MilesFromHerView
MilesFromHerView
56- You’ve Got Barre, Yoga, Running… But Where’s Strength in the Mix?
You’ve been moving. Barre classes? Check. Yoga flow? Love it. Running? When time allows, you’re lacing up and logging miles. But if you’re still feeling stuck, achy, or like your body just isn’t changing this episode is your missing piece.
We’re talking about where strength training actually fits in your weekly routine, without replacing the workouts you love. Whether you're a barre devotee, a dedicated yogi, or a busy runner chasing that post-workout high, adding progressive strength doesn’t mean giving anything up. It means finally training in a way that supports your full, active life.
I’m also sharing real stories of women who thought they had to choose… until they started layering in strength the smart way and saw everything shift.
In this episode, we cover:
- Why your favorite workouts still matter but might not be enough on their own
- The signs your body is asking for more support
- How progressive strength fills the gap (without burning you out)
- Real-life case studies from women who blended strength with yoga, running, and more
- The mindset shift that helps you train smarter without overhauling your life
This episode is for you if...
- You love movement but still don’t feel “strong”
- You’ve been told to “just lift weights” but don’t know where to start
- You want a balanced, sustainable way to feel powerful in your body again
👟 Want a smart strength plan that fits your life without ditching the workouts you love?
Check out the KatFit Strength Programs
Book a Call to start to build your strength plan!
🖤 Let’s Stay Connected:
If this episode hit home, send it to a friend who’s juggling all the workouts but still feels stuck.
Rate & review the show, or message me what resonated most—I love hearing from you.
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You don't need to quit your favorite workouts. You just need to train smarter. Whether you love running Pilates, yoga, or hopping into your favorite fitness class, it doesn't have to be either or, but if you, if you're not progressively strength training. You're leaving results on the table. This episode is about showing how strength training isn't here to compete with your current movement. It is here to support elevate it and make it sustainable so you can keep doing the things you love without burning out or breaking down, or wondering why your body feels like it's working harder and changing less. Welcome to MilesFromHerVIew, the podcast powered by KatFit Strength, where busy women like you find practical solutions to fuel your fitness journey with authenticity and resilience. I'm Kat, your host, a mom of two active boys, a business owner, and an ultra marathon runner and a strength trainer in her forties with nearly two decades of experience. I'm here to help you cut through the noise of fads, hacks, and quick fixes. This is a space where we celebrate womanhood and motherhood. All while building strength and resilience and reconnecting with you from a place of self-compassion and worthiness. Whether you're lacing up your running shoes to go out for a run, driving your kids to practice or squeezing in a moment for yourself, I'm right here in the trenches with you. Let's dive in. Welcome back. I'm Kat, I'm your host. What you can't see. It is a rainy day behind me. You can see out my office window behind me and it's been raining. We honestly, we need the rain, so it is the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. Which is the unofficial start of summer. I, it's always bittersweet when school comes so close, my kids are in grade school, so they have a couple more weeks left of school, so I'm excited to have home over the summer. Little. Nerve wracking because that means the routine switches up. But it's all good. We will get through it. But hopefully your may has been going well and you're, you're hanging in there with all the extra events of the school year. So before we dive in today's episode on progressive overload and what actually builds strength, I wanna zoom out and get to the why, because let's be honest, most of us are not chasing six pack abs. We're chasing resilience, we're chasing energy. We want to feel capable, not consistently recovering or run down with our fitness. We're talking about building a body and mind that carries you through real life, pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause, busy mom schedules, and all the curve balls in between. And honestly, when done right, your fitness will become that anchor. Not just another thing on your to-do list. It gives you the energy to keep up with your kids, powerful in your skin, and not live in fear of injury burnout, or feeling like you're falling apart in your forties and beyond. And I get it. I honestly, I truly get this, that the fitness industry is loud. You've got all the research reels, the fitness influencers, the with the hot takes and enough contra contradictory info to make your head spin. Trust me, it makes my head spin and I am in the business. One post says hit is the secret to fat loss. Another says it's walking with a weighted vest and another swears it's heavy lifting or nothing. Honestly, you're left wondering, am I doing the right thing? Is it too late for me? Why am I doing all the things and not seeing results? That is when I hear a lot. Let me clear it up for you. No, it's not too late. No, your body is not broken. And no, you don't need to do everything. You need a clear, progressive plan that works with your life and not against it. So today we're cutting through all the noise and we'll break down what strength training actually does for your body and how it plays with other modalities like yoga. And group fitness and why it should be your foundation, especially in hormonal seasons of life, like pregnancy, postpartum, and PerMon menopause. So let's dive in. There's a lot of ways to move and they're not all doing the same thing. That matters a lot. So we're gonna break it down. I am only picking a handful of, of. Styles of working out does not mean that I am picking on any of these for any reason. I just can't go over all the formats. We'd be here forever. So first one, yoga and Pilates. These are amazing for mobility, breath and nervous system regulation. You're gonna feel more tuned in with your body, but without progressive overload, they won't build or maintain that lean muscle mass. They're great tools. It's just not strength training. Group fitness, think orange theory, body pump, any of those group fitness classes, they're fun, they're motivating and it helps you stay consistent. But most classes are high rep, low load and randomized, and what this means is you're working hard but not always in an efficient, smart way. Without structure progression, you're going to hit a plateau hit. It is amazing for cardio that. Cardio health endurance, insulin sensitivity, and it is effective in doses, but it doesn't build muscle like strength training does. So think of hi as your hot sauce, a great add in, but it shouldn't be the main dish. Running. You know, I'm a runner. I love to run, and I get the joy, the freedom, the mental clarity it brings. But again, without strength training, running alone won't protect your muscle or your joints long term, especially in midlife. You need both weighted vest walking. It's a cool tool and it is trending so hard right now. You probably can't escape it in your reels. It is good for bone loading and increased work output. But it is still walking and it should not be confused with lifting. It is a supplemental aspect of training, not a foundational, so the bottom line is. Each of these have its own place, but if you wanna change your body, support your hormones, and build real strength and age like a badass, you need progressive strength training. All right, so why? Why about progressive strength training? If you are a friend of the podcast and you have listened to a lot of episodes, I do talk a lot about this, and this is not to say any of the aforementioned. Ways to work out are bad. I fully support them and my clients as we'll get into later do incorporate these modalities into their training plans, and I want them to. However, progressive strength training is that backbone to the plan. Strength training isn't just picking up weights. It's a signal for your body to adapt. Progressive overload means we're gradually increasing the stress placed on your muscles by upping weights, reps volume, or intensity. So that's how your body knows to build strength and increase that lean mass and boost that metabolic function. So if you're in your thirties and forties, you need that signal. When you enter 30, muscle just naturally starts to decline around age 30, and this is called sarcopenia. We don't want to lose our muscle, and this is accelerated when we start perimenopause. We want to maintain our current and build on our muscle mass. And if we don't have the plan to build or maintain, what is gonna happen is your metabolism is going to slow down. You're going to be more you're gonna have less insulin sensitivity, increase joint instability and higher injury of risk and lower energy and endurance. But see, the thing is strength training is preventative care. It's your long game. It literally reverses the aging curve. It's not gonna stop it, but it'll slow it down. And research shows resistance training improves bone density, muscle mass, hormonal health, mental wellbeing, I wanna be very clear here, you are not broken and you are definitely not too late. You're just ready for a better plan. And this isn't about punishment, it's about power. It's not about shrinking your body, but owning your strength and progressive strength training is how you age with muscle confidence and, and options. It's the real flex. With that, we need to shift our mindset. When I say strength train, I'm not talking about a five day bro split or isolating one muscle group at a time. I'm talking about training like an athlete for life with purpose, structure and phases. I, in my past career was a college track and field coach. The way I set up the athletes trading plan was understanding who they were, their body type, their biological age, in their age, in the sport. I put together a plan that would set them up for success, understanding these identifiers, because the plan has to meet. Them where they're at to elevate them to ensure their success. Athletes train with purpose, structure and phases. In a chaotic life, we can still train with purpose, structure and phases in order to build strength. Yes, it will look different than what it looked like when I trained college athletes because in college athletics I had a beautiful container that I had a lot more in my control. I was able to build a much prettier, more controlled plan. But with my clients, there is still a training plan with purpose, structure and phases. So athletes are not training for. Aesthetics. They're training for the outcomes of function, power, resilience, and longevity. And this is exactly. How I coach my women inside my programs. I think about movement patterns, not muscle confusion. Squats, hinges, hinges are like dead lifts, pushes and pulls, carries rotational work and layered on mobility, energy system training, and yes, built in rest because rest is where the adaptations occur and there's a difference. It's all periodized, meaning we don't just throw workouts at you and hope. They do something, I move them through blocks. They start with building a foundation and it looks different for each person because I want to know how long they've been working out, what is their experience with lifting and any sort of fitness and understanding are they pregnant? Postpartum, are they experiencing perimenopause symptoms and build that into their program? So they start with that foundation, and the foundation can look a little bit different. It can look like they're starting with body weight workouts, banded workouts, a mix of banded and dumbbell or a barbell workouts. It can be a mix of body weight and barbell dumbbell kettlebell. So I establish their foundation. So that their body builds that capacity to handle the workouts. Then we focus on strength to power, and from there. It's intentional, it builds on itself. Now I'm gonna give you some real case studies. The names have all been changed Sarah, she came to me. She was training for half marathons. She ran four to five days a week, but struggled with chronic hamstring tightness and just was feeling weaker in every training cycle. So what we looked at was anchoring her running with two full body strength training sessions per week and focusing on hip stability and core control, and building single leg strength within 12 weeks. Her mileage felt easier. She was able to build on her mileage. Her long runs were more efficient and her back pain disappeared. So nowhere in there was five workouts of strength training her two full bodies to be in full transparency with 30 to 40 minutes. It was a plan that set her up for success. Around her running, but also in her everyday life. When I say her long runs were more efficient, when she finished her long runs, she had more energy. She wasn't exhausted, and she could go home and still have energy throughout the day. Emily Love daily yoga practice. But was frustrated that her body wasn't changing the way she expected. She felt connected. But she just didn't feel strong. I'm a big proponent of yoga. I think it's just amazing and we kept it there for mobility and mindfulness. But I added two days of strength training. Within months, she could hold her poses deeper, she felt stronger, and finally saw muscle definition, and it truly reflected how hard she was working. Most of these examples, what I'm showing is where their starting point is. A lot of my clients start with two strength training days and increase to three again. Most of my clients have the capacity for two strength training days. I do like to sneak in that third one, but again, we're working with the flexibility of life now, Julie, she came to me. She thrived on community and accountability. She loved going to Orangetheory five days a week, but she was plateauing and constantly sore to the point where outside life beyond her workouts, she felt exhausted and was sore and just. Couldn't understand why she wasn't seeing more change. So I scaled back her frequency. I built her strength plan with structured progression and added a true recovery day. Now, she still goes to classes two times a week because she likes that energy, but her primary training driver is strength and. Energy as well as her aesthetic have changed too. So even though progressive strength training isn't. Aesthetic driven and training like an athlete isn't aesthetic driven. You will still see aesthetic changes. It's when we sit here and target and hyper-focused, aesthetic changes, we miss core components to set our body up for success. Amanda, who's 44, was dealing with a lot of joint pain and unpredictable energy, and the dreaded perimenopause, midsection weight gain. She was an avid tennis player and she just. She just didn't feel that drive on the court anymore, and she didn't wanna give up her Saturday doubles or her daily walks, so we had to create a plan that respected those while addressing the joint pain, hormonal shifts, and potential muscle loss in two months. Her knees stopped aching. Her core and lower back felt more stable, and she finally started seeing results without eating less or pushing harder. See, that's the thing is when we think we. Need to see a change. When we plateau, oftentimes we're taught well, we need to cut our calories, we need to push harder in the gym, cut our calories so that we keep seeing the changes when. Most times it's the opposite. We need to have a better aligned plan to set us up for success, that there is a backbone for some of these clients. It was incorporating more rest. It was, and all of these clients putting in that backbone, cohesive plan of strength training so that they would excel in the other movements that brought them joy as well as in life. So the biggest takeaways here is you don't need to quit what you love. You need to train smarter. Strength training isn't here to replace your favorite workouts. Honestly, it is here to elevate them. This isn't an all or nothing. It's about layering your movement in a way that makes you feel strong, supported, and in a steady body. If you felt confused, stuck, or feel like you're falling behind, you're not. You're one solid strength block away from feeling grounded again. So take a breath, pick up a weight, and move with intention and remind yourself you are not starting over, you're building forward. If this hit home, don't stop at inspiration. Send this to a friend who needs to hear this. Reach out. Better yet, click the link in the show notes and let's hop on a call and build a strength plan together. You've waited long enough to feel powerful again, so let's go book the call. I'll catch you next time. Thank you for tuning in to MilesFromHerView, powered by KatFit Strength. If this podcast inspires you, don't keep it for yourself. Hit follow or subscribe to stay updated on the new episodes, and leave us a review to help more women and moms discover this space. Your feedback fuels this podcast and I'd love to hear what's working for you or what topics you want to dive into Next. You can connect with me on Instagram at KatFit Strength, or share this episode. With a friend who is ready to embrace her strength. Remember, fitness isn't about perfection. It's about showing up for yourself and finding strength in every step of your journey. Until next time, keep moving forward one mile at a time.
