35- From Reflection to Action: Your 2025 Fitness Vision

In this episode of Miles from Her View, host Kat invites listeners to reflect on their accomplishments in 2024 and prepare for a goal-oriented and fulfilling 2025. 

Kat, a seasoned strength and conditioning coach, shares insights on setting realistic and aligned goals for the coming year, focusing on health, fitness, and personal growth without the burden of guilt or shame. Through her personal stories and professional expertise, she outlines practical steps for establishing effective routines and underscores the importance of understanding the different seasons of life to shape achievable goals. 

This episode offers guidance for women navigating the complexities of family, career, and self-care, emphasizing the value of learning, growth, and community support in the journey toward strength and wellness.

00:00 Reflecting on 2024 and Embracing 2025

00:41 Introduction to the Podcast and Host

02:07 Seasonal Reflections and Personal Stories

06:03 Setting Realistic Goals and Overcoming Challenges

17:51 The Importance of Smaller Actions and Habits

21:33 Building a Support System for Success

23:07 Final Thoughts and Encouragement for 2025

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Transcript

Kat: 0:00

As we close the chapter in 2024, I want to invite you to pause and reflect with me, not to dwell on what didn't happen, but to celebrate what did, and get excited about the possibilities for 2025. This episode is all about asking the right questions to guide your next steps in health, fitness, and in life without the guilt or shame. We will also dive into the understanding the season of life you're in and how that can shape your goals in a way that feels more aligned and achievable. Whether you've crushed every goal this year or feel stuck. This episode is for you. So let's get started. Welcome to miles from her view, the podcast, where we dive deep into the unfiltered reality of fitness, strength, training, and nutrition within womanhood and motherhood. I am your host, Kat, founder of Kat the strength, I'm a career strength and conditioning coach, entrepreneur, lifelong athlete, and a mom of two active boys. In each episode, we explore the unique challenges and triumphs faced by women navigating the complexities of life. From juggling family and career to prioritizing self care, we dissect the systems and the habits that shape our health and wellness. Join us for real stories, authentic advice, and genuine conversations as we empower each other to embrace our journeys and find strength and vulnerability. Welcome back. I'm Kat, your host, and I'm so excited to have you here. I'm recording this podcast. About a week before it's going to air. So it is the Friday, the 20th right now of December. And let me tell you, I feel it. Everybody is in the process of. Wrapping up work, getting all the errands done, to take some time off, to enjoy however you honor the season. I just feel everyone just has a lot of busyness going on and that is okay. So, Obviously it's a week later. I'm hoping you're unplugged. You have some downtime and you are taking that time for yourself to nourish yourself and what you need. I also recognize that you might be getting bombarded with messages of 2025 or maybe you're in a state of reflection of how did 2024 go and what are your visions for 2025? That's perfectly normal. But today I want to share with you some ways to reflect, to hopefully decrease some of that guilt and shame, as well as to build a good foundation and understanding a starting point, or I'm going to say a continuation point, because you're really not starting. A lot of things that we try to implement, it's a continuation. It's a, we want to deepen the process of habits and rituals. And I'm going to have you. Focus a little bit more on your well being, and this pertains to the strength training, the cardio, the nutrition, the sleep, the stress mitigation. Now, I'm not going to break down what workouts you need to do or stop doing or what foods to eat or not eat. That's not what we're going to do. This is going to be in establishing routines and really aligning your goals with what you matters most to you. Those core values, those core principles, those things that are going to fill you up versus tear you down. I'm going to infuse some of my own personal stories because. I think that can help. Even though I am a personal trainer, this is what I do in my everyday life. I'm also a human. I'm a mom of two very active kids. I also consider myself an athlete for life. I train for ultra marathons. I'm running a business. There are many moving parts. There's a lot that you might be able to relate to and there's a lot that we don't have the same 24 hours. We just have the 24 hours in a day. So I do that. I want you to take away what helps you and just discard what doesn't, because I'm all about owning your story, owning your own superpowers, because we all have them. I will acknowledge it. If you're a long time listener, you've heard me say this again. So bear with me. The fact is there are 24 hours in a day. We all do not have the same 24 hours. But we all can learn from each other and take what someone has gone through to help set ourselves up for success. The biggest thing when we reflect on a year, it does not have to mean judgment. It's not about tallying the wins and the losses and seeing how far we've advanced, you know, having this big boastful moments. It's about learning and growth. And I know a big culture on social media, especially at the end of the year. I've participated. I I'm not immune to this is sharing a lot of apps out there. Show how many books you've read, how many podcasts you've listened to in the running world, there's an app called Strava and how many miles have you run? How many, how much vert have you done? And it just. a lot of data. And that's great. It should be celebrated. I'm not here to say, Oh, that's wrong at all. I mean, honestly, I look back and I'm like, wow, I did that. I think there's great part of that, but also I feel like sometimes it comes with judgment and judgment through comparison of what maybe you didn't do versus I did versus whoever, but it's not about those comparing or the tallies of the wins and losses. Where we stay Entrenched in a goal where we see the progress build is that learning and growth. And this reigns true with your own personal fitness. Fitness goals are essentially expiring goals. If you don't keep working on strength training, your cardio capacity, mobility, stress mitigation, sleep, nutrition, anything, those physical adaptations that you have gained from them are going to go away. You may hear people and I'm not, I'm going on a little sidetrack, you know, falling over the process, but what does that mean? And the process is learning and growth, learning about where you were and where you're going to go. As I mentioned in the beginning part of this, we're going to talk about the seasons because it is so important. If you are a parent, you watch your kids grow, you watch how they change, but you yourself have seasons with them. My life, what I can do is so different now that my kids are as pretty much in middle school, fifth grade and eighth grade than when they were in preschool or when they were infants and toddlers. And it's going to look different in another couple years when they're in high school and approaching college and so on and so forth. So, So, looking at the seasons and understanding what is achievable and kind of releasing what may not be now does not mean it will never happen. It's knowing that this is a season in which I'm in. I still want to do that, but this season doesn't have the capacity. So that's a little teaser to later, but I want to get into a little bit of my personal story here. As I mentioned, I. Run ultra marathons. I'm a business owner. I'm a mom. You know, these are all titles. These are all things that are just moving parts here. And I am someone who's like, I want to achieve it all. And I want to achieve it yesterday. There are only 24 hours in a day and energy only goes so far before we hit burnout. And if we do not take the rest and recovery, our body will choose it for us. And oftentimes at a time that we don't want to stop this year, I set out to run 200 miles. per month and consistently string trained three to four times per week. I want to break that down. I know 200 miles seems like, whoa, how much mileage are you doing per week? I do have a run coach and we break out running. I run based on time, meaning you have a 45 minute run today. You have an hour run today. With ultra training, there are longer runs and they can go into weeks. Very long. My peak long run is around five and a half hours to six hours. That's training for a hundred mile race. I do not do that year round. I want to just put that in there. I plan for that. It's a whole other, whole other podcast that I can go into if you are curious on how to train for an ultra marathon. Even if you don't know how. Don't ever want to run one and you're just curious, happy to do a podcast on that. What happened with life, I started out and it wasn't like a hard press. The one thing when I do goals, I make sure it's in ranges. It wasn't like if I don't get 200 miles and I'm not going to sit there and be like, well, I'm at 197, I better go out and get a quick three mile run. And that is not how I establish goals. And we'll talk about that a little bit later. So I looked at it, it was like, okay, this is something I want to do over the years. I've been gradually increasing my miles. per month, not as a main goal, but as my cardio capacity expanded as My body has adapted to the training. I've been able to handle more. My times have been getting faster, and I want to disclose, I am a happy middle packer runner. But, as the months crept on, I was really impressed to look back that I was hitting this, and it didn't seem hard. Then, my first race happened. I knew the next month, I did 100k in April. The next month, I knew the mileage would be down. That's normal. I'm recovering from 100 K is 63 miles. I'm recovering from that race. That month is May. The May is pretty much the final full month of school. So there's a lot of activities, a lot of extra things that are thrown in there. So piece of life. This was a great time to have a race to downshift in that month. So I knew there were going to be outlier months. So it kind of goes into that range where it wasn't dishonor my body and the fact that it was If I do a race that I shouldn't recover, it's okay. This is planned that this will be lower. Well, life started happening and come August, I had a vacation planned. I had this vacation planned the December prior. So December, 2023, it was scheduled. When I looked out at my year, discuss it with my coach that I'd be taking 12 days off. We went on an amazing trip. I highlighted before, but for a quick recap, we did six national parks out in the Pacific Northwest area and a lot of hiking. I knew for me that I could run on there. I could do workouts, but I needed to prioritize focusing, being with my family, taking a trip of a lifetime that my husband and I had on our bucket list to do with the kids. Probably when we were talking about having family, so I was not doing any workouts, so I knew that month would be low, but the mental impact was just stressful here. My big a race, my 100 mile race was at the end of October. Also coinciding at that time. I had a little inflammation flare up in my sacrum and a little bit to my SI joint. It was causing a little bit of an issues. Things weren't feeling that great. It's causing more tightness in my hips. So. It forced me to take a step back. It forced me to have lower miles at a time where I really needed peak miles. I had many freak out moments. I'm not immune to this. I know that with ultra training, with strength training, it's not about the one workout. It's about stacking all the workouts. It's about the consistency and showing up. And I have years of consistency. It does not mean, okay, just slack for fun. It's, When things like this come up, it helps us. If I didn't honor myself, like I did, scaling back, yes, missing key runs, that I would have never crossed that finish line. I also, in getting to the start line, needed to adjust my goals as to what I was looking for. What would be realistic in that situation to what would be unrealistic in that situation? And I made a decision. A commitment to myself that I was going to have fun and trust and believe in my body that it would do what I needed to do on that day. And the coolest thing was, it did. So, I want you to reflect on your whole year. Maybe you're thinking about goals that you sat there and made at this time. In December 2023, and maybe the year had a lot of twists and turns. I want you to reflect on what you did accomplish, even if it wasn't what you originally set out to do. Maybe you didn't stick to your workout routine, but you walked more than ever. Maybe you didn't lose weight, but you learned how to cook healthier meals for you and your family. The whole point is wins come in so many forms. So for me, even though I didn't, Master the 200 mile month for 12 months. What I learned was how to keep my ego in check and further trust in my body that it can still perform. So reflect on these two questions. What achievements or progress are you proud of? What challenges did you face and lessons you can carry? And I'll put a little disclosure. If you feel comfortable, email me these. I would love to hear, and I'd love to celebrate your progress, your accomplishments, and. Also cheer you on in the future here. So now looking towards 2025, I want you to think about yourself this time, December of 2025, and look back on your year and seeing how you felt strong, capable, aligned with your goals, and write down what does that look like for you. So really think about, you know, imagine yourself at the end of 2020, 2025 looking back on a year where you felt strong, capable, and aligned with your goals. What does that look like for you? Okay, focus on the for you part. Now I mentioned the seasons portion. Seasons can really help you set realistic goals. Seasons will change. Having a realistic goal working with the season you are currently in. Think back to that kind of framing the future question there is it's going to allow you to be strong, be capable at the end of that year. So this might be the season of growth and pushing boundaries and trying new challenges because you have the capacity. Or it might be a season of recovery and rebuilding where you're focusing on the basics. Neither one is better or worse. It's all about honoring where you are. When we establish goals, we want to look at what do we want to do. I vividly remember when I was having kids. A lot of people had opinions. A lot of people have opinions when you have kids. It's like, you didn't realize how many people had opinions about how you should live your life until you are either trying to conceive pregnant, or you have a baby for the first time. I had not started endurance running in the capacity of Marathons, half marathons, ultra marathons, any of that. It had been on my like, Oh my goodness, could I do this? Am I capable of doing something like this? I enjoyed working out. I enjoyed having that time for me. I, for me, it doesn't always come natural, but it's something that does fill my soul. A lot of people tell me, well, you have kids now. So basically like forget all the time you have. You're never going to be able to achieve those things. And I would talk about like how I want to go backpacking with my husband. I want to run a marathon. I want to, at that time I didn't really spoken about running an ultra marathon, but I was talking about doing these big adventurous things. And the response that I got back was, Oh, you'll never have the time to do that. Oh, you can forget that. And I found it really discouraging because not that I was like, Oh, I'll show you when I become a mom, I can do all these things. It was kind of that like, is, is that what I signed up for that? I will never have me when I become a mom. And looking back on that is, I know that's totally not true. Okay. So when I started endurance running and you know, with my, after my first child, there was bumps in the road to get back, just the normal things, you know, of. Finding time for myself, articulating what that is, you know, developing those, that understanding of, okay, now I have a child, you know, there's work, child, he has needs. Where do I fit in and getting those reflexes, those habits. It's feeling more comfortable where, yes, that guilt of I shouldn't take time for myself or I shouldn't, I should go pick them up if I get done work early versus going and taking, getting that workout for myself. All of those little bits I had to, you know, establish that, yeah, no, it's totally fine for me to get a workout in and then go pick them up at the regular time. He didn't know the difference. And then after I had my second child, that's when I really launched into getting into endurance running was what do I have the capacity for? Surely it came with a lot of failures and a lot of burnout, but that's sometimes how we learn. I'll never forget. I would put myself through hard workouts. I was just exhausted all the time and I'm like, there's got to be a better way. There's got to be a better way and there is and that's where it's looking at. What season are you in? What do you have the capacity for? How can you in this season, whether it be a season where you have little kids or a season that you're coming into that you have more time because your kids are more independent your work life balance is changing in the favor that you have more time, how can you, Honor the capacity in the season that you are headed in or currently in that it aligns and feels good with your goals. So here's some framework questions. How do you envision feeling by the end of 2025? That goes back to how I started this, you know, just that, imagine yourself at the end of 2025, looking back on the year where you felt strong, capable, aligned with your goals. What does that look like for you? Now, the second question is what's one primary health or fitness goal you'd like to achieve. Notice it didn't say name four or five, what's one. And this one is the most important. This one is often overlooked and this one has. So much value and it's the magic one that literally will get you to where you want to be at the end of 2025. You ready for it? What smaller actions or habits can help you get there? I'm going to repeat it. What smaller actions or habits can help you get there? This This is where the movement happens. This is what keeps you progressing forward in your goals. It's not these huge big grand things. I'm going to framework fitness for right now. You know, the common trends in the fitness world is gyms are packed January 1 or January 2nd, that first week in January. They are packed. They are packed solid. You can't find a machine, you can't find a weight to save your life. As the weeks progress, the gym's empty. Backside of that, and maybe you're sitting there being like, Oh my goodness, this is totally me. Most people set a goal. I want to get in shape. I want to use 2025. In 2025, I'm going to go to the gym five days a week. I'm going to work out for an hour a day, five days a week. And they start week one, five days a week. Boom. They're nailing it. Week two, nailing it. Maybe they, they miss one day, but they're nailing it. Week three, the fatigue sets in. There's a lot of other things that start to bubble up. week four. So maybe they go two or three times, maybe four times, week five, you know? And so it starts to dwindle like that because we're not looking at the smaller actions or habits that are going to get there. There's a lot of other things that go into supporting, keeping your health at the forefront. So it might look like, Hey, I want to start utilizing my gym membership, or I want to strength train in 2025. Let's just use strength. All right. So we want to strength train in 2025. We want to become regular for that. What things do you need to do to set yourself up for success? Do you have a gym membership? Do you feel comfortable strength training? Do you have a plan to follow? Do you have someone to support you on that? And then when we're looking at that numerical goal of the frequency in taking action on this goal, Start small. If you're not already consistently going or participating in a workout 2 3 times a week, you should not start with 5 times. It does not mean that you cannot handle 5 times a week. I firmly believe you can. It's, you're setting yourself up for failure. So start with 1 2. I recorded a podcast on the ranges and why ranges are really, really great and this is where. And what smaller actions are going to get you there? Maybe it's you need to buy weights. Looking for a program that you actually like. One that aligns with your understanding of lifts and the equipment you have available to you. Setting out your clothes the night before if you're going to an early morning workout is huge. I know some people like to sleep in their clothes. I'm not that person. But if that helps you, awesome. Do it. Maybe it's setting the coffee maker every day so you don't have to press the button or pour the grounds into the filter and the water in the back. I mean, I love that my coffee is made every morning when I come downstairs. Maybe it's Looking at your workout the night before laying out your clothes. And again, these are building habits, having the coffee maker set on auto with your workout equipment, wherever, and ready for you to go in the morning, because those smaller actions set you up success and take out the barriers to getting to the workout. Because the more things you have standing in your way to Do something especially early morning that is going to prevent you from doing it. It also holds true to the afternoon or after work. Plan out the things and take those smaller actions so that you are set up for success to see those habits and meet that goal. Alright, so I mentioned some support and I'm going to give you some strategy about support. Success is This isn't about going at it alone. It's about building a support system that lifts you up and keeps you accountable. It's a thousand percent okay to ask for help. So I'm going to use the example of strength training. If you're unsure about strength training, hire a coach that can help support you in that one that sees and supports you. on your level. Not every coach is created equal, and I'm not perfect for every person. Think about where you need that support for your goals. And it's very easy to think like we have to have it all figured out for ourselves, but having someone guide you, you know, like if it's a coach, a friend, or a community, it's very easy. Having a good support system, whether it's your partner, spouse, a friend, is huge. I know my husband and I, we motivate each other to work out. It helps us keep moving forward. But we help support each other in our goals. We help hold ourselves accountable when we don't really feel like showing up some days. Because that makes a huge difference. It's not just about me. forcing us or holding guilt. It's just, Hey, you know what? I know I, you have a lot going on. I feel it too, but we got this. We can do this. So find those people who are your allies and your support it with these goals and lean on them. What kind of support do you need in 2025 to reach your goal? Think about that. If it's a person or someone you need to hire to help you with that service and start the research. It will serve you well. We are not meant to do this all alone. I don't know how your year went. It may not have gone exactly as planned and that's okay. Progress is not linear at all. It's about showing up, learning and adjusting as you need to. Adjusting to the season you're in, the energy and capacity that you have. But as we head into 2025, I really hope you take the time to celebrate your wins. Reflect on those challenges. They're not a negative. Challenges happen and that's part of growth that helps create the change and deepen the learning process and set the goals that feel so true to you. If you're looking for support, I'm always here to help whether it's through the podcast, my newsletter or working one on one with me. I genuinely want to see you thrive. Before you go, I'd love for you to follow me on a miles from review, follow the podcast and share it with a friend. That would be huge. Share it with someone who might benefit from this podcast. If you want to get to know me more and all the things about catfish strength, hop on my email list. I promise you, I do not have the time to spam and I, you'll hear from me once a week. I do not have the capacity to email you every day. 2025 is your year to move forward with strength and purpose. Thank you so much for joining me today, and I look forward to being with you on the next Miles from Her View. Thank you for joining me on another episode of Miles from Her View. Your support means the world to me, and I truly appreciate you being a part of our community. If you found today's episode helpful and want to stay informed about all things social media, CatFitStrength. Make sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter. You'll receive exclusive insights, tips, and updates straight to your inbox. To sign up, simply visit the show notes for the subscription link. To discover more about CatFitStrength programs and how you can ignite your fitness journey, head over to our website at www. cat. fit. There you'll find everything you need to invigorate your path. To strength and once again, thank you for tuning in and I can't wait to connect with you in our upcoming episodes. Take care and remember act to take the next step.