’re doing. progress at home often happens in small steps that are easy to forget from one week to the next. without keeping track, it’s hard to tell whether you’re actually getting stronger or just repeating the same workout. your notes also give you a clear idea of what to aim for next time, whether that’s squeezing out one more rep, slowing down the lowering phase, or moving to a more challenging variation.

𖥔 eat for it. your muscles need energy and protein to recover and grow, so your training can only do so much if you’re not eating enough to support it. when it comes to protein, around 1.6 g per kg of body weight per day is a solid target for muscle growth. some people may benefit from a little more, but you don’t need to chase huge numbers to see results. and if you’re trying to build muscle while eating as little as possible, you’re making it harder for your body to recover and adapt to your training. you can’t expect to build muscle efficiently if you’re constantly underfueling yourself.

the equipment you actually need

you don’t need a home gym to start building muscle, but a few well-chosen pieces of equipment can make progression a whole lot easier.

💵 if you have zero budget

start with your body weight, a sturdy chair and a backpack filled with books or water bottles. the backpack is more useful than it looks: you can wear it for squats and lunges, hold it for hip thrusts, or use it for bent-over rows to give your back some much-needed pulling work.

this setup is enough for your first few months, especially if you’re new to strength training. you’ll have plenty of time to learn the movements, improve your technique and build a foundation before you need to invest in anything. eventually, though, you’ll probably find that some exercises become too easy, particularly for your legs and glutes. that’s when having some proper resistance makes a real difference.

💸 if you can spend a little

a set of resistance bands is a great next step. they’re inexpensive, take up almost no space and can add resistance to exercises like squats, glute bridges, hip thrusts and overhead presses. with a suitable door anchor, you can also do rows and pulldowns, making it much easier to train your back and biceps.

a pull-up bar that fits securely in a doorframe is another useful addition, especially if you want to work toward your first pull-up. even if you can’t do one yet, you can start with controlled hangs and assisted variations, as long as the bar is installed according to its instructions and is suitable for your doorframe.

💰💰 if you want a setup that lasts for years

if you can afford one bigger investment, i’d go for a pair of adjustable dumbbells. ideally, choose a set that lets you increase the weight in small increments and has enough room to grow with you. add a bench if you have the space, and you’ve got a setup that can cover a huge range of exercises: romanian deadlifts, squats, lunges, hip thrusts, rows, presses, curls and plenty more. combine your dumbbells with a set of resistance bands, and you’ll have even more options for training your entire body.

a kettlebell is a nice extra for swings, goblet squats and other exercises, but it’s not a priority. i’d put that money toward a more versatile set of weights first.

what you can happily skip: vibration plates and pretty much any gadget sold with promises of “toning” or sculpting one specific part of your body. you don’t need a special piece of equipment to tone your arms, flatten your stomach or lift your glutes. you need a training routine that challenges your muscles, enough food to support your efforts, and time to let the results add up.

i spend hours every week turning complex concepts into practical, easy-to-follow advice. if you find my work helpful, consider supporting it by becoming a free or paid subscriber ♡

Subscribe now

if you want to start this week, keep it simple. choose one exercise for each movement pattern, use whatever equipment you already have, and plan two or three full-body sessions. aim to finish most sets with just one to three good reps left in the tank, and write down what you do. the following week, look for one small way to progress: an extra rep, a little more weight, a slower lowering phase or a slightly harder variation.

and before you go… if you train at home, tell me in the comments what your setup looks like, and share this with the friend who still thinks she needs a gym membership to get started.

thanks for reading,
—glicia ⋆˚✿˖

about the writer

i’m glicia, a certified personal trainer and dietitian in training based in paris. at never not hungry i translate research and complex concepts into clear, relatable insights you can actually use in your everyday life. when i’m not writing, i’m designing workout programs, trying overpriced cafés, reading romantasy, or lifting heavy things. welcome to my little corner of the internet. i hope you’ll stay.

💖 find me elsewhere (instagram, pinterest, spotify)

sources

• Schoenfeld, B. J., Grgic, J., Ogborn, D., & Krieger, J. W. (2017). Strength and hypertrophy adaptations between low- vs. high-load resistance training: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 31(12), 3508–3523. link

• Robinson, Z. P., Pelland, J. C., Remmert, J. F., Refalo, M. C., Jukic, I., Steele, J., & Zourdos, M. C. (2024). Exploring the dose-response relationship between estimated resistance training proximity to failure, strength gain, and muscle hypertrophy: a series of meta-regressions. Sports Medicine, 54(9), 2209–2231. link

• Plotkin, D. L., et al. (2022). Progressive overload without progressing load? The effects of load or repetition progression on muscular adaptations. PeerJ, 10, e14142. link

• Schoenfeld, B. J., Ogborn, D., & Krieger, J. W. (2017). Dose-response relationship between weekly resistance training volume and increases in muscle mass: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Sports Sciences, 35(11), 1073–1082.

if you missed edition 01, you can catch up here.

i’m a little late with this edition, but i promise i have a good reason. i took two weeks off during this training block: one during my vacation, and another one right after, because i wasn’t feeling well. instead of sending you a update when i wasn’t really halfway, i decided to extend the block by two weeks, picking up exactly where i stopped, and to wait until i had real numbers to share with you.

in the first edition, i told you i’d rather make the plan work for me than force myself to follow it at all costs. i didn’t expect to put that into practice so soon. when i got sick, i stopped and gave myself the time i needed to recover, instead of pushing through just for the sake of sticking to a plan. and that was only the first adjustment, because the plan itself needed more changes than i expected.

in the last edition, i shared my goal for this block: becoming a faster runner while maintaining the muscle i’ve built over the years. so it’s time to catch you up on what’s happened since then, what worked, what didn’t, and how i’ve adjusted my goals and training along the way.

let’s get into it.

the logbook is for ✨ paid subscribers ✨

in the rest of this article, i’ll walk you through…

• where i got it wrong, and how to adjust a plan without abandoning it

• my new running program: the two weekly sessions, distances and paces, and why i decided to build it myself

• my new weekly split, now that i’m running twice a week instead of three times

• my numbers at this point in the block: lifting and running, next to my starting numbers from edition 01

• what changed in my nutrition, and why i stopped the deficit

• my red lines check: energy, recovery and hunger, and what they told me

why become a paid subscriber?

the paid tier is for readers who want to take things a step further and turn what they learn into something they can actually use. alongside the free posts, you’ll get:

• 2 in-depth guides every month: the tools, frameworks, & resources to help you put what you learn into practice.

• the logbook: a monthly training journal where i share the exact program i’m running. it’s a real-time look at how i set goals, adjust my training, and track my progress along the way.

• member perks: exclusive offers, ready-to-use workout templates & workbooks.

Read more

food works the same way when i’m away. no tracking, no rules, i eat what i love and what i feel like eating. the only things i hold on to are drinking enough water and having some protein and fruit at breakfast, mostly because that’s what makes me feel good in the morning.

if you asked me to describe myself in one word when it comes to training, i’d say consistent. but it wasn’t always that way.

i used to think being consistent meant never missing a session, never eating “off plan,” and never taking a week off unless i had a very good reason. it took me years of starting over to realize that consistency and perfection are two very different things, and that only one of them actually gets you anywhere.

subscribe to never not hungry for free to get weekly posts on lifting, nutrition & wellness culture. if you want to take things a step further, becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to all the guides, tools, and resources i create to help you get stronger with more confidence and less guesswork.

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what being consistent really looks like

before i learned how to be consistent, i was very good at starting. i’d find a new program, get excited about it, follow it to the letter for two or three weeks, and then something would happen. maybe i’d come across another program online that looked smarter, or hear a coach explain why what i was doing was all wrong. and just like that, i’d drop what i was doing and start over, convinced the next program would finally be the perfect one.

i was always looking for a better plan, and i almost never made it to the end of anything.

until i realized that consistency is a lot less exciting than trying to be perfect. there are no fresh starts, no clean slate, no shiny new program every month. it’s following the same plan for months even when it starts to feel boring, doing a shorter session when you only have forty minutes, and eating a normal dinner after a big lunch without trying to make up for it.

when i look back at my six years of training, they’re full of imperfect weeks. there are the three or four weeks i take off every year for trips, the months when work gets busy and i train less than i’d like, and plenty of sessions where the weights feel heavier than they should. if you plotted my progress on a graph, it would probably go up and down all over the place. what makes the difference is the average of all those weeks. in a normal year, i train around 48 weeks out of 52, and when i take a break, i come back without turning it into a whole thing.

your body doesn’t really know what happened on one random tuesday. it responds to what you do most of the time, over weeks and months. and that’s good news, because it means one missed session, a weekend of eating out, or even a week at the beach barely makes a difference. what actually holds you back is the cycle of going all in, burning out, and starting over. every time you start from zero, you’re back at week one.

when you look at the numbers, it makes even more sense. twelve weeks on the same program, even if you only follow it 80% of the time, is enough for your muscles to adapt and for you to gradually add a little more weight to the bar.

now take those same twelve weeks and split them across four different programs that you drop after three weeks each. on paper, you trained just as much. but in practice, you spent most of that time learning new exercises, figuring out a new routine, and starting over before you ever had a chance to see your lifts go up.

the five changes that finally made me consistent

𖥔 give every habit a minimum version. for each thing you want to do regularly, decide what the full version looks like and what your bare minimum would be. if you take your training as an example, the full version could be four one-hour lifting sessions a week, and the minimum, two forty-minute full-body sessions. the minimum is what you do in the weeks when life gets in the way, and it’s what keeps you from falling back to zero. it’s exactly how i built the 50-day challenge i’m running right now. if you want to join me, i explain all the details in this post.

𖥔 finish the program. pick a program that makes sense for your level and your schedule, and follow it for eight to twelve weeks before you judge it. it will probably start to feel repetitive at some point, and that’s usually when it starts working, because you finally know the exercises well enough to push them. the perfect program doesn’t exist, and a decent one you actually finish will always do more for you than a brilliant one you drop in week three.

𖥔 after a slip, just eat your next meal. no skipping breakfast the morning after, no extra cardio to “burn it off”, no stricter plan starting monday. you go back to your normal way of eating at the next meal, as if nothing happened, because nutritionally almost nothing did. the compensation is what turns one meal into a bad week.

𖥔 put your breaks in the calendar. i know i’ll take three trips a year, so i plan three or four weeks off training from the start. when they’re part of the plan, they stop feeling like failures, and coming back is just the next step instead of another fresh start. the same goes for busy periods at work, exams or holidays with family: if you can see them coming, decide in advance what your minimum version will look like during those weeks.

𖥔 judge the month, not the day. at the end of each month, count how many sessions you did and how many of your meals looked like what you wanted. if the answer is “most of them”, you’re doing well, even if one week was a mess. looking at a whole month makes it much harder to decide you’ve ruined everything because of one bad day.

i spend hours every week turning complex concepts into practical, easy-to-follow advice. if you find my work helpful, consider supporting it by becoming a free or paid subscriber ♡

✨ subscribe now ✨

when i think about the version of me who started over every week, i wish someone had told her she was already working hard enough. what she needed was a plan that still worked when life got in the way, and permission to have an average week: to train a little less during a busy month, or to eat pizza on a saturday and have a normal breakfast on sunday without calling it a failure.

six years in, those imperfect weeks are the reason i’m still lifting today. so if you’re getting ready for yet another monday reset, i’d skip it this time and go back to wherever you left off, even if that means starting with the minimum version. all those ordinary weeks you’ve been dismissing are the ones doing the work.

if this one hit close to home, tap the ❤️, tell me in the comments where your “perfect” usually breaks down, or forward it to the friend who restarts every monday (we all have one, and sometimes it’s us).

thanks for reading,
—glicia ⋆˚✿˖

about the writer

i’m glicia, a personal trainer and dietitian in training based in paris. six years ago, i got over my fear of getting bulky and decided to give lifting a try. back then i couldn’t do a single push-up, i was scared of carbs, and i was surviving on rabbit food. today i eat more than i ever have, plenty of carbs included (gasp!), and i’m stronger and leaner than i was at 25.

at never not hungry i translate research and complex concepts into clear, relatable insights you can actually use in your everyday life. from the science behind lifting to habits, mindset, and the practical frameworks that make change easier, every post is designed to help you make sense of fitness without making it your whole life.

when i’m not writing, i’m designing workout programs, trying overpriced cafés, reading romantasy, or lifting heavy things. welcome to my little corner of the internet. i hope you’ll stay.

💖 find me elsewhere (instagram, pinterest, spotify)

train every day, go on a diet, run a marathon, read 10 books before the end of the year, wake up at 5 am, start a business, learn a new language and finally become that girl. the list of goals is long and, somehow, every single one of them promises the same thing: ending the year as a completely different version of the person you were at the start.

i do get the appeal of this kind of challenge. for a lot of people, sticking to a routine gets harder and harder as the months get colder. waking up at 5 am to train in the summer is one thing, but waking up at the same time when it’s 5°C outside, still dark, and your bed feels like the best place in the world is a whole other story. there’s a difference, though, between using autumn and winter as a chance to get yourself organized again and believing you’ll manage to change 15 things in your life at the same time (you won’t, trust me).

if most of the habits you want to build still aren’t part of your routine, a “winter arc challenge” probably isn’t going to fix that by magic. i’m not saying this to discourage you. i love setting new goals, creating little challenges for myself and even gamifying my life a bit, i just try to keep my feet on the ground these days.

a few years ago, i jumped headfirst into pretty much any challenge that came my way. 75 hard, sure. a giant list of daily habits, bring it on. wake up early, train, walk, read, meditate, drink three liters of water, never eat this, never do that... and then day twelve would come around and i’d be tired, frustrated and staring at an endless list of things i hadn’t managed to tick off.

now i prefer a different approach. i don’t want to spend the next months trying to transform my entire life. i want to pick a few small things that would actually make a difference in my routine and make room for them. so this autumn, i’d like to suggest a different kind of challenge.

i spend hours every week turning complex concepts into practical, easy-to-follow advice. if you find my work helpful, consider supporting it by becoming a free or paid subscriber ♡

yes pls ♡ i want to get stronger!

50 days, 7 small changes

the idea is simple: for 50 days, you choose 7 small changes to bring into different areas of your life. it doesn’t all have to be about fitness. it could be eating a portion of fruit a day, reading for five minutes before bed, leaving your phone outside the bedroom, going for a walk, spending some time on a personal project, tidying the house for 10 minutes or simply going to bed a little earlier.

there’s no universal list and, above all, there’s no checklist built around the routine of an influencer who apparently has the whole day free to film reels, do her skincare and go to the gym. your list has to fit your life.

how it works

you can start whenever you like, but the idea is to finish before the holidays, when routines naturally start getting more chaotic. that time of year is for celebrating, traveling, seeing the people we love and enjoying ourselves, so when the holidays come around, i want to give life a little permission to just happen.

i also don’t want this to be 50 days of following a checklist, only to drop everything on day 51. i’d like these 50 days to be a kind of experiment, a stretch of time to:

1. take an honest look at the areas of your life you’d like to improve

2. choose small changes that could help

3. test those changes in real life

4. notice what works, what doesn’t, and why

5. decide what’s worth keeping once the 50 days are over

because at the end of the day, the real goal is to find out which changes actually make sense for you, and the challenge is just a good excuse to do that.

your list is the heart of the challenge

before you start, you’re going to look at your life as it is today. the real one, with work, studies, commitments, tiredness, laziness, last-minute surprises and everything else, rather than the life you’d like to have or the perfect routine you saved on pinterest.

think about the different areas of your life and choose 7 small things that could make it a little better. i’ll share my own 7 habits below for inspiration, but your list will probably look completely different from mine, and that’s exactly how it should be.

one important rule: create a “minimum version”

each change on your list gets two versions. the full version is what you plan to do on a normal day. the minimum version is what you can manage on a bad day, when you’re tired, sick, traveling, overwhelmed or just not in the mood for anything. the minimum version counts, and you log it the same way, without guilt and without needing to “make up for it” the next day.

in my experience, habits rarely die because people don’t know what to do. what usually kills them is a bad day where the only options you can see are doing everything or doing nothing, so i want to offer you a third one.

if your goal is to read 10 pages, maybe the minimum is one page. if you want to train for 45 minutes, maybe the minimum is a 10-minute walk. if you want to journal every day, maybe the minimum is three lines. the minimum version is there to keep the habit alive when life isn’t cooperating.

the rest of this post is for ✨ paid subscribers ✨

here’s what you’ll find inside:

• the 20-minute exercise to take an honest look at your life right now and find the smallest changes that would actually make a difference

• four checks to run before a habit goes on your list, so you don’t end up with a routine built only on restriction

• my own 7 habits, with the full and minimum version of each one and why i chose them

• how to make it stick, with the small things that keep a habit alive on a random tuesday in november

• what to do when you miss a day, step by step, so one bad day doesn’t turn into a week of guilt

• the notion template to plan your 7 changes and track your progress over the 50 days

why become a paid subscriber?

the paid tier is for readers who want to take things a step further and turn what they learn into something they can actually use. alongside the free posts, you’ll get:

• 2 in-depth guides every month: the tools, frameworks, & resources to help you put what you learn into practice.

• the logbook: a monthly training journal where i share the exact program i’m running. it’s a real-time look at how i set goals, adjust my training, and track my progress along the way.

• member perks: exclusive offers, ready-to-use workout templates & workbooks.

Read more

“how to become a gym girl” is a little series i’m putting together for those of you who want to start going to the gym but feel stuck before you even begin. if that’s you, i hope this makes taking that first step feel a little easier ♡

welcome back to our how to become a gym girl series.

i wrote almost all of today’s post at the gym, in the middle of my quad workout. i rarely touch my phone when i train, but today i was so bored that i opened my notes app and started typing whatever was going through my head. i do this all the time. i even have a folder called “brain dump” for moments like this 😄

i just wanted to clear my head for a few minutes, but somehow, i ended up thinking about the next posts i wanted to write. and that’s when i realized it’s been a while since the last edition of this series. so between sets, while i rested and watched what was happening around me, a few ideas started to come together. they ended up becoming the post you’re reading right now.

to be honest, i didn’t really know what to write about until a conversation caught my attention.

a couple of women near me were talking about how much they disliked working out. one thing led to another, and the conversation got to a point that hit very close to home. one of them said (maybe not in these exact words, but something along these lines):

— “i’ve never been an athletic person. i've always been so weak.”

if you’ve been reading me for a while, you probably know this part of my story. i spent a big part of my life believing i wasn’t an athletic person. i hated sports, i thought i had no talent for them, and i simply accepted it as part of who i was.

as if some people were just born “sporty” and others weren’t.

that’s when i started thinking about how we build stories about ourselves and, after a while, start treating them as facts.

“i’m not an athletic person.”

“i hate the gym.”

“i’ve never been good at sports.”

“i have no discipline.”

“i just can’t enjoy exercise.”

sometimes these sentences are only a description of how we feel in that moment. but when we repeat the same story for years, it becomes part of our identity. and without even noticing, we start making decisions based on it.

i know because i did exactly that.

the identity you’ve built for yourself

if you’ve read atomic habits by james clear, you might remember the idea of identity-based habits. put very simply, changing a habit shouldn’t only be about what you want to achieve. there’s also a question behind it: who is the person who does these things?

instead of just thinking “i want to read more,” you start thinking “i’m someone who reads.” instead of “i need to go to the gym three times a week,” you start building the identity of someone who trains.

that might sound like a small difference, but it changes a lot about the way you see your own actions. if you believe you’re a sedentary person trying to start working out, every trip to the gym can feel like a chore that takes effort and willpower. but if you start seeing yourself as someone who trains, going to the gym stops being something you’re trying to do and becomes something you just do.

it becomes part of who you are.

and this is where another idea comes in. it wasn’t created to talk about habits, but i find it surprisingly relevant here: personal lore.

so… what's personal lore?

if you spend any time online, you’ve probably seen someone talk about their lore.

originally, lore refers to the history and the world behind a character, a video game, a movie or a book. it’s all the background details, events and little stories that explain how a character got to where they are. online, people borrowed the word to talk about the personal stories that make up their own lives.

that time you did something completely random at 19. the weird job you once had. the phase when you were obsessed with something. a story almost nobody knows, but that’s somehow part of who you are.

it’s your unofficial biography. the personal mythology you carry around about yourself.

i kept turning these two ideas over in my head. james clear's point is that the habits you repeat build the person you believe you are. personal lore says that the stories you repeat about yourself slowly become your own history. once i put them side by side, i started wondering whether the story we tell about ourselves could be rewritten.

rewriting your personal lore

for many years, my personal lore said i wasn’t an athletic person. that was the story.

i didn’t play sports, i wasn’t good at PE, and i was sedentary for most of my life. i had no strength, no coordination, no “talent.” and since that story had been repeated so many times, i never stopped to question it.

until i started lifting.

when i decided to take lifting seriously, i had some very concrete goals. i wanted to change the way my body looked, improve my health, find out if i could do things that seemed really hard for me and, most of all, get stronger.

but looking back, i think one of the most important things that happened was something else. slowly, i started collecting evidence that the story i told about myself wasn’t necessarily true. movements that had seemed impossible became part of my routine. the weights on the bar kept going up. after a few years, i was lifting things i couldn’t even imagine getting off the floor when i started.

i found out i could actually enjoy training.

and little by little, the story changed. i didn’t wake up one day and decide, “from now on, i’m an athletic person.” but somehow, my actions started to contradict the old story i had about myself. i think that distinction is important.

you don’t need to convince yourself that you’re already the person you want to be. you can start by giving yourself small pieces of proof.

you’re not stuck with the old version of you

i used to believe i didn’t like sports. it took me years to look at that belief properly, and when i did, it didn’t hold up very well. maybe i’d just never found an activity i enjoyed. i thought i was weak, but i’d never trained, so i had no way of knowing. i thought i had no discipline, when in reality i’d never built a routine that made sense for my life.

questioning these beliefs doesn’t mean every struggle is a mindset problem, or that changing the way you think is enough to change your life. that would be way too simplistic. sometimes you really won’t like an activity, and that’s fine. the gym doesn’t have to be for everyone. but there’s a huge difference between saying “i tried lifting and didn’t like it” and “i’m not someone who works out.”

the first one is a preference, the second one is an identity. and identities can change.

think of your identity as a story that’s being written all the time. you don’t have to erase everything that came before. your old story still exists, it’s part of you. but it doesn’t have to decide what happens in the next chapters.

if you’ve spent the last ten years saying you hate exercise, it doesn’t make much sense to try to become, overnight, the person who spends two hours at the gym every day and loves it. start smaller.

maybe you can start with a walk after lunch, two lifting sessions a week, or that pilates class you keep meaning to try. maybe it’s finally learning how to run, or simply deciding to stop treating movement as a punishment.

each of these choices adds a small line to your story. and after a while, you look back and realize your lore has changed.

how to start rewriting your lore

before you think about goals, weights, measurements or how many days a week you should train, i want to suggest an exercise. grab a piece of paper or open your notes app and write down your answers to these four questions.

01. what’s the story i tell about myself?

start with the sentences you repeat without even noticing.

• “i’m not athletic.”

• “i’m terrible at sports.”

• “i have no discipline.”

• “i don’t like the gym.”

• “i’m so weak.”

don’t try to fix these sentences yet. just get everything down on paper.

02. where did this story come from?

think about the experiences that helped shape this idea of yourself.

• was it school?

• a bad experience with sports?

• comments from other people?

• comparing yourself to someone else?

• years of not moving much?

• or did you simply never find an activity you liked?

this isn’t about finding someone to blame. it’s only about understanding where the story came from.

03. what do you want to be part of your lore from now on?

now imagine you’re writing the next version of your story. don’t think about the body you want to have. think about the person you want to be.

• “i’m someone who takes care of my health.”

• “i’m a woman who gets stronger over time.”

• “i’m someone who enjoys moving my body.”

• “i’m someone who doesn’t give up just because something is hard at first.”

• “i’m a woman who feeds my body instead of being scared of food.”

choose the affirmations that really make sense to you, not what looks good on social media.

04. what actions would back up this new story?

this is the most important part, because writing “i’m someone who trains” in your notes app is fun, but it won’t do the work for you.

if you want to be a gym girl, here are some things that could be part of your new lore:

• finding a gym where you actually feel comfortable

• choosing a training program you can realistically stick to

• starting with two or three sessions a week instead of trying to train every day

• learning the basic movements and accepting that you’ll feel a little clumsy at first

• writing down your weights and reps so you can see your progress

• adding reps or weight little by little

• eating enough to fuel your training, carbs included

• prioritizing protein and meals that actually keep you full

• sleeping and resting instead of believing more training is always better

• trying different kinds of movement until you find a few you really enjoy

• showing up even in the weeks when your motivation is nowhere to be found

none of this is particularly revolutionary, and that’s exactly the point. you don’t need a movie-worthy transformation to change the way you see yourself. you need enough experiences to show your brain that the old version of the story isn’t the only one possible anymore.

every workout is another line in your story

these days, when i think about the woman i was before i started training, it sometimes feels like i’m talking about someone else. the woman who believed she had no talent for sports is still part of my story but she’s no longer the only version of me that exists. and that's what i like most about the idea of personal lore. instead of trying to become a completely different person overnight, you just need to make room for other versions of yourself to exist, too.

maybe you’re not “an athletic person” yet. that’s okay. going to the gym twice this week already counts. so does doing your first push-up, adding 2 kg to your squat, taking a 20-minute walk when you’d normally have spent that time on the couch, and eating a plate of pasta before training without feeling like you have to make up for it later.

all of that is a new little detail in your lore. they’re small stories that, once they start to pile up, slowly change the way you see yourself. and one day, you realize that “i’m not someone who works out” just doesn’t make sense anymore.

because you do work out now. you’ve collected the evidence and you’ve written a different story.

that’s one of the best parts of starting something new: finding out that you never really knew who you could become.

thanks for reading,
—glicia ⋆˚✿˖

P.S. if you think this was useful, tap the ❤️, drop a comment, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

read the other posts in this series

about the writer

i’m glicia, a personal trainer and nutrition student based in paris. i’m the person behind never not hungry, a newsletter about getting stronger, eating actual food (yes, with carbs!), and making fitness a little less complicated. when i’m not writing, i’m designing workout programs, trying overpriced cafés, reading romantasy, or lifting heavy things. welcome to my little corner of the internet. i hope you’ll stay.

💖 find me elsewhere (instagram, pinterest, spotify)

i didn’t save the video, take screenshots, or even remember the creator’s name. unfortunately, my brain doesn’t work like, “oh, this could make a good piece of content. let me save it.” 😅 usually, when i see or hear something that catches my attention, it just lingers in the back of my mind for days until i eventually write it down. so forgive me for the lack of visual context. at least i like to think i’m a decent storyteller, so let me set the scene.

she was lean enough to have visible abdominal definition, which already puts her at a level of leanness most women don’t naturally walk around with. she trained hard, was active outside the gym, and looked like someone who took care of herself. honestly, most women i know would look at that body and think, “yeah, i’ll take that.”

but strangers on the internet looked at the same body and decided she clearly wasn’t lean enough. apparently, you could tell she trained, but not enough to have the body of someone who lifts.

who actually has that body

let’s start with the numbers, because they almost never make it into the conversation.

essential body fat for women is around 12% of body weight. the key word here is essential, which means the minimum amount of body fat the body needs for basic physiological functions, including hormone production. the healthy range sits higher, roughly 14 to 25%, although it varies with age and other individual factors. for most women, visible abs tend to show up toward the leaner end of that range, or below it.

so when your feed is full of women with visible abs all year round, you’re looking at a very small and very specific group of people. some are simply genetically lean and have always been that way. that’s not a virtue or a sign of superior discipline. it’s a body type. some are athletes who happen to be photographed during a particularly lean phase of their training year. and some may be using anabolic steroids without ever mentioning it.

that side of the fitness industry has become increasingly hard to ignore, while the results are still often packaged as nothing more than discipline. carrying a lot of muscle while staying extremely lean year-round isn’t something most women can achieve naturally, no matter how consistent they are. still, the caption says “hard work”, and you close the app wondering what’s wrong with your training.

research has shown that chronically not eating enough to support the demands of your training can have real consequences. it’s known as low energy availability, and when it becomes severe or prolonged, it can contribute to relative energy deficiency in sport, or RED-S.

basically, you’re training, but there isn’t enough energy left over to properly support all the other things your body needs to do. over time, that can affect everything from your menstrual cycle and thyroid function to bone health, recovery, energy levels, and injury risk. some women may notice their periods becoming irregular or disappearing altogether, while others might simply feel constantly tired, stop recovering well between sessions, or see changes like hair thinning. your body isn’t “failing” you. it’s adapting to a situation where there isn’t enough energy to comfortably cover everything you’re asking it to do.

new research shows just how important this can be for bone health. a 2026 study of young women with functional hypothalamic amenorrhea found that their lumbar spine bone mineral density was significantly lower than that of regularly menstruating women, and was not significantly different from that of a group of recently menopausal women.

none of this shows up in a photo and that’s the whole point. you can’t read someone’s health from their body. you can’t look at a woman and know she’s healthy just because she has visible abs, and you definitely can’t look at another woman and decide she’s unhealthy just because she doesn’t.

fitness was never supposed to be a second full-time job

the official recommendations, written by people who actually study this stuff, are far less dramatic than what your instagram feed would have you believe.

the world health organization recommends 150 to 300 minutes of moderate aerobic activity per week, plus muscle-strengthening work for all major muscle groups on at least two days. that’s it. two proper strength sessions, plus some walking, cycling, running, dancing, or whatever gets you moving and that you actually enjoy enough to keep doing.

actually, the amount of work required to get meaningful health benefits is surprisingly small. a 2022 meta-analysis published in the british journal of sports medicine looked at 16 studies, some of which followed people for more than 25 years. it found that 30 to 60 minutes of muscle-strengthening activity per week was associated with a 10 to 17% lower risk of death from any cause, as well as a lower risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer. thirty minutes. per week.

when aerobic activity was added, the association was even stronger, with all-cause mortality risk around 40% lower. and beyond roughly an hour of strength training per week, the curve started to flatten. in other words, those extra hours weren’t buying the same additional benefits for those particular outcomes.

nutrition isn’t nearly as complicated either. eat enough to support your training, get enough protein, and build a way of eating you can actually live with for years. i guarantee you’ll be fine. not everyone needs to weigh every grain of rice to make that work. but extremes are much easier to sell and when they become the version of fitness people see over and over again, it’s hardly surprising that so many women look at it and think, that’s not for me.

the women nobody in this fight is thinking about

while the internet is busy arguing about whether a lean woman is lean enough, there’s a much bigger problem happening in the background.

in 2022, 31% of adults worldwide, roughly 1.8 billion people, weren’t even reaching the minimum recommended level of physical activity. women were further behind men, at 34% compared with 29%, and the trend is moving in the wrong direction. if nothing changes, the global figure is expected to reach 35% by 2030. in the united states, where we have better data on strength training specifically, only 31% of adults report doing muscle-strengthening activity at least twice a week. among women, just 20% meet both the aerobic and strength-training guidelines.

those are the women i’m actually thinking about.

most of them have never set foot in a gym. and when the version of fitness they see online looks like a full-time job, complete with meal plans, supplements, 5 a.m. workouts, and an apparently endless list of things they’re doing wrong, it’s not exactly an invitation to start. the entry fee feels too high, so they scroll past and keep waiting for a version of fitness that looks possible for them.

that’s why, as a trainer, i think part of my job is to show people a version of fitness that actually fits into a life. three strength sessions a week can make a meaningful difference to your body and health, but the benefits go way beyond what you can see in a progress photo. strength training can support your mental health, with randomized trials showing that resistance training can reduce depressive symptoms. it also teaches you what it feels like to do something difficult, stick with it, and slowly discover that you’re capable of more than you thought.

and maybe most importantly, it can change the way you see your body. not just as something to look at, but as something you can use, rely on, and get stronger in.

i started lifting at 37 with absolutely no sporting background. six years later, i have a body that does things i once never thought it could do. and the things i value most about it have very little to do with whether my abs are visible on a particular day.

the woman in that video i told you about had a body most doctors would consider healthy and most women would probably consider enviable. yet, a comment section decided that it wasn’t lean enough to count as the body of someone who really trains.

that’s how far the standard has drifted from the thing it was supposed to measure.

if you think this was useful, tap the ❤️, drop a comment, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

thanks for reading,
—glicia ⋆˚✿˖

about the writer

i’m glicia, a personal trainer and nutrition student based in paris. i’m the person behind never not hungry, a newsletter about getting stronger, eating actual food (yes, with carbs!), and making fitness a little less complicated. when i’m not writing, i’m designing workout programs, trying overpriced cafés, reading romantasy, or lifting heavy things. welcome to my little corner of the internet. i hope you’ll stay.

💖 find me elsewhere (instagram, pinterest, spotify)

sources

• WHO Guidelines on Physical Activity and Sedentary Behaviour (2020): adult recommendations: 150-300 min moderate aerobic activity per week, muscle-strengthening on 2+ days.

• Momma et al., British Journal of Sports Medicine (2022): muscle-strengthening activities and risk of mortality, cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes.

• Pelland et al., Sports Medicine (2026): resistance training dose response: weekly volume, frequency, hypertrophy and strength.

• Strock et al., Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology review of physique competitor case studies (2023): body composition, hormones, mood and menstrual function during contest prep.

• Angelidi et al., Endocrine Reviews (2024): REDs: endocrine manifestations, menstrual dysfunction, thyroid and bone.

• Frontiers in Endocrinology (2026): bone mineral density in women with functional hypothalamic amenorrhea vs controls and recently menopausal women.

• Jeukendrup & Gleeson, Sport Nutrition (Human Kinetics), after Lohman: essential and healthy body fat ranges for women.

• Strain et al., The Lancet Global Health (2024): global trends in insufficient physical activity, 2000-2022.

• NCHS Data Brief No. 443 (2022): US adults meeting aerobic and muscle-strengthening guidelines, by sex.

• Scientific Reports (2025): upward comparison predicts state body dissatisfaction after fitspiration exposure.

• Gordon et al., JAMA Psychiatry (2018): resistance exercise training and depressive symptoms.

i know now that part of the problem was food. i simply wasn’t eating enough to build anything, which is a story i’ve told before. the other part was much simpler, and nobody had ever explained it to me. i was doing the same workouts, with the same weights, month after month. my body had no reason to change, so it didn’t.

what changed the game for me was understanding progressive overload and actually applying it to my workouts. when you put it like that, it sounds like a complex concept, but it’s actually much simpler than you think. if you googled it right now, you’d probably understand the basic idea pretty quickly. the problem is that most of what you’ll find stops at the definition. which isn’t much help when you’re standing in front of a dumbbell rack, trying to figure out what you should actually pick up.

this guide starts at the definition and then gives you the rules you run every week: what to write down, which number you’re trying to beat today, when to add weight, how much to add, and what to do when the plan stops being obvious.

disclaimer

this guide assumes you already have a program, meaning a fixed set of exercises you repeat each week. if you don’t have one yet, read "how to program your workouts the smart way" first, then come back here. progressive overload is what you apply to a program. it isn’t a program by itself.

this is educational content, not medical advice. if you have a medical condition, are pregnant or breastfeeding, are recovering from an injury, or have a history of disordered eating, talk to a doctor before starting or changing a training program.

part 1. what progressive overload actually is

progressive overload means asking your body to do slightly more than it’s already comfortable with, over and over, for a long time.

your body is efficient. muscle is expensive tissue to build and expensive to carry around, so your body keeps only the amount it currently needs. training is how you tell it the current amount isn’t enough. you lift something hard, you create a demand it can’t quite meet, and during the days that follow it repairs the tissue and adds a little capacity on top, in case the same thing happens again.

once that capacity is built, the same workout stops being a demand. the weight that was hard in january is just a normal tuesday in march. your body has already adapted to it and has nothing left to gain from doing it again.

this is why women who train four or five times a week for a year sometimes look and feel exactly the same as when they started. they’re working. they’re just working at a level their body sorted out months ago.

the five ways to do more

five things can go up in a session:

1. the weight on the bar,

2. the reps you get with it,

3. the sets you do,

4. the sessions you train per week,

5. and the quality of each rep (meaning a fuller range of motion and more control on the way down).

sets and sessions hit a ceiling faster than most people think. more sets means more fatigue to recover from, and you only recover so fast. more sessions means more hours you probably don’t have. piling those on is the most common way a motivated woman ends up exhausted and stuck.

the two levers you’ll actually use every week are reps and weight. quality sits underneath both as a condition rather than a variable you play with.

the condition that makes all of this work

none of this matters if your sets are easy.

the measure most coaches use is RIR, which stands for reps in reserve. it’s the number of clean reps you could still have done when you stopped the set. if you finish a set and you’re sure you had three more in you, that’s 3 RIR. if you couldn’t have done a single extra rep, that’s 0 RIR, also called failure.

for building muscle, how close you get to failure matters. a 2024 series of meta-regressions covering dozens of studies found that muscle growth improved as sets were taken closer to failure, while strength gains were much less sensitive to it (Robinson et al., 2024). meaning: if you’re stopping every set with five reps left in the tank, adding a rep next week isn’t progress. you were never near your limit in the first place, so there was no demand to increase.

most of your working sets should land at 1 to 3 RIR. on the set where you’re attempting a new best, 0 to 1 RIR is the point.

part 2. why training hard isn’t the same as progressing

these are the three messages i get most often from readers:

“i’m lost. i train four times a week and i feel like it’s not working. is that even enough?”

“i can’t get my lifts to go up even though i train four or five times a week. why?”

“i’m eating enough, i’m training four times a week, and i’m still not gaining muscle. i don’t understand.”

when i actually talk to these women, the pattern is almost always the same: very long sessions, eight or ten exercises, constantly sore, and never fully recovered. so no session is ever performed at real intensity. there’s also no record of anything, which means no one, including them, can tell whether the work is going anywhere.

a session can leave you wrecked and still be identical to the one you did last month. how hard it felt tells you very little, because your sleep, your stress, your last meal and where you are in your cycle all change how the same weight feels on a given day. the only reliable signal is what you wrote down.

if you’re not tracking, you’re not progressively overloading

you can’t beat a number you don’t know. this is the whole reason progressive overload fails for most people. they understand the concept perfectly and then walk into the gym and pick up whatever dumbbells they used last time, more or less, for however many reps feels right, more or less.

tracking takes about ninety seconds per session and you just need four things:

1. the exercice you did,

2. the weight you used,

3. the reps you got on each set,

4. and optionally how hard it felt in RIR.

a notes app or a paper notebook does the job, and apps like strong or hevy are built for it and make the history easier to read.

the part people get wrong is recording only their best set. write down every set.

part 3. why you add reps before you add weight

there are two dials in front of you, weight and reps. the method in this guide moves one at a time, in a fixed order: reps first, weight second, then back to reps. trainers call this double progression, because you’re progressing on two variables in sequence rather than trying to push both at once.

there are four reasons i recommend it to every beginner.

1. the weight jumps available to you are too big

in a perfect world you’d add 200 grams to the bar each week and progress forever. real gyms don’t work that way.

the smallest plate in most gyms is 1.25 kg, so the smallest barbell jump is 2.5 kg. dumbbells usually go up in 2 kg steps. a machine stack often jumps 5 kg per pin, sometimes 7.

now run the numbers. adding 2.5 kg to a 60 kg leg press is a 4% increase, which is manageable. adding 2 kg to an 8 kg dumbbell shoulder press is a 25% increase. there is no world in which you add 25% to a lift every week. try it and you’ll fail the set, get discouraged, and conclude you’re not progressing, when the real problem is that the gym only sells you progress in chunks that are too large.

reps are the small change that lets you close the gap between one dumbbell and the next.

2. you always know exactly what to beat

this is the underrated part. when you walk in and your log says 8 kg, 9 reps, 8 reps, 8 reps, your job today is obvious. get ten on the first set. no deciding, no guessing, no scrolling through your phone between sets wondering whether you should go heavier. beginners abandon programs because they’re boring or because they’re confusing, and a single clear target each session removes the second problem.

3. it tells you when something else is wrong

when you can’t add a single rep, anywhere, for three weeks running, that’s information. it usually means you’re not eating enough, not sleeping enough, or carrying more volume than you can recover from. without a log, that signal takes six months to reach you.

4. it’s backed by research

a 2022 study put this to the test directly. researchers took 43 trained lifters, men and women, and ran them through the same lower body program twice a week for eight weeks. one group was told to increase the load while staying in an 8 to 12 rep range. the other group was told to keep the same load and increase the reps (Plotkin et al., 2022).

muscle growth was essentially the same in both groups. squat strength favored the load group by about 2 kg, a difference the authors themselves described as of questionable practical significance.

i want to be honest about what that does and doesn’t say. it doesn’t mean weight never needs to go up. over months and years, load has to increase, and that small strength edge is real. what it says is that adding reps to a fixed weight is a legitimate way to drive muscle growth, not a lesser substitute for adding plates. this is why the reps-first approach holds up: you’re building muscle the whole time you climb through the rep range, and the weight increase arrives at the end of it.

one full example, start to finish

let’s run it on a dumbbell shoulder press.

• three working sets

• rep range of 8 to 12

• starting with 8 kg dumbbells

look at week 6 → your reps collapsed back to where you started in week 1, which feels like going backwards and is in fact the opposite. in week 1 you pressed 25 reps with 8 kg, so 200 kg of total work. in week 6 you pressed 25 reps with 10 kg, so 250 kg. that’s 25% more work done in five weeks, with no dramatic sessions and nothing that required motivation.

five weeks to change dumbbells sounds slow but run that pattern for a year on every exercise in your program and you’ll be a genuinely different lifter.

Read more

A long list of exercises, collected from all over the place. Four or five sets of everything, and it takes about an hour and a half to get through it. She does that five times in a normal week, six when she starts worrying that nothing is happening. She’s sore most days and reads it as proof the work is working.

By the middle of the week she’s tired, so the sessions get softer without her realizing it. She doesn’t push as hard, she doesn’t add weight, she just gets through them. Which feels like not doing enough, so the following week she adds another session.

And I know her well, because that was me for a good few years.

I get it, honestly. We live in this weird world where doing more has somehow become the answer to everything. You want to be more successful, so you work more. You want to improve your life, so you add more habits to your routine. You want to change your body, so naturally, you start spending more time at the gym.

The problem is that at some point “doing more” starts to affect the quality of your training. Every time you train, you’re asking your body to do something that costs it energy. For it to adapt and come back stronger, you have to give it time to recover.

It sounds very simple but most women do exactly the opposite.

In this article, I want to show you that adding more sessions to your program is (almost) never the answer, and how to get better results by doing less. The smart way.

How much is actually enough

Contrary to what a lot of women think, you don’t need to be at the gym six times a week to get results. And when I say “results”, I mean what most women who are neither bodybuilders nor high performance athletes are looking for: a strong body, some visible muscle definition, and a body fat percentage that sits in a healthy range.

For the general population (and by general population I mean people like you and me), three to four lifting sessions a week, plus food that actually covers your macronutrients, meaning enough protein, carbs and fats, is enough to see a real change in your body composition. The problem is that a lot of women don’t train those sessions with enough intensity to produce the results they’re waiting for.

Intensity here has nothing to do with finishing your session soaked in sweat and out of breath. The variable that matters most for building muscle, and for the visual changes that come with it, is progressive overload.

In plain words, progressive overload means asking your muscles for a little more than you asked them for last time. Your body adapts to whatever you do repeatedly, so if you squat the same 30 kg for three sets of ten every week for six months, it has no reason to build anything new. The extra can come from a heavier weight, from an extra rep or two, from an added set, or from controlling the way down instead of just dropping into it. It doesn’t need to be a big jump, it just needs to keep happening.

I’m not going to go deeper here, because it deserves an article of its own and that’s exactly the one I’m writing next. If you’ve been here for a while you know I talk about it often, and I’m realizing more and more that this is where it breaks down for a lot of you.

But back to the number of sessions per week, and how to know which split works for you.

First you need to decide how many times a week you actually want to train, and can realistically train. For beginners, three full body sessions is the sweet spot. It’s easier to manage, and when you start out your body responds to almost any new stimulus, so there’s no need to load a beginner’s week with more. There’s also the question of sticking with it, which is the most important thing when someone is starting. A woman who has never trained in her life can be very intimidated by a plan with four, or five, gym days a week.

For women who have been training for at least six months, my split of choice is an upper/lower four times a week, meaning two sessions for the upper body and two for the lower body. Here you have room to bring in more varied exercises, target specific muscle groups in each session, and four days really lets you build an interesting program that will keep a motivated person engaged.

I’ve been lifting for six years now and I’ve tested a lot of different things, and I understood that training more than four times a week isn’t sustainable for me in the long run. Maybe I’ll do it from time to time, for a very specific goal, but most of the time I train four times a week and shift the emphasis to different muscle groups depending on the phase I’m in.

Ok, so now you know how many times a week to train. Next is how to structure strategic sessions, with the right exercises and the right number of sets.

What a strategic session looks like

I wrote a really comprehensive guide for beginners where I explain exactly how to program your workouts, with two training templates ready to use. So I’ll just put a summary of the main pillars here, but if you want the complete step by step, go take a look at it.

Instead of thinking about body parts in isolation, it helps to think in terms of movement patterns. This approach makes it easier to build a balanced program, because it naturally covers all your major muscle groups without you having to count every single one.

There are seven main patterns you need to know:

1. Squat works your quads, glutes, and core. This includes back squats, goblet squats, front squats, and leg press. Any movement where you bend your knees and hips to lower your body or a weight, then stand back up.

2. Hinge focuses on your posterior chain, meaning your glutes, hamstrings, and lower back. Romanian deadlifts, conventional deadlifts, back extensions, and cable pull-throughs all fall here. The movement is driven by pushing your hips back and then forward, with less knee bend than a squat.

3. Horizontal push targets your chest, front shoulders, and triceps. Think bench press (barbell or dumbbell), push-ups, and chest press machines.

4. Horizontal pull works your back, rear shoulders, and biceps. Cable rows, dumbbell rows, chest-supported rows, and seated machine rows are all solid options.

5. Vertical push hits your shoulders and triceps. Overhead press with a barbell or dumbbells, and the shoulder press machine.

6. Vertical pull targets your lats and biceps. Lat pulldowns and assisted pull-ups are the most beginner-friendly options here.

7. Carry trains your grip, core, and overall stability while you move under load. Farmer’s carries and suitcase carries are two great ways to train this pattern.

On top of these seven patterns, you’ll also want some isolation work depending on your goals. Lateral raises for the side of your shoulders, bicep curls, tricep pushdowns, leg curls for your hamstrings, leg extensions for your quads, hip abductions for your glutes, etc.

As for the number of exercises, five to six, no more. Start with the big compound lifts, meaning the ones that use several joints and a lot of muscle at once, like squats, hip hinges, presses, rows and pull downs. That’s where most of your results come from and where progress is easy to measure. The small isolation work comes after, and it’s fine if it doesn’t always fit.

Here is the skeleton of a session:

• five to six exercises per workout,

• two to three compound movements first,

• then two to three isolation or accessory exercises,

• three to four sets per exercise.

Write down your sessions in a notebook or an app (sets, weight used, reps). And last but not least, keep the same program for at least six to eight weeks and let the numbers climb. Changing your routine every three weeks is the most reliable way to never get good at anything.

Cardio, and why it’s important

Please, hear me clearly! Cardio is for your health, not to burn calories. I want that information printed in your brain.

There are three main raisons you should add cardio to your week:

• your heart, which is the obvious one and the one that decides how your next forty years go,

• your insulin sensitivity, meaning how well your body handles the sugar in your blood after you eat, which affects your energy, your body composition and your long term health,

• and your lifting.

That last one surprises people but stay with me. When your conditioning is poor, your breath becomes the limiting factor on a heavy set of squats long before your legs do. You rack the bar gasping not really because you couldn’t have done two more reps, but because you couldn’t breathe. Better cardio fitness also means you recover faster between sets, so your third set still looks something like your first.

Two easy sessions a week is enough to start. Easy means a pace where you could still hold a conversation, thirty to forty five minutes. It can be whatever you like: running, cycling, rowing, the stair machine, dancing. If you’re currently at five or six lifting sessions a week and you’re not an athlete, not preparing for a competition, and only want to improve your body composition, my honest advice is to cut your lifting down to four sessions a week and add some cardio for all the reasons above.

It took me years to accept that training more doesn’t always lead to better results. Whenever progress stopped, I assumed I hadn’t earned it yet, and the fix was another session, another exercise, another thirty minutes. What actually changed my body was doing less in the gym, with a lot more intention. Aaand, let’s not forget, eating like a grown woman who trains.

So if you ask me how much you should be training to see results, my honest answer is that four times a week is usually more than enough, and often more than you can recover from the way you’re currently building them.

If you think this was useful, tap the ❤️, drop a comment, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

Thanks for reading,
—Glicia

About the writer

I’m Glicia, a personal trainer and nutrition student based in paris. I’m the person behind never not hungry, a newsletter about getting stronger, eating actual food (yes, with carbs!), and making fitness a little less complicated. When I’m not writing, I’m designing workout programs, trying overpriced cafés, reading romantasy, or lifting heavy things. Welcome to my little corner of the internet. I hope you’ll stay.

💖 Find me elsewhere (Instagram, Pinterest, Spotify)

Fitness content is full of finished stories. Someone tells you what worked after it already worked, with the bad weeks edited out and the numbers rounded in a flattering direction. You get the conclusion without the process, which doesn’t teach you much if what you actually want is to learn how to run your own training.

So I’m doing it the other way around. Every month, I’ll share the real thing: the program I’m following, why I built it that way, the sessions exactly as they’re written, my numbers, and then what actually happened. Including the weeks when I miss sessions, feel terrible, or get something wrong.

For this first edition, we’re starting with the program I’ll be running for the next 8 weeks, with one goal: to become a faster runner while doing my best to maintain the muscle I’ve built.

The logic behind this goal and the trade-offs I’ll need to make

I’m running a half marathon next year. Before I start adding distance, I want to get faster over a shorter one first, because pace matters when you’re trying to make longer distances feel manageable.

The plan is three runs a week: one long run, one speed session, and one easy run to build volume. That puts me at around 25-30 kilometers a week, which tends to surprise people when the goal is simply to run a 5K in under 25 minutes. But you don’t get faster over 5 kilometers by only running 5 kilometers. A fast 5K is built on the aerobic base underneath it, your ability to hold a hard effort for 25 minutes without completely falling apart. And that base comes from the slower, longer runs.

You’re probably wondering how I’ll manage that much running while being a gym girlie who trains four to five times a week.

Well, for these eight weeks, I’m dropping down to four, with shorter sessions and fewer sets. And no, this isn’t because cardio “kills your gains.” I’ve already written a whole article about why that idea is mostly a myth. It’s more about recovery. I only have so much of it. If I spend most of it trying to recover from five days of lifting, my speed sessions will suffer, my runs will feel awful, and the whole experiment stops being worth doing.

So for these eight weeks the gym has one job: maintain what I’ve already built. I’m not trying to build muscle while also running 30 kilometers a week. That’s not a realistic goal for me right now, and pretending I can maximize both at the same time is probably the fastest way to end up doing both badly.

So, here’s the exact training split and nutrition plan I’ll be following.

The Logbook is for ✨ paid subscribers ✨

Everything above is the reasoning, what follows is the actual plan. Behind the paywall:

• My full lifting program: the split, every exercise, sets and reps, and the exact progression rule I’m using week to week

• My 8-week running program: the sessions, distances, and how they’re placed around lifting so my legs aren’t destroyed on speed day

• The nutrition plan my dietitian and I built for this block: calories, protein target, and how I eat around runs

• My starting numbers and what I expect to see at week 4

• The red lines that make me change the plan instead of pushing through

Why become a paid subscriber?

The paid tier is for readers who want to take things a step further and turn what they learn into something they can actually use. Alongside the free posts, you’ll get:

• 2 in-depth guides every month: the tools, frameworks, & resources to help you put what you learn into practice.

• The logbook: a monthly training journal where i share the exact program i’m running. it’s a real-time look at how i set goals, adjust my training, and track my progress along the way.

• Member perks: exclusive offers, ready-to-use workout templates & workbooks.

Read more

But here’s my confession: I want to feel good in a swimsuit, so for a few weeks I’m eating a bit less to try to shed a little fat.

And every time I’m about to say that out loud, I feel the urge to soften it. To add disclaimers. To explain that I’m doing it in a healthy way, that I haven’t fallen back into my old habits, that I promise I’m still healed. As if wanting to look leaner was something I needed to apologize for.

This article is me saying it honestly. And then telling you what it actually costs, because contrary to what some people will try to sell you on social media, getting leaner has a price.

when did wanting to be leaner become controversial?

I have this conversation with my close friends more often than you’d think. At some point someone lowers her voice and asks something like “is it bad that I still want to lose a little?” Like she’s confessing something. Like she needs permission to admit she cares about how she looks.

And I get why. In some spaces, especially the ones trying to undo the damage of diet culture, aesthetic goals have become almost taboo. The acceptable goal is “getting stronger.” Say you want visible abs or leaner legs and you can feel the room shift, like you just outed yourself as not fully healed.

So women end up with two scripts, and honestly, both of them are dishonest.

Script #1: diet culture - You should always want to be leaner, whatever the cost, and the cost will never be mentioned. Just “tone up,” earn your beach body, eat 1,200 calories. I lived inside that script for about twenty years, and I’ve already written about what it did to me, so I won’t retell it here.

Script #2: the correction - If you still want to be leaner, you have healing to do. Your desire is internalized misogyny, train for strength, love your body, and please stop talking about fat loss. It comes from a good place, I really believe that. But look at what it does: someone else is still deciding what you’re allowed to want, just in the opposite direction.

But there’s a third option, and it’s the one I’m trying to live in. You name what you want, out loud, without shame. And then you look at the price without flinching. Both parts matter, the wanting and the receipt.

Wanting to look leaner is morally neutral. It says nothing about your values, your intelligence, or how healed you are.

Aesthetics is what got me through the gym door at 37. Performance is what kept me there for six years. Both of those things were real, and pretending the first one never existed would be rewriting my own story.

wtf "leaner" actually means and the price list

Quick definition before we go any further, because this word tends to create a lot of confusion. Being leaner simply means having more muscle and less fat. There’s no special quality called “toned” that you can train for and, more importantly, there’s no special method designed to tone your body.

What helps you build muscle effectively is, as you probably already know, strength training.

For “leaner” to look like anything, the muscle has to already be there. Otherwise you just become a smaller, flatter version of yourself (I know, because that was me, the original skinny fat girl).

One thing I'd do before chasing it, though: check what you actually mean when you say you want to be leaner. Sometimes it really is about how you look. But sometimes it's code for:

— “I want to feel in control” or
— “I had a rough month and I want to feel like I’m doing something about myself”

Fat loss won’t buy those. Your wants deserve to be taken seriously, and taking them seriously includes checking what they’re made of.

Now the price list. Getting leaner has a price, a real one, and I want to lay it out the same way you’d look at the price of a trip before booking it:

• Hunger. A deficit means giving your body less energy than it burns, and your body notices. If it’s done well, we’re talking about a low-grade hunger that visits regularly, for months. Anyone selling you fat loss without hunger is lying to you.

• Performance. Your lifts stall, or drop a little. Recovery gets slower and training feels heavier. For someone who has learned to love progress, this is the cost that hurts the most.

• Headspace. More planning, more food decisions, more “no thanks” at dinners you’d normally enjoy without thinking. If you read my article about food tracking, you already know how much mental space food management can take.

Add mood, sleep and energy, which all degrade the deeper the deficit goes and the longer you stay in it. That’s normal physiology doing its job, and no amount of discipline exempts you from it.

But the most important thing I can tell you about the price is that it climbs. Going from soft to athletic costs a few months of mild, livable discipline. Going from athletic to visibly shredded costs a completely different life.

One last line on the receipt. Being lean comes with maintenance costs. Whatever you did to get there, you’ll need to keep doing, even if it’s a less restrictive version. That’s why “photoshoot lean” and “livable lean” are two completely different products. And they come with two very different price tags.

what my first real bulk-and-cut process taught me

Last year I did my first real bulk. Six months, about six kilos gained, with my dietitian watching the numbers the whole way. And it was a good bulk, honestly. A solid part of those six kilos was muscle, and I stayed relatively lean through the whole thing.

And still, seeing myself bigger affected me mentally. I knew the plan, I understood the numbers, I had a professional in my corner, and my head struggled with the mirror anyway, more days than I expected. I’m telling you this because it kills a very convenient story, the one where doing everything correctly means the mental part follows automatically. It doesn’t always. Twenty years of programming don’t dissolve because your macros are calculated properly.

So after the bulk, I decided to cut. Four months, supervised, structured. A start and end date, a plan, and someone watching the data with me.

I need you to see the difference between that and what I did in my twenties, because on paper they look similar. Both involve eating less. But my old under-eating was just a way of living I never really chose, with no start, no end, and nobody checking whether it was hurting me. The cut was a project. It was the same tool with a completely opposite meaning.

And the cut showed me exactly where my personal line is. The first three months were manageable. Some hunger, some planning, nothing dramatic. Then came the last month, when we lowered calories a bit more to finish the job, and the food noise started. If you’ve never heard the term, food noise is when thoughts about food get louder and more frequent without being invited. You’re in a meeting and part of your brain is negotiating your next snack. That was new information about myself, and now I know where my curve bends.

I’d do it again if I felt the need, though. I want to say that clearly, because that’s the sentence script #2 doesn’t allow.

Fast forward to today, and to the part I hesitated to write.

As I said, I’m in a slight deficit right now because I’m going on vacation and I want to feel good in a swimsuit. I know how that sounds. We’ve spent years, rightfully, repeating that every body is a beach body, and that nobody has to earn the right to wear a swimsuit. I’m not walking any of that back. You can put on a bikini today, exactly as you are.

And at the same time, I feel better in my skin when I know my body will be exposed and I’m at my leanest. Both things are true. Being honest about this means being willing to hold both, instead of only saying the more virtuous one out loud.

That’s what an informed aesthetic choice looks like to me. I know what I want. I know what it costs. I’ve decided I’m willing to pay the price. And, most importantly, I know when the transaction ends.

(When I’m back, my dietitian and I are changing the brief anyway, because I’m running a half marathon next year and my body will have a completely different job to do. Goals rotate like that. An aesthetic phase, a performance phase, maintenance. All of them just have to make sense for me, and for nobody else.)

if getting leaner is on your mind

If you’re sitting with your own version of “I’d like to be leaner,” here’s what I’d want you to know, from someone who’s been on every side of this.

→ Build muscle first. Months of consistent lifting before any cut, because there has to be something under the fat to reveal. You also need to know your maintenance calories, at least roughly, because you can’t create a controlled deficit from an unknown number.

→ A healthy relationship with food. This is what lets you handle a few months of an intentional caloric deficit without old wounds reopening, and it matters more than anything else on this list. If restriction ever owned you, that history is part of YOUR price, and it belongs in the decision.

→ The right timing. A deficit during your most stressful season costs double. Pick a boring stretch of life, one without a calendar full of social events, when you actually have the headspace to plan your meals every day.

→ Set a modest deficit, around 300 to 500 kcal below maintenance, and aim to lose roughly 0.5% of your body weight per week while keeping your protein high and your training heavy. The research is clear that slower rates preserve muscle and performance far better than aggressive ones. And if you can, have a professional run the numbers with you. My bulk and my cut both worked because someone was watching the data with me the whole time.

→ Define the exit before you enter. An end date, plus red lines that stop the cut automatically, with no negotiation: your cycle goes irregular, your sleep breaks, training starts feeling like punishment, or the food noise moves in and won’t leave. Deciding your stop conditions in advance is what separates a project from a spiral.

You’re also allowed to have a price cap.

“Leaner than I am now, but nowhere near shredded” is a perfectly valid goal. You can want some of the look without wanting the full-time job that comes with maintaining it. Getting 80% of the result for 20% of the cost isn’t giving up. It’s just knowing what you’re willing to pay.

In a few weeks I’ll be on vacation, a little leaner than I am today, eating all the food I love with zero guilt, not training, and feeling really good in my swimsuit. I wanted that, I said it out loud, I knew the price, and I paid a small, deliberate amount of it with my eyes open.

That’s what I want for you too, whatever you end up deciding. Your wants are yours. Nobody gets to assign them to you, and nobody gets to shame you out of them. Just make sure that when you buy, you’ve seen the full receipt first.

If you think this was useful, tap the ❤️, drop a comment, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

Thanks for reading,
—Glicia

* sources

• Long-term persistence of hormonal adaptations to weight loss, Sumithran et al., NEJM, 2011

• Effect of two different weight-loss rates on body composition and strength-related performance in elite athletes, Garthe et al., IJSNEM, 2011

• A systematic review of dietary protein during caloric restriction in resistance trained lean athletes, Helms et al., IJSNEM, 2014

• IOC consensus statement on Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S), updated 2023, BJSM

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I get it. I really do. I want results too, every time I start something new. I want to know the work is going somewhere and that I’m not wasting my time.

Lifting is never wasted time though. Besides whatever aesthetic goal you have (and yes, you’re allowed to have one), you start collecting the benefits the moment you pick up a weight, whether or not any of it shows up in the mirror. But being able to see your own effort still matters. It’s what keeps you going back on the weeks when nothing feels like it’s happening.

This is why you need a way to read your progress, especially when the scale and the mirror are both telling you you’re stuck.

My road to body recomposition wasn’t a straight line, and I want to say that first, because almost everything you read about it looks like a clean before and after with a tidy arrow in between, and mine was nothing like that.

At the start, I almost quit.

I’d done the reading. I knew what body recomposition was supposed to be and yet, I’d decided that six weeks in, I would see something. My body fat would come down, maybe I’d have a bit of definition in my shoulders, the scale would either drop a little or, best case, stay exactly where it was while my body rearranged itself underneath.

I was also eating more than I’d eaten in years, which, if you’ve read anything else I’ve written, you know wasn’t a small thing for me.

Six weeks in, I stood in front of the mirror and I looked exactly the same. I took photos. Same corner of the bedroom, same morning light, same gym clothes. I lined them up next to the ones from week one and I couldn’t find a single f* difference.

I’d be lying if I told you that, at that moment, I wasn’t seriously considering giving up.

i was measuring the right goal with the wrong tools, at the wrong moment

Six or seven weeks isn’t enough time to build visible muscle. It just isn’t. Muscle takes months, and if you’re trying to build it while also losing fat, it takes longer, because you’re asking your body to do two jobs at once. I knew this in theory. I could’ve explained it to you over coffee. But knowing something and believing it at 7am in front of a mirror are two very different skills, and I only had the first one.

And the three tools I was using to measure my progress were genuinely terrible at that point. Let me explain.

(i) The scale can move a kilo or two in a single day depending on water, salt, where you are in your cycle, and how much food is currently sitting inside you; (ii) the mirror is even worse, because you see yourself every single day, which is exactly the frequency at which change becomes invisible; (iii) and the photos, which I thought were my objective measure, were being taken and judged by a person who was in a mood. Some days I looked fine, some days I looked like I’d gone backwards, and it was the same body in the same week.

So I had three sources of information, all three were lying to me, and I was making decisions based on them anyway.

One thing before I go on, because I don’t want you to close this and throw your scale in a drawer. None of those tools are actually useless. Weigh yourself if you want to. Just stop reading any single number, and look at the average across a few weeks instead. Keep taking the photos too. Take them, and then leave them alone for months, because two photos taken a week apart will always show you nothing, and two photos taken six months apart will sometimes show you everything.

So keep collecting. Every measurement you take now is data you’ll be able to read properly later, once there’s enough of it to mean something.

how a before-and-after post completely changed the way i measured progress

It’s going to sound strange coming from me, because I don’t like before-and-after posts and I don’t publish them. But a few years ago one showed up on my feed at exactly the wrong moment (or maybe the right one).

Same woman, two photos. And the caption said she weighed the same in both.

I went back and forth between them probably ten times. In the second one her whole body was different. Visible muscle, visibly less fat, shoulders and waist in a completely different relationship to each other. Same number on the scale but two different bodies.

And that’s the thing that finally clicked. If a person can look like that at the same weight, then weight was never the variable I should’ve been watching. All that time, I’d been staring at a number that was incapable of telling me what I actually wanted to know.

So I stopped tracking my body and started tracking what my body could do.

At my next workout, I opened the Notes app on my phone and wrote down every exercise from that session, along with the weights I used and the reps I did. Then I did it again the next time. And the next. (I now log everything in an app I’m building myself, but honestly, the Notes app did the job for a long time, and it’ll do the job for you too.)

A few weeks later I scrolled back to the first entry, and the weights weren’t the same weights anymore. The thing I couldn’t see in the mirror had been sitting in a note on my phone the whole time, and I hadn’t even noticed it happening.

And this is why those numbers matter more than they sound. If you’re getting stronger, two things are true at once: your training is giving your body a reason to adapt, and you’re eating enough to let it happen. You can’t really fake that combination. Strength going up is your training and your nutrition telling you they’re working together, weeks before your body gets around to showing it to anyone.

what i actually watch now & why

There are four things, and they arrive in the follwing order:

Weight at the same reps. This one moves first, usually somewhere between week two and week six, and it’s the simplest proof you’ll ever get. Same exercise, same number of reps, more weight. My Romanian deadlift was 35 kilos when I started, 40 on a good day. Six months later it was 60.

Reps at the same weight. If you train with dumbbells you already know the problem: the next pair up is a two kilo jump, and two kilos is enormous when you’re pressing ten. So you sit at the same weight for weeks and it feels like nothing’s happening. But if you did eight reps in week one and you’re doing twelve in week six with the same dumbbells, that’s progress. Write it down.

Recovery. This is one of the clearest signs the work is landing. When I started, I used to lose half my reps by the last set, and then one day I noticed my third set had stopped falling apart. Which meant I was getting stronger and recovering faster after each workout. I also stopped needing two days to walk down stairs like a normal person after leg day. Nothing about me looked different, but my body was very obviously handling more.

Your waist against your hips. It’s a ratio, not a weight, so measure both and watch the relationship between them. When your waist holds steady while your glutes and shoulders start filling out your clothes differently, that’s your sign that body recomposition is happening. It will always be the slowest one, so please, please be patient.

how long this actually takes

It depends. I can’t tell you how long it’ll take for you to see results, because everyone’s different and there are a lot of variables involved: your genetics, how many times a week you train, what your nutrition actually looks like, how much you sleep, and so on. What I can give you is a rough idea of what happens for most people.

The first two months are mostly your nervous system getting better at the movement. You’re learning to use what you already have, which is why strength can climb quickly while absolutely nothing visible happens. Months three and four are where the structural change starts. Around month six you can usually see it yourself, if you know where to look.

That’s normal and that’s not you being slow. I know it’s not what anyone wants to hear, including me. But it is what it is. And that’s also why I now give a program (here’s how you can create yours) at least twelve weeks before I judge it. Anything shorter, and I can’t tell the difference between a real signal and a bad day.

Before you ask whether your program is working, count how many sessions you actually did against how many you planned. Not how many you meant to do. How many you really did.

If you planned sixteen and you did nine, the program isn’t what failed, and no amount of clever measuring is going to rescue that. I say this with love, and also because I’ve been the woman with nine out of sixteen and a very detailed opinion about why the program was wrong.

three exercises are all you need to track your progress

I said three exercises to track your progress, not the only three exercises you’re doing. Your program stays exactly as it is, with all the accessory work and everything else you like in there. You’re just picking three movements out of it to follow closely, so that you always have something to compare against.

Three, because two isn’t enough to show you a pattern and five is enough to make you quit. I’ve tried logging every single exercise of every session and I lasted about three weeks before the notebook became the reason I dreaded going.

Here’s how I’d choose them.

Go for compound movements, meaning the ones that use several joints and a lot of muscle at the same time. They respond to progress much more clearly than isolation work, and they move in whole kilos instead of tiny fractions, which makes the change obvious when you scroll back. A bicep curl going from 8 kilos to 9 is real progress, it’s just a small, slow signal. A squat going from 40 to 50 is very hard to miss.

Pick things you can load precisely. A barbell or a machine works better here than a band or a bodyweight movement, because 2.5 kilos is a step you can measure and “the band felt harder today” isn’t. Nothing wrong with bands and bodyweight exercices, they’re just difficult to use as a ruler.

Cover your whole body with the three: one lower body, one upper body push, one upper body pull. If you want a set that works for almost anyone, here’s where I’d start:

• for lower body, a squat, a deadlift (or Romanian deadlift), or a hip thrust

• for pushing, a bench press, a dumbbell press or an overhead press

• and for pulling, a barbell (or dumbbell) row, or a lat pulldown

Mine are a Romanian deadlift, a lat pulldown and a shoulder press (which I do on a machine).

Then pick things you’re willing to keep in your program for at least twelve weeks, which mostly means picking things you don’t hate. There’s no point choosing the technically perfect exercise if you’re going to swap it out in a month, because the second you swap it, your comparison goes back to zero. You can’t measure progress on something you’ve done twice.

What you’ll write down: The date, the exercise, and the weight x reps of your heaviest working set. You don’t need every set and you don’t need a note about how you felt. Three lines a session, plus sessions done against sessions planned at the end of the month. It takes less than five minutes.

Six years later, I still can’t stop thinking about how this method helped me stay focused and not give up. It’s also really fun to look at the entries you wrote years ago, compare them with the ones you wrote last week, and see how much strength you’ve gained.

So if you’re six weeks in and nothing has changed, it’s entirely possible that everything is already changing and you just have no way to see it yet. My evidence was wrong, not my training, and I nearly threw out something that was already working because I was reading the wrong data. Start writing it down today, because the version of you in three months is going to want to scroll back and see where she started.

If you think this was useful, tap the ❤️, drop a comment, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

That’s all for now,
—Glicia

💖 Find me elsewhere (Instagram, Pinterest, Spotify)

For some of us, it can be an anxious time too. We’ve been training hard for months to put on muscle, and of course we don’t want to lose it all over one week away. The good news is that maintaining muscle is much easier than building it. It only takes a fraction of the training volume needed to make new gains.

Research on detraining (the fancy word for what happens when you stop training) shows that most trained people maintain their muscle size for about two to three weeks before any measurable loss occurs. Strength sticks around even longer, often four weeks or more, because a big part of strength comes from your nervous system learning how to produce force. And thankfully, that doesn’t disappear after a long weekend or a vacation.

So if you’re away for a few weeks and you’d rather not work out, don’t. Enjoy your trip. Walk a lot, go for a swim, carry your own bags, stay generally active, and when you get home, pick up your usual program where you left off. I promise you’ll be just fine.

And if you want to keep training anyway, simply because you enjoy it and you like keeping your body moving, I made a program for you. It’s designed to replace your regular routine whenever you can’t make it to the gym, whether you’re on vacation, traveling for work, or simply don't have access to your usual equipment. It uses bodyweight and resistance bands only, so you don’t need to pack thirty five different accessories.

Hope it helps, and most importantly, enjoy your holidays. Rest, eat the foods you like, spend time with the people you love. Your little routine will be waiting for you when you come back.

The download link is at the end of this article ⬇️

this download is available for paid subscribers only. why become a paid member?

the paid tier is for readers who want to take things a step further and turn what they learn into something they can actually use. alongside the free posts, you’ll get:

• 2 in-depth guides every month: the tools, frameworks, & resources to help you put what you learn into practice.

• the logbook: a monthly training journal where i share the exact program i’m running. it’s a real-time look at how i set goals, adjust my training, and track my progress along the way.

• member perks: exclusive offers, ready-to-use workout templates & workbooks.

Read more

“how to become a gym girl” is a little series i’m putting together for those of you who want to start going to the gym but feel stuck before you even begin. if that’s you, i hope this makes taking that first step feel a little easier ♡

i’ve been lifting weights without interruption for six years now (holidays and the occasional flu aside), and i’ve been walking into gyms for over a decade. you’d think that qualifies as an environment where i feel completely at ease. and yet. every time i have to train somewhere other than my usual gym, panic shows up before i do. my brain seems to forget every movement that’s become automatic to me by now.

at the end of last year, my regular gym closed for renovations, so i had to find somewhere else to train in the meantime. i found a small, family-run gym close to home, and on my first session there, i felt like a complete beginner again. which made no sense on paper. i knew how to use most of the machines, i had my program with me, and i knew exactly what i was doing. my heart was pounding so hard i thought i was about to have a panic attack.

i’m a naturally anxious person, and i don’t like being the center of attention. knowing someone is watching me, for any reason, makes me painfully aware of myself: my flaws, my mistakes, every small thing i could be doing wrong. a new environment where i’m also likely to be watched is the perfect recipe for my brain to spiral.

in the end, everything went fine. i trained at that little gym for almost two months before i could go back to my usual one. i’m telling you this story because i know, from the inside, the anxiety a beginner feels the first time she walks into a gym. by nature, gyms are intimidating places. there’s a certain masculine aura, all sweat and testosterone, hanging in the air. even when a gym makes a real effort to feel welcoming to women, and even though the last few years have brought a genuinely positive shift toward encouraging women to lift, the weight room is still, more often than not, full of men. i understand the hesitation. i understand why some women refuse to set foot in one at all.

but if you actually want to build muscle, change your body, and get strong, at some point you have to walk in. training at home is great, especially when you’re starting out. unless you’ve built yourself a fully equipped home gym though, you’ll hit a wall pretty fast: not enough equipment, and no real way to keep progressively overloading your training. i’ve written about progressive overload more times than i can count, because it’s the single biggest driver of real results, not just how your body looks, but your strength and performance too.

in this article i’ll walk you through five simple steps to get past the fear of training in a gym when being a gym girly doesn’t come naturally to you.

01. choose a gym that removes friction, not one that looks perfect

forget the gym with the perfect aesthetic look, the nicest equipment or the best reviews if it’s 40 minutes away. the gym you’ll actually go to is the one that’s close, easy to get to, and doesn’t require willpower just to walk through the door.

i’ve been doing this for years, and i know for sure that if i have to wake up at 4:30 am to get ready and get to the gym at 6 am to train before work, the chances i skip most of my workouts are high. for years i trained in a gym that wasn’t pretty, taht didn’t offer any of the extras: no sauna, no fancy protein shakes, no ultra high-tech equipment. but it was 5 minutes away from me, and it had everything i needed to train with intensity and progressive overload. that was enough to keep me going year after year, because there was no friction involved.

beyond location, pay attention to the vibe. smaller or family-run gyms, like the one i ended up in, tend to feel less intimidating than a massive commercial chain packed with mirrors and men mid-deadlift. look for gyms that offer a free trial or a day pass. go once before you commit to a membership, and go at the time of day you’d actually train. a gym that feels calm at 10 am can turn into a completely different place at 6 pm.

if the free weights section still feels like too much in the beginning, start with machines. they guide your movement, the risk of doing something wrong is low, and most of them come with instructions printed right on them. you can move to free weights once the machines stop feeling foreign.

02. get your program and split right from day one

nothing feeds gym anxiety like standing in the middle of the floor wondering what to do next. walk in with a plan. as a beginner, a full body routine two to three times a week, or a simple upper/lower split, will take you much further than anything complicated.

when i first decided i wanted to start strength training, i had no clue about programs, splits, or training volume. i was going to the gym 3 times a week and, since i didn’t know what to do, every time i just did all the machines available (yes, you read that right, i did ALL the machines in one session 😄). it was exhausting and barely efficient. if i had known what to do back then, i’d have ten years of proper training behind me by now. i’d have seen results faster, and my whole fitness journey would have been so much easier and smoother.

also, please, please, please, resist the urge to copy an advanced lifter’s program because it looks impressive online. their split exists to manage years of accumulated fatigue and very specific weak points. yours should exist to build a base. once the fundamentals are second nature, and only then, is it worth adding complexity.

03. get curious about the science behind lifting instead of letting it intimidate you

one of the fastest ways to feel like you belong somewhere is to actually understand what you’re doing there. instead of assuming everyone else in the weight room knows something you don’t, get curious. learn what progressive overload actually means and why it matters. learn roughly how much protein your body needs to build muscle. learn why lifting heavy won’t make you bulky.

the more you learn, the more engaged you’ll become. this isn’t about turning yourself into a certified coach overnight. it’s more about replacing intimidation with information. understanding the basics of how strength training works transforms it from a mindless chore into something intellectually stimulating. you start making connections, seeing patterns, understanding why certain things work and others don’t.

and honestly, it’s just cool to know what’s happening inside your body when you lift. your muscles are literally adapting and getting stronger, your bones are getting denser, and you’re building something that will serve you for decades. that’s pretty amazing when you think about it.

04. learn the unwritten rules so you stop guessing

a big part of feeling like an outsider in a gym is not knowing the etiquette, and being terrified of breaking a rule nobody explained to you. so here it is, spelled out:

• wipe down equipment after you use it

• re-rack your weights

• if someone is between sets on a machine you want, ask if you can work in rather than hovering behind them like a threat

• don’t film yourself without checking if anyone in the background minds

• don’t sit on a machine doomscrolling between sets if you can help it, both for your own focus and everyone else’s comfort

• put the weights back where they belong, not a 65 kg dumbbell next to an 8 kg one; it makes no sense, sorry

• understand that the gym is a public space, so if someone asks to work in with you on a machine, don’t act like it bothers you (even if it does)

05. find the courage for the first step, then repeat it

everything above helps. but at some point, none of it replaces actually walking in. the first session will probably feel awkward no matter how prepared you are. mine did. you go once, it’s uncomfortable. you go again, it’s slightly less uncomfortable. you keep going, and one day you realize the fear quietly left without announcing itself.

unfortunately, i don’t have a life-changing hack for you. what kept me coming back day after day, and then year after year, was thinking deeply about my body-and-health-related values. i wrote down the things that really matter to me when it comes to my body and my physical health.

i know i want enough muscle, not only for my overall health but also for the look i like. i want to feel strong and perform well in my workouts. i can’t achieve that training at home. and hear me out, please: that doesn’t mean you can’t build muscle and change your body training at home, at least up to a point. but like i said before, there are limits only a fully equipped gym can get you past. so for my goals, i need the gym.

write down your goals. be honest about what you really want, and if it makes sense to start going to the gym, get your membership and take the first step. i promise you won’t regret it.

thanks for reading,
—glicia ⋆˚✿˖

P.S. if you think this was useful, tap the ❤️, drop a comment, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

read the other posts in this series

about the writer

i’m glicia, a personal trainer and nutrition student based in paris. i’m the person behind never not hungry, a newsletter about getting stronger, eating actual food (yes, with carbs!), and making fitness a little less complicated. when i’m not writing, i’m designing workout programs, trying overpriced cafés, reading romantasy, or lifting heavy things. welcome to my little corner of the internet. i hope you’ll stay.

💖 find me elsewhere (instagram, pinterest, spotify)

I turned 43 this year and I still have trouble believing it when I look in the mirror. It’s hard to explain, but I don’t see a midlife woman in the reflection. Maybe because in my head I’m still a 20-year-old trying to figure out how life works, full of dreams and wanting to live incredible things. Maybe because I was blessed with my family’s genetics and I don’t look my age. But mostly because, health-wise, I’m in the best moment of my life. I’m in my best shape ever. I have endurance, energy and strength I never had before. I feel capable. Which is the complete opposite of my twenties, when I had no confidence, was physically weak, underfed, and constantly sick. Back then, a simple cold could keep me in bed for days. Today I can’t remember the last time I got sick.

So this image of the woman in her forties that lives in the collective imagination doesn’t match anything I know. And I’m certain it doesn’t match the reality of many other women either. Because contrary to what this whole discourse wants us to believe, your forties don’t have to be a decade of pain and decline. This is not the age where you’re supposed to have fragile health, aches everywhere, and a body you don’t recognize anymore.

But that’s the story being sold, and business is good. The moment the algorithm decides you’re over 40, your feed changes. Suddenly it’s full of “coaches” explaining that your metabolism is broken, your hormones are out of control, and your belly fat is a cortisol problem that only their 30-day reset can fix. There are supplements for your hormones, detoxes for your liver, protocols for your inflammation. Everything has a name, a villain and a price tag. And I understand why it works. This marketing targets a painful spot for most women: getting older. It catches us at a vulnerable moment, when the body starts changing, when doctors shrug off our questions, when reliable information is hard to find. Fear sells better than facts. If someone tells you your body is broken and then offers you the solution, you listen. Especially when everything around you keeps repeating that aging, for a woman, is a slow catastrophe you should fight with everything you have.

Don’t get me wrong. The changes are real. Perimenopause is real, and for some women the symptoms are brutal. None of this should be minimized, and I won’t pretend a positive mindset fixes hot flashes. What I refuse to accept is the conclusion the wellness industry draws from it: that your body after 40 is a problem to solve, and that the solution costs 89 euros a month.

Here is what really works: lifting heavy weights, eating enough instead of surviving on 1,200 calories, taking care of your sleep and your mental health. And most importantly, doing all of this for months, then years.

The hard part is that nobody can sell it to you, because you have to do it yourself.

I started lifting seriously at 37. Six years later I’m stronger than I’ve ever been, and I’m not an exception or a genetic miracle. I’m just proof that the timeline they sell us is wrong. The women I see at the gym in their 40s, 50s and 60s are proof too. Maybe my real problem with “midlife woman” is that marketing turned it into a diagnosis. A market segment. A before picture. And I refuse to be a before picture. Lifting not only changed my body, it changed the way I see and treat myself. I’m not a fragile woman, desperate and ready to believe the first person who tells me that at 40 I should stick to gentle movement so I don’t stress my body, eat like a toddler to lose belly fat, and swallow 15 different capsules every morning to regulate my hormones.

I’m doing exactly what I should be doing, and my plan is to spend the second half of my life stronger than the first. Here’s how you can do it, too:

#1. Lift weights, and lift heavy

Two or three sessions a week are enough. Muscle is the closest thing we have to an anti-aging medicine. It protects your bones, your metabolism and your independence later in life.

#2. Eat enough food

Being on a low-calorie diet most of the time is not a health plan, it’s a slow burnout. Prioritize protein at every meal (a portion the size of your palm is a good start) and stop treating carbs like the enemy. If you’re lifting heavy, eating at maintenance will improve your body composition without needing to deprive yourself.

#3. Take your sleep seriously

Seven to nine hours is where your hormones, your recovery and your mood actually get regulated. No supplement can make up for chronic bad sleep.

#4. Move outside the gym

Daily walks, stairs, carrying your own groceries. This kind of low-intensity movement takes care of your heart, your joints and your stress levels without wrecking your recovery.

#5. If you have real symptoms, see a real doctor

Irregular cycles, brutal hot flashes, sleep falling apart, mood swings that scare you. That’s a conversation for a gynecologist or an endocrinologist, with bloodwork on the table, not for a stranger on Instagram selling a hormone-balancing protocol.

before you go…

If you think this was useful, tap the ❤️, drop a commet, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

See you in the next letter,
—Glicia

💖 Find me elsewhere (Instagram, Pinterest, Spotify)

if you’d told me ten years ago that i’d be the person who actually enjoys going to the gym, who even looks forward to it, i would’ve laughed in your face. but here we are: a certified personal trainer, writing a publication about fitness, and in better shape than i was in my twenties. (fyi, i’m 43 now.)

the reason i’m telling you this is because for a long time, none of it worked. i tried every program, every diet, every “just eat less and move more” piece of advice you can imagine, and none of it stuck. not because i wasn’t trying hard enough, but because i was chasing the wrong things for the wrong reasons. it took years of trial and error, and a fair amount of wasted time and money, before i found the strategies that actually worked. and by “worked,” i don’t just mean physically. yes, my body changed but what changed more was how i saw strength training altogether: not as a punishment for what i ate, or a countdown to some ideal body, but as something i got to do for myself, that made me stronger, sharper, and more at home in my own skin.

tired of bad fitness advice, unrealistic routines, and confusing information? you’re in the right place.

since i started this newsletter, i’ve wanted to build something beyond the articles. something that goes further than a sunday read. because i know how it feels to stand in the middle of all the fitness information out there today, contradictory studies, fifteen different opinions on the same topic, and have no idea where to start. i’ve been there. i spent years piecing things together from forums, instagram reels, and trial and error, when what i actually needed was a clear, structured place to begin. that’s what i wanted to build for you.

i’ve been sitting on this for months, turning it over in my mind, refining it, and trying to get it just right. and now i’m finally ready to share it with you: introducing the never not hungry paid membership. think of it as a library of practical guides, not just more posts. this is for readers who want to take things a step further and turn what they learn into something they can actually use.

alongside all the free posts, you’ll also get:

• ⭐️ 2 in-depth guides every month. the tools, frameworks, & resources to help you put what you learn into practice.

• 📝 the logbook. a monthly training journal where i share the exact program i’m running. it’s a real-time look at how i set goals, adjust my training, and track my progress along the way.

• 🦋 member perks. exclusive offers, ready-to-use workout templates & workbooks.

• 💬 on top of this, paid member also get access to the private chat. dedicated threads for q&as, resource requests, plus a space to chat with people working on the same things and striving towards similar goals.

what this means for you?

all the resources and practical guides are exclusively for paid members.

the idea is simple: help you build your own library of tools you can actually come back to, instead of saving the same articles over and over and never doing anything with them.

these resources take time and a lot of research to put together, so expect a new drop every other week. everything is added to the archives, so you’ll never miss anything. you’ll have access to the entire library and the member perks for as long as you’re a member.

Subscribe now

questions you might be asking.

what exactly do i get as a paid subscriber? you get access to a growing library of practical resources designed to make training and nutrition easier to navigate. this includes in-depth guides, ready-to-use workout templates, practical tools, and the logbook, my monthly training journal.

what’s the difference between the articles and the guides? my articles explain how things work and why they matter. the guides and resources give you a practical framework to put what you’ve learned into action. everything i create is evidence-based, backed by hours of research, and designed to help you understand the concepts, make informed decisions, and apply them to your own life and goals.

is a paid subscription worth it if i already read your free articles? my free articles stand on their own, and you can learn a lot from them without ever upgrading. the paid subscription is for when you want to stop piecing things together yourself and have a structure to follow, plus a place to ask me your questions directly.

is the content suitable for beginners? absolutely. i create content for women who want to get stronger, understand nutrition, and feel more confident in their choices, whether they’re just starting out or have been training for years. you don’t need to know everything about fitness to get started. that’s what i’m here to help you with.

do i need to follow a specific diet or training program to use the resources? not at all. my goal is to help you understand the principles behind training and nutrition so you can make them work for your life, whatever it looks like. the resources give you guidance and structure without handing you another set of rigid rules to follow.

how often do you publish new resources? a new resource comes out every other week. the library keeps growing over time, so the longer you stay, the more you have to work with.

final thoughts.

when i started publishing never not hungry almost one year ago, i honestly had no idea if anyone would want to read what i had to say. i wrote because i couldn’t keep all the burning, passionate ideas inside me any longer. the fact that there are so many of you here now, reading, sharing, and writing to me about how these ideas have changed the way you think about strength training, nutrition, and your health, means more than i can put into words.

i’m very aware of paywall fatigue on substack. i feel it too. that’s exactly why i took so long to make the leap and launch this project. i hope it helps you cut through the noise, stop restarting from zero every time life gets in the way, and actually build the kind of strength, in your body and in your head, that sticks.

thank you for your support, for reading, commenting, and sharing my work. it means a lot ❤️,

—glicia

Subscribe now

about the writer

i’m glicia, a personal trainer and dietitian in training based in paris. six years ago, i got over my fear of getting bulky and decided to give lifting a try. back then i couldn’t do a single push-up, i was scared of carbs, and i was surviving on rabbit food. today i eat more than i ever have, plenty of carbs included (gasp!), and i’m stronger and leaner than i was at 25.

at never not hungry i translate research and complex concepts into clear, relatable insights you can actually use in your everyday life. from the science behind lifting to habits, mindset, and the practical frameworks that make change easier, every post is designed to help you make sense of fitness without making it your whole life.

when i’m not writing, i’m designing workout programs, trying overpriced cafés, reading romantasy, or lifting heavy things. welcome to my little corner of the internet. i hope you’ll stay.

💖 find me elsewhere (instagram, pinterest, spotify)

Which brings me, very conveniently, to today’s topic.

Over the last six years, my relationship with training has had real highs and real lows. Some months I couldn’t wait to get to the gym. Other months, the couch won more often than I’d like to admit. If I had relied on motivation alone, I would have quit years ago. What kept me consistent was never willpower. It was systems. Small structures that make training easier to execute and, just as important, more enjoyable. Today I’m sharing the five that made the biggest difference for me.

01. learn when your body actually wants to train

I’m a morning person. When I train early, I have more energy, I’m more focused, and the whole day seems to roll better. So I plan all my workouts for the week at fixed morning slots, like appointments I don’t negotiate with myself every day. That’s the point of a fixed schedule: the decision is already made. You’re not spending mental energy at 6 pm debating whether you’ll go or not. You just go, because it’s Tuesday and Tuesday is lower body.

That said, I don’t let it become a prison. If something comes up and I can’t train in the morning, I simply swap the order of my tasks when possible and train later. The workout still happens, just at a different time.

If you don’t know your best window yet, pay attention for a week or two. Notice when you have the most energy and when your workouts feel the least like a chore. Then build your schedule around that, not around what some 5 am motivational video told you.

02. review your goals at least three times a year

Goals expire. The goal that excited you in January can feel completely stale by June, and training without a clear purpose is the fastest way to lose steam. So about three times a year, I sit down and ask myself what I actually want from my training right now.

I like working in phases. Some phases are all about performance: lifting five times a week, chasing progressive overload, maximizing muscle growth. Others are more about quality: slowing down my tempo to perfect a movement, improving mobility, working on my general fitness. And some phases are just... calm. Maintenance mode. Those matter too.

Right now, my goal is to be a fitter person in the health sense of the word. My lifting is focused on the main muscle groups, with extra attention on my glutes because that’s my current aesthetic priority (I contain multitudes). On the cardio side, I want to run faster, so I follow my running plan religiously. My current split: lower/upper four times a week, plus two runs that I plan to bump up to three in the coming weeks.

The beauty of phases is that they match your life. Crazy season at work? Maintenance phase. Feeling ambitious? Performance phase.

You’re not failing your plan, you’re adjusting it.

03. save your best media for training only

This one is my favorite because it feels like cheating. I pick media I really want to consume and I make it exclusive to training. All my runs (including the long ones) are on the treadmill right now—I refuse to run outside in this heat, I have my limits—and I always have an audiobook ready for them. The rule of the game: I can only listen to that audiobook during my long treadmill runs. Nowhere else. So every week I actually look forward to a 90-minute treadmill run because I need to know what happens next in the story. Same logic with music. I have playlists I only play when I lift.

There’s real science behind this. It’s called temptation bundling, which is a fancy way of saying you pair something you should do with something you love doing. Your brain starts associating the workout with the reward, and showing up gets easier.

And it works way beyond the gym. Podcast you love? Only while folding laundry. Trashy reality show? Only while meal prepping. Use it on any task you keep avoiding.

04. find a rhythm you can keep for years

The best training plan is not the most impressive one. It’s the one that fits your actual life. If you can only train twice a week, that’s completely fine. Two sessions a week, done consistently for years, will beat six sessions a week that collapse after three weeks every single time.

If your time is limited, make those sessions count. Go for full body workouts built around compound movements, meaning exercises that work several muscle groups at once, like squats, rows and presses. More muscle worked per minute, more results per session.

Consistency is boring advice, I know. But it’s the entire game.

05. don't be afraid to mix it up

Strength training stays the foundation, and I’ll die on this hill. Building muscle protects your bones, your metabolism, your joints, and your independence as you age. Health organizations recommend a minimum of two strength sessions a week, and I consider that non-negotiable for long-term health.

But around that base, play. Yoga, pilates, running, hiking, whatever calls you. Variety breaks the monotony, trains your body in different ways, and keeps motivation fresh. I love lifting, but running does something for my head that no barbell can. And I recently started doing Hyrox sessions from time to time. I’m hooked, and I want to make it a regular part of my routine.

so, to sum it up…

Know your best time and protect it. Give your training a purpose and renew it a few times a year. Bribe your brain a little. Choose a rhythm you can sustain. Keep it varied enough to stay fun.

Notice that none of this requires being a disciplined person. I'm not one. On paper, I'm actually a great candidate for quitting, but having a setup that catches me on the days when motivation doesn't show up is what keeps me going. Hard days will always come, for everyone. The people you see training year after year aren't more motivated than you. They've just made showing up the path of least resistance.

So my advice: stop waiting to feel motivated and start making it easy, and pleasant, to show up. Discipline isn’t something you have. It’s something you set up. And you can start setting it up this week, with just one of these five strategies. Pick the easiest one first.

Now I’m curious. What actually keeps you showing up? Or if you keep falling off, where does it usually break down? Tell me in the comments, I read every single one.

before you go…

If you think this was useful, tap the ❤️, drop a comment, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

That’s all for now,
— Glicia

💖 Find me elsewhere (Instagram, Pinterest, Spotify)

it took me an embarrassingly long time to learn the thing nobody hands you when you start lifting: you cannot build muscle on a diet of “less.” muscle needs food. real food, enough of it, on purpose. building it slowly, with a little extra on your plate, is how you actually change your body.

that’s the whole reason i put together a step-by-step bulking guide for you. it’s the guide i wish someone had given me when i started my fitness journey, before i wasted all that time scared of carbs and terrified of the scale moving up.

so here's what you'll find inside this guide

a full walk-through of how to run a bulk from start to finish, written for women, in plain language, with nothing thrown at you that i don’t explain. it covers:

• how many calories and how much protein you actually need, with the math done for you

• how to set your macros without overthinking it

• training, cardio, sleep, and recovery, the parts that quietly make or break your results

• what to do when the scale stalls, or climbs too fast

• how and when to end a bulk, which is the part almost everyone forgets

• the mindset side, because watching the scale rise on purpose is hard after years of dieting

honestly, this is the kind of resource i’d have happily paid for when i started.

if you’ve been lifting for months and look exactly the same, or you’ve wanted to build muscle and had no clue where to start, this one’s for you.

the download link is at the end of this article ⬇️

Read more

i didn’t touch creatine until i’d already trained consistently for a full year, with all the other parts of my routine locked in. that choice was entirely intentional, and it’s the whole reason i can talk about creatine honestly. because i do the work, i can say that yes, creatine is a great supplement and it works.

my problem with creatine, and with most supplements on the market, is that the internet has turned it into either a miracle powder or a dangerous chemical, depending on which video the algorithm serves you. and like everything these days, the truth is a lot more nuanced than that.

what creatine actually is and who it’s for

creatine is a compound your body already makes and stores, mostly in your muscles. you also get it from food, mainly red meat and fish. its job is to help regenerate ATP, which is the molecule your cells use for quick, explosive energy. when you lift something heavy or sprint, you burn through ATP fast. creatine helps you top it back up faster, which means you can do a little more before you fail.

when you supplement with creatine you’re not adding a foreign substance. you’re topping up a tank your body keeps anyway, just usually not all the way full.

supplementing with creatine monohydrate (the cheap, well-studied form, ignore the fancy expensive versions) raises the amount stored in your muscles. the international society of sports nutrition, after reviewing decades of research, calls it the most effective supplement available for increasing high-intensity exercise capacity and lean body mass during training.1 that is a strong statement from a cautious body of scientists, and they don’t hand those out lightly.

now, i need you to really pay attention, because this is where most women get it wrong. creatine helps most when you train hard and push close to your limit. if you lift heavy, do sprints, or play a sport built on short explosive bursts, that’s exactly the kind of effort it supports. it buys you an extra rep or two and a bit more power, and over months that adds up to real strength and muscle.

if you go to the gym once in a while, scroll your phone between sets, and your sleep and nutrition are a mess, creatine will do almost nothing for you. i mean that plainly. a supplement is the last 1 percent, and it only matters once the other 99 is handled.

and that's exactly why i waited a year. i wanted the foundation built first, so i could actually tell what the supplement was adding.

now let's talk science for a second. i know it's boring, but it's the only way to know whether you're investing in something worth your money or just paying for expensive pee. for women specifically, the research is promising but still catching up, because we've been badly underrepresented in this field for years. a recent review found positive effects on strength, exercise performance, and possibly mood and cognition in women, with particularly interesting benefits around menopause and bone health. 2 some studies show smaller short-term strength gains in women than in men, but longer trials tend to close that gap. the honest summary: the case for women is strong and getting stronger, even if it’s not settled in every detail.

what it feels like for me

four and a half years in, here’s my actual experience.

i won't lie, when i started taking creatine i had big expectations. i'd done my research and read the studies, but a part of me still secretly hoped it would help me build noticeably more muscle, and build it faster. what i actually got was less dramatic than that, but good enough that i've never stopped taking it (and honestly, i think i'll take it for the rest of my life).

recovery is the biggest benefit i got. i feel like i’m able to bounce back faster between hard sessions, and i feel less wrecked the day after legs. i also recover better for my runs. i’m doing 2 runs a week right now (on top of 4 lifting sessions), one focused on speed and one more focused on distance and endurance. i usually do my long runs on the weekend and honestly, i feel really good and recovered, and i’m almost sure creatine is helping me with that.

another cool benefit is the pump. i mean, everyone loves a good pump. after i started taking creatine, my muscles feel a little fuller. this side effect is not in your head and, most importantly, it’s not fat. creatine pulls a small amount of water into your muscle cells. it’s an osmotically active compound, which is a fancy way of saying water follows it inside the cell. your muscle cells swell slightly, which is what creates that full feeling.

and last but not least, creatine helps me train harder. on the days my muscles are screaming, it lets me squeeze out those extra one or two reps and push a set closer to failure instead of stopping with something left in the tank. that matters more than it sounds. training close to failure, that point where you genuinely couldn’t do another clean rep with good form, is one of the biggest drivers of muscle growth. so anything that helps me get a little closer to that line, a little more often, is quietly helping me build more muscle over time.

the myths that make me cringe

let me clear out the nonsense, because there’s a lot of it.

“creatine makes you fat or bloated.”
it can cause a small increase in water held inside your muscles, which might show up as a kilo or two on the scale early on. that’s water in the muscle, not fat, and many people barely notice it. it’s also part of why your lifts go up.

“creatine causes hair loss.”
this one comes from a single 2009 study of rugby players that found a rise in DHT, a hormone linked to hair loss in some people. the problem is the study never actually measured anyone’s hair. not once. no follicle counts, no hair density, nothing. and in over fifteen years, nobody has been able to replicate even the hormone finding. a 2025 randomized controlled trial measured both DHT and hair health directly over twelve weeks and found no difference between creatine and placebo.3 the scary headline is built on one shaky study that measured the wrong thing.

"creatine wrecks your kidneys."
this is probably the most repeated and most wrong. in healthy people, robust research, including systematic reviews covering doses from 1 up to 80 grams a day across durations from days to years, shows no harm to kidney function.4 the confusion comes from a lab quirk: creatine slightly raises a marker called creatinine that doctors use to estimate kidney function, which can look alarming on a blood test without meaning anything is actually wrong. if you have a pre-existing kidney condition, talk to your doctor first and get monitored. for everyone else, the safety record is excellent.

how i take it

no loading phase, no cycling. i take 3 to 5 grams of creatine monohydrate every day, whenever is convenient, usually stirred into a glass of water or a shake. that’s my whole protocol, and it’s backed by the official recommendations.

you can do a loading phase, around 20 grams a day split into four doses for a week, if you want the effects faster. it works, but it’s optional, and it’s more likely to cause that early water-weight bump and the occasional upset stomach. a flat 3 to 5 grams daily gets your muscles fully saturated in about three to four weeks with none of the fuss. consistency is the only thing that matters. creatine isn’t a pre-workout you feel kick in; it works by building up and staying topped off. take it every day, training day or not.

so, to sum it up, creatine is one of the few supplements that earns its reputation. it’s cheap, it’s one of the most studied compounds in sports nutrition, it’s safe for healthy people, and it does what it claims if you train hard enough to need it.

but it’s a multiplier, not a starting point. it multiplies the work you’re already doing. if the work isn’t there, there’s nothing to multiply. build the training, fix the food, protect the sleep, and then, if you want a small, reliable, well-researched edge, creatine is waiting. that’s the order i did it in, and four and a half years later, it’s still in my routine every morning.

before you go…

are you taking creatine? if yes, how long, and have you noticed a difference? hit reply and let me know. i read every response.

and if this was useful, tap the ❤️, drop a comment, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

💖 find me elsewhere (instagram, pinterest, spotify)

when i first started, i did everything backwards. i ate less, trained more, and treated my body like a problem to fix. i bought into the idea that getting in shape meant shrinking. it took me a long time to understand that an athletic body is not built on restriction. it’s built on fuel, consistency, and a handful of habits that are almost boring in how plain they are.

so here’s how i’d do it again, from zero.

nutrition: eating to support your training, not to punish yourself

i’ll be honest with you. the biggest shift in my whole fitness life had nothing to do with a workout.

it was learning to eat enough.

for years i thought “healthy” meant tiny portions and constant low-grade hunger. i’d eat a sad lettuce salad (no carbs, not enough protein, no taste) and call it a meal, then wonder why my workouts felt like wading through mud and why i was thinking about food every fucking hour. the name of this newsletter is a joke and a confession at the same time. i spent so long fighting hunger that now i treat it like information. hungry usually means my body needs something, and that something is fuel.

if i started over, my plate would follow a simple shape. a clear protein source in every single meal. half the plate fruit and vegetables. the rest a mix of carbs and fats that i actually enjoy eating.

if you have no idea where to start with nutrition, i wrote a whole piece on it, with a step-by-step breakdown 📝

never not hungry

how to eat to gain muscle and lose fat (beginners friendly)

If you've ever tried dieting, you've probably ended up in one of these two camps at some point…

Read more

4 months ago · 915 likes · 11 comments · glicia carence 🧚🏻‍♀️

for the purpose of this article, i’ll just cover the basics.

protein first, because it’s the one most beginners undereat and the one that matters most for building muscle. protein is the raw material your body uses to repair and grow the tissue you break down when you train. i’m not precious about the source, i just make sure something protein-rich is on my plate before i build the rest of the meal around it.

then the produce. half the plate fruit and veg, because that’s where most of your fiber, water, and micronutrients live. and because it lets you eat a genuinely large amount of food for not many calories. this is the trick that changed how full and satisfied i feel: high volume. i’d rather eat a giant bowl that takes me twenty minutes to finish than a sad little portion i inhale in three bites and resent afterward.

my faves: big roasted vegetable bowls, fruit with yogurt, soups, air-fried veggies and potatoes, all sorts of veggies mixed with carb sources to add more volume for fewer calories (pasta, quinoa, rice, beans). and don’t forget the spices and condiments to bring flavor. all of these are delicious, nutritious foods you look forward to, not food you tolerate.

and whole foods most of the time. not all the time. i’m not interested in a version of fitness where you can never have a croissant, which would be both tragic and unsustainable. the “most of the time” is doing the heavy lifting here. if the bulk of what you eat is minimally processed and built around protein and produce, the occasional pastry or glass of wine doesn’t move the needle.

food is not the enemy of the body you want. it’s the thing that builds it. you cannot grow muscle, recover from training, or have the energy to be consistent if you’re running on fumes.

eat to support the work, not to apologize for existing.

training: full-body strength, built on movement patterns

if i started over, i would not walk into the gym and start doing random machines based on whatever was free. i did that for months and it got me nowhere except mildly sore and very confused.

i’d train three to four times a week, full body each session, and i’d build everything around seven movement patterns: squat, lunge, hinge, push, pull, carry, and rotate.

let me explain why patterns instead of body parts, because this is the thing i wish someone had told me on day one. your body doesn’t move in “biceps” and “abs.” it squats down to pick something up, it hinges at the hips to lift from the floor, it pushes things away, it pulls things toward you, it carries heavy bags up the stairs, it rotates to reach across. train the patterns and you train the whole functional, athletic body, not just the muscles that look good in a mirror.

for the first four weeks, i would chase one thing only: form. light weights, slow reps, paying attention to how each pattern actually feels. this is the most important phase of your program. spending four weeks learning to brace your core and move well is what lets you load heavy later without your lower back filing a complaint. i rushed this part the first time and paid for it with a tweaked back that set me back longer than four weeks ever would have.

then, for the next eight weeks, progressive overload. this is the engine of the entire thing, and it sounds fancier than it is. progressive overload just means gradually asking your muscles to do a little more over time. a little more weight, one more rep, one more set, better control. muscle grows in response to a demand it isn’t used to. if you lift the same weight for the same reps forever, your body has no reason to change. so you nudge it. last week you squatted 30 kilos for eight reps, this week you try for nine, or you add 2.5 kilos. small, steady, written down so you actually remember what you did. the notes app is your training partner.

cardio i’d treat as a tool, not a way to burn as many calories as possible. this is a big one for women especially, because so many of us were taught that cardio is how you earn your food or undo a meal.

i refuse to train that way anymore.

i run because it clears my head and because a strong heart and good aerobic fitness matter enormously for living a long, capable life. but you don’t need to run if you don’t like it. instead, add two or three moderate cardio sessions a week, the kind where you can still hold a conversation, plus maybe one harder effort. walking counts. cycling counts. dancing in your kitchen counts. it’s all movement that makes your body work better.

habits: the part you’re keep skipping (and the part that decides everything)

this is where most plans fall apart, and where i’d put more attention than i used to.

you can have the perfect meal plan and the perfect program, but if you sleep five hours, drink two glasses of water a day, and barely move outside the gym, none of it sticks. the habits around your training matter as much as the training. they’re just less exciting, so nobody sells courses on them.

the mistake i made, and the mistake i see everyone make, is trying to overhaul everything overnight. new diet, new program, 10,000 steps, three liters of water, eight hours of sleep, all starting monday. by thursday you’re exhausted and you quit, and then you decide you’re “just not disciplined.” you are disciplined. you just tried to change ten things at once, which nobody can do.

so i’d build from my real baseline, slowly. that means being honest about where you actually are, not where you think you should be.

if i currently walk 3,000 steps a day, my goal isn’t 10,000. it’s 4,000, then 5,000. water, same approach. if i barely drink any, i’m not going to suddenly chug three liters. i’d put a bottle on my desk and refill it twice. being even slightly dehydrated makes you tired, hungry, and weak in the gym. it’s the cheapest performance upgrade there is.

and sleep, which honestly might be the most important of all and the one i guarded least when i was younger. sleep is when your body actually repairs the muscle you trained and balances the hormones that control hunger and recovery. train hard and sleep badly and you’re pouring water into a leaky bucket. i’d pick one thing, a consistent bedtime, or no screens for the last hour before bed, and protect it like it matters. because it does.

the thread running through all of this is patience with yourself. pick one habit, get it steady, then add the next.

let’s wrap it up

if i had to start over, i wouldn’t try to be impressive. i’d eat enough, with protein and color on every plate. i’d lift full body a few times a week, learn the patterns, get my form right, then slowly add weight. i’d walk more, drink water, sleep like it’s part of the program, and i’d change one thing at a time instead of burning out trying to change all of them.

i already know someone is thinking, “how am i supposed to lift three times a week, add cardio, sleep eight hours, and get my steps in while having a job, kids, and an actual life?” i hear you, and i mean it. life gets hard, time is the one thing none of us have enough of, but hear me out.

if something matters to you, it’s worth giving it whatever you can, even when that isn’t much. if you don’t have the time to go all in right now, that’s completely fine. do what you can with what you have. you might not get the results you were hoping for, at least not as fast, but you’ll be building something anyway. i’m not going to pretend two workouts a week is the same as four. it isn’t. but two is a world away from zero.

see you in the next one 💌

before you go…

what's the hardest part of your fitness journey right now? not the beginning, not the end goal. right now, where you are today. hit reply and tell me. i read every single one.

and if this was useful, tap the ❤️, drop a comment, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

💖 find me elsewhere (instagram, pinterest, spotify)