How often does someone ask, “what sets your ‘insert business field’ services apart from your competitors?” I can’t tell you the amount of times that I got asked this as I started building this company and my answer was always the same - it says it right in the mission statement.  

R7 Strength strives to empower a community of women to redefine strength and foster health in symbiosis through strength training and coaching protocols that deliver optimized and sustainable results.

My goal was to establish a framework that recognizes that health is not one dimensional. The seven pillars of health reflect the notion that there is a multi-dimensionality to health and in order to operate efficiently, effectively, and appropriately throughout life there has to be balance, recognition, and development of each respective pillar. R7 Strength and its guiding principles are built around a coaching methodology that recognizes the interdependence between the body and the brain that facilitates developing a symbiotic relationship between all seven pillars. Establishing a connection between the body and the brain is a fundamental step in building real, raw, resilient strength. Our guiding principles emphasize developing this connection and leveraging a physically strong, capable body for success throughout all seven pillars. But where did these principles come from? How did I build them and how do they help establish, develop, and refine this connection? This six part blog series breaks down the brain and how its function and evolution have shaped the approach that R7 Strength takes to strength training and protocols. Before we get into the nitty gritty, let’s start with the question: why the brain?

I was first introduced to the complexities and nuances of the brain in middle school when I started experiencing migraines and syncope. It started with migraines, I would lose my vision and get an intense pain on the right side of my head directly behind my eye. Both my parents and I had no idea what was going on or why it was happening, and it wasn’t until I had passed out randomly a couple of times and spent more than a few nights in the Emergency Room that I finally got referred to a neurologist. As he started explaining that what I was experiencing was a migraine, I felt a sense of relief - it gave me an explanation and understanding of what was going on. However, despite the battery of tests that were ordered we couldn’t find an explanation for the syncope episodes or why the migraines were happening. This set off a period of about a year in high school where I focused on working with my neurologist and parents to understand what would trigger an episode. We looked at everything from sleep to diet and routine stressors. Eventually, we identified key triggers and strategies that would help keep me from ending up back in the Emergency Room. My main takeaways? The brain is incredibly complex and there is so much we still don’t know about how it works. External inputs were creating an output in my body that other people didn’t experience. It was not a “fun” experience by any definition of the word, but it ignited a passion for understanding how the brain can influence how the body feels and how I could take control of my own health by understanding how certain inputs would impact my health and well being.

This fascination with the brain was further reinforced in school when I was studying Architectural Engineering. I know what you’re thinking, I was studying how to design building systems, how does that have anything to do with the brain? My emphasis was in lighting and electrical design, the program at CU has one of the best lighting design programs in the country and its curriculum emphasizes human interaction with light. Light is emitted from a source and interacts with the objects and surfaces surrounding it in a complex flux balance transfer until it reaches an equilibrium state. What we see is a result of both the source, the object, and how our brain processes and decodes this information into a picture. We broke down everything from how light enters the eye and is processed by rods and cones in the retina and transformed into an electrical signal that travels along the optic nerve to the psychology of light and how we can manipulate variables such as intensity and color temperature to elicit a specific feeling or emotion in a space. The curriculum spoke to my fascination with how external inputs impact how the brain takes in and interprets external stimuli and creates emotional and physiological responses in the body.

On a less nerdy and more personal note, my recovery from an eating disorder has also largely shaped my view and interest in the complexities of the brain and its role in both physical and behavioral health. When I started the recovery process, I can remember thinking to myself “this won’t be too hard, I know what I need to do to put on weight and I know what I was doing was wrong and hurting me.” Looking back on it now, I laugh at that thought and that I was at any point naive enough to think that the recovery process would be that simple. The hardest part has been retraining my brain. I spent years reinforcing negative feedback loops that needed to be undone and depleting my body so much that my brain had adapted to constantly be in survival mode. I will adminantly stand by the statement that my recovery didn’t truly begin until I recognized how specific stressors were triggering behavior patterns and responses. Once I started recognizing those feedback loops, I was able to start the process of retraining my responses. It was hard. I would relapse, but every relapse was a learning opportunity. For a while I saw a relapse as failure and like I was back at square one, but I wasn’t. I started connecting the dots on what would trigger a relapse and once I could identify it happening I could start training a different response. It created an awareness that facilitated my ability to process emotions, how I was feeling, and choose a different course of action - create and reinforce a new feedback loop to replace the old one. Sometimes that looked like finding new ways to process an input, such as a comment about my body at work or feeling rejected and unwanted after a failed date, but other times it looked like having the awareness to remove myself from situations entirely. Regardless of the strategy, I was training my brain to respond to these stressors differently and it’s a process I’m still actively engaging in today. 

My experiences and interests in the brain are uniquely my own and I can’t say that my story is applicable to every single person, but I can confidently say that every person can benefit from an understanding of how it shapes how we experience and interact with the world around us. This blog series breaks down the brain and reiterates the important role it plays in developing strength and optimizing your health. R7 Strength uses this fundamental understanding of the brain as a foundation for our services and protocols. I am so excited to dive a little deeper into how I developed the Core 3 guiding principles for our community!