The Third Way – Sustainable, enjoyable workouts

My client Sarah is no slouch. She’s one of the most driven women I’ve ever met – as an accomplished news reporter and Miss America pageant competitor, she balances a lot of lines….she is both thoughtful and articulate, confident and humble, hard-working and easy going. Overall, she’s dedicated, incredibly goal-oriented, and pretty damn fierce. She’ll show up to a session in full makeup not afraid to sweat like Rocky and can burpee like a champ.

Sarah recently hit a training peak for a pagent event and after months of preparation, we met to recalibrate her training. After our warm-up yesterday, she responded to my cheerful suggestion of “Let’s do some HIIT!” with laughter and a firm “Nope!”

And I did a double take.

Athletes and competitors are sometimes the most challenging people to work with because they’ll show up and give 100% effort day after day, week after week – but after their performance date, they typically fall into one of two camps: they either insist on keeping “top form” and moving forward with the frequency and intensity of their training (and then get burnt out or injured), or they stop training completely, ghost on sessions and engage in unhealthy behavior cycles (like turning an indulgence meal into an indulgence month).

The Third Way is about developing an intuitive knowledge of what our bodies need and how we can best serve them over weeks, months, and years.

Not Sarah. This woman has it figured out! She has internalized what we call “periodization” which is training in cyclical periods to optimize performance (peaking when you intend to peak) and recovery (resting and returning to a regular schedule of maintenance workouts). After her competition, she took a few days to recover, then resumed training with Pilates classes – something that works her out in a different way than HIIT and bodybuilding. Pilates is an activity she enjoys and finds sustainable. She likes the social setting of working out in a class, using a reformer, and being challenged by those around her to try a little bit harder.

She’s mastered the art of fitting workouts into her life, rather than fitting her life around her workouts. It’s a mindset that can sustain her health through career changes, relocating, and life events. Not a small achievement at the ripe old age of 23!

This is what I call the Third Way – it’s not relentless balls-to-the wall training, and it’s not doing nothing and letting our fitness gains melt away. It’s about developing that intuitive knowledge of what our bodies need and how we can best serve them over weeks, months, and years. It’s about embracing the seasonality of training, rather than taking a mental snapshot of what our “peak” looked like and trying (and failing) to maintain it. It’s what we do when we pull out those skinny jeans from high school and lovingly throw them in the Goodwill bag because we know our bodies have accomplished amazing things since then and there’s no going back to what they once looked like. We find new ways of working out, new ways of being inspired by movement, and connecting with the rhythms of our training cycles in meaningful ways.

So please – do yourself a favor and take a page from Sarah’s book. Here are some tips to finding your Third way:

1. Cycle your intensity. Work hard, then take your foot off the gas and find a sustainable, enjoyable rhythm in your exercise routine. Your trainer can help you find a periodization schedule that fits your goals and your life – focusing on activities that you enjoy and ones that give you the
2. Try a new challenge. Nothing is as motivating as signing yourself up for an athletic event, a short workout challenge, or a membership at a new studio. Harness that joy of activating by jumping in right away.
3. Evaluate your goal posts. When you commit to a new challenge, take a moment to visualize yourself participating in the day-to-day activity – like an upbeat training montage! This can be more beneficial than imagining your end goal (hitting a PR, winning a competition, or having a certain body fat percentage) because you give yourself ownership over making the change, and agency through the process of doing the hard work, rather than creating a mental snapshot of what the finish line will look like, devoid of a roadmap to get there.

When Sarah chose to work out the Third Way, our session looked a bit different. We did some walking, foam rolling, stretching, and goal setting. Rather than counting down to the end of a breathless boxing interval, we did myofascial recovery work and talked about finding new goals, workout communities, and ways of exercising. It was a great reminder for me – that as a trainer, I need to follow the lead of what the client is telling me about where they are and where they want to be, rather than holding them to some external standard. And that’s how people discover how to sustain themselves with exercise over a lifespan – not just for a season.