Methods are many, principles are few. This concept is what drives my training programs and coaching and how I structure protocols for every client that I work with in order to optimize results, ensure adherence, and create a sustainable relationship with strength training as we pursue and foster strength throughout our lives. The methods will vary from client to client, but the principles I’ve developed are simple and take a dual prong approach to training that functions to create a symbiotic relationship between all seven pillars of health as defined by our company standards. The seven pillars as we have defined them are:

1. Physical Health

2. Mental Health

3. Social Health

4. Intellectual Health

5. Occupational Health

6. Spiritual Health

7. Environmental Health

Each pillar of health is important for maintaining a healthy, fulfilling life. Our dual prong approach to training protocols emphasizes this principle and seeks to establish a symbiotic relationship between all seven pillars. The principle?

Train the Body - Train the Brain

The duality of this approach is what I felt like was missing when I was working in a corporate gym. The messaging is highly focused on the body and the workout through trends, marketing, and sales tactics. It’s more than a workout, it’s how this training stimulus impacts your life outside of the gym. Are you physically stronger and able to carry your kids up the stairs at night for bed? Do you have more cognitive clarity throughout the day when you train in the morning? Are you a more attentive partner when you are engaging in appropriate recovery processes? All of these are just examples of the connections that go far beyond the actual workout but make the biggest impact on how people engage with the fitness industry. When we reinforce these positive feedback loops associated with exercise, the likelihood that people maintain and adhere to a program skyrockets. Now that I have established a baseline for how the dual prong strategy functions together, let’s break it down into its separate parts and connect it back to the understanding of the brain that we have built in this series.

First and foremost, the services that R7 Strength offers focuses on training the body through proper training protocols. The protocols focus on meeting clients where they are at and gradually building towards their goals so that they can build physical strength and a relationship with their body that emphasizes our second guiding principle:

Understand, Embrace, Develop

This principle seeks to address external inputs and create a functional, strong body that is capable of performing. I wanted to create a structure and mindset that puts my clients in a positive affective state. Right now, there is a huge movement towards body positivity and loving your body and how it looks no matter what it looks like. This is great in theory, but the reality is that your view of your body is going to vary from day to day based on how it fluctuates naturally and your current emotional state. Believe me, I want to be all for loving your body no matter what it looks like but I have been down that rabbit hole and it left me feeling like I was completely stagnant as I recovered from an eating disorder. I kept telling myself I would be “recovered” when I could look at my body after the weight gain and love it, when that never happened I felt like I was just failing and that feeling of failure rendered all of the progress that I had made obsolete in my mind. When I came to the realization that the day I love how my body looks may never come, but I could appreciate and love everything it does for me, my entire perspective changed. Why did it change? I wasn’t relying on emotion to dictate my success or failure, but I was creating a positive affect around my body that I could cultivate and nurture through daily practices. Understanding and embracing how the body is designed to move creates a positive affect around body image and training that focuses less on aesthetics and more on function and capability that in turn enables us to properly develop and load movement patterns. The result? A  functional foundation that we can build on as we advance training protocols and in turn develop the body. Your body is designed to move, grow, and change; let’s understand, embrace, and develop it.

The second prong of R7 Strength services seeks to train the brain through coaching calls and check-in forms. The calls and check-ins focus on creating a raw, honest dialogue with clients to ensure that we are providing them with the resources that they need to be successful and connect the work they are doing to promote physical health and strength to their personal definition of strength. Often times, a client’s personal definition of strength has a large carryover into the other pillars of health and utilizes our third guiding principle:

Educate, Implement, Reflect

This principle seeks to address internal inputs and develop new feedback loops in the brain. This draws on adaptive brain theory and neuroplasticity. We are trying to accomplish two main tasks as we train the brain (1) train our stress response and (2) make and reinforce connections between inputs (i.e. actions, behaviors, practices) and positive outputs (i.e. more mental clarity, confidence at work, energy throughout the day). We accomplish these tasks by educating our clients on different strategies and habits they can engage in and why they work so that they can then implement them for themselves. After implementing them, the reflection process occurs and is facilitated through coaching calls and check-in forms. As we reflect, we start building that connection and positive feedback loop in our brain by creating awareness around how our body responded to an input that we gave it. This reflection process also enables us to adjust protocols as needed as we look at a client’s health in its entirety rather than physical health in isolation. Furthermore, as clients actively engage in this process they are developing the cognitive adaptive response of the brain by creating new “datasets” for the brain to pull from as it seeks to make informed decisions by remembering past events. The repetition of these practices reinforce these connections that better serve all pillars of health. 

Let’s look a little more in depth at training and reflecting on the stress response. Training the brain and its associated stress response involves creating new networks and pathways that the brain can “pull” from so we respond to stress in positive ways. Essentially, it enables clients to apply stress in situations where they have control so that they can perform better in situations where they have less control. I will use myself as an example to give context to the concept. I have very bad anxiety and have been getting panic attacks since I was in middle school. I feel like I am drowning, can’t breathe, and start shaking as I try and catch my breath. I had tried everything possible to control and work through the attacks but nothing worked until I had a coach who programmed in a breathing drill after my conditioning work at the end of a training session. It replicated everything I would feel in a panic attack, but in a controlled environment. It gave my brain a memory to pull from so that next time I had a panic attack it recognized “we have been here before and worked through it” and I was able to calm myself down with the same breathing drill. This coach may not know it, but this one little thing transformed my life and gave me an entire new perspective on what training looks and why I’m training. I knew why I was doing something, I implemented it, and I was able to reflect on the positive impact it had on a situation. The result? I kept training it and reinforcing that pathway so that gradually I was able to respond even better and even faster each time it happened. Overall, training the brain develops a better understanding of the relationship between our internal and external environment and how we can manipulate different variables and stimuli to get desired outcomes. We are empowered to take control of our own health and take in information, process it, apply it, and make an informed decision whether it is something of value. If it is of value, we can then reinforce the pattern and behavior.

Which circles us back to training the body, as the training stimulus creates physiological impacts and responses that facilitate neural plasticity and set the stage for us to train the brain and create these new pathways. As a result, we have come full circle and defined R7 Core 3:

1. Train the Body - Train the Brain

2. Understand - Embrace - Develop

3. Educate - Implement - Reflect

I built these principles after feeling like I was failing in a system that wasn’t set up for me and reaching a breaking point. Originally, I went into it with the notion of changing the system or flipping the script. The reality is the system isn’t changing any time soon, in life and in the fitness industry. As a result, the last concept I will touch on is the communal component of R7 Strength and how we can increase adaptation through a cooperative response to stress. I want to create a community where we can share, have raw, honest dialogues, and build together. In life, we are constantly facing adversity and hardships as we navigate a world that may not be set up for us to succeed. In fitness, trends sell and there's an abundance of misinformation. My goal with this company and the R7 Core 3 is to create an internal system that optimizes how we function in the external system. It’s not about eliminating stress, it’s about recognizing, training appropriate responses, and having the tools in our toolbox to deal with it. It’s not about ridding the world of the latest and greatest fitness fads and trends, it’s about teaching people and providing them with the proper education and skills to navigate the trends and extract what’s useful and use it to enhance their lives. It’s about creating a community of women that feel empowered, confident, and in control in whatever environment they are thrown into. It’s about leveraging our training in the gym to create a symbiotic relationship with all seven pillars of health as we build real, raw, resilient strength.