Hi everyone,

For those of you who don’t know me personally, my name is Lexi. I am 27 years old.  I am a Registered Nurse and have been working in the Pediatric Oncology/Hematology unit for four years.

Growing up, I always wanted to play a sport. Even though my dad would always encourage us to stay active and take care of our physical health, my parents never enrolled me in any sports. I always had a strong desire to be involved in something athletic, but it never panned out that I could play on a team or plug into an athletically structured environment. This was always somewhat of a disappointment to me.

Once I was in high-school, I made efforts to stay active the only way I knew how. I used to go for evening runs after school and occasionally do a few sets of lunges and squats. I wasn’t in bad aesthetic shape, but I didn’t really reap optimal benefits of exercise since I wasn’t working towards anything or programming my training.

I started lifting about 5 years ago because my boyfriend used to work at a gym. I was given a free membership so I could go in and watch classes and I began gravitating towards resistance training. Even still, I struggled for a long time with getting my mind in the right place. I learned the principles of progressive overload, but I struggled to push myself when the sets became too difficult. It sometimes would feel like the barbell was going to crush me, and it was taboo for me to think that feeling that uncomfortable was actually something that was working positively towards my health.

One thing that I always kept in my mind was that I was building towards something that would one day help me build a better quality of life. Working in a hospital, we are often exposed to people with a sub-optimal quality of life. Sometimes these are byproducts of bad luck since many diseases and conditions that people struggle with are genetic in nature and non-preventable (at least to this point). However, in some cases, I noticed that people over the age of 50 often had a diminished quality of life for no other reason that they weren’t strong enough to do things that made them happy. They were losing the battle with muscular atrophy, and every few years, they would lose more and more of their ability to complete basic tasks and remain independent. 

I knew that for me, I don’t want to be diminished that early in life. At 50 years old, most people still have one-third of their life left. It doesn’t seem ideal to live the last 33% of your life not doing the things that make you happy because you are having to succumb to preventable health problems. As I pondered this, I began doing research and analyzing training modalities. I began to study the benefits of resistance training, especially with the goal of adding strength and not worry as much about size. 

I stumbled upon more and more of the benefits of barbell training, and specifically, the effects of lifting heavy (65%< of your 1RM) on maintaining muscle and building/retaining bone density. I did my best to keep showing up, continued working on my form (the learning curve on barbell training can be steep and intimidating at times), and program my training with the goal of getting stronger. Over time, I really fell in love with it and as I got better, I came out of the other side of that uncomfortable feeling I used to dread.

Before long, my lifts began to improve. It’s been about two years that I have found my groove with my training and caught the bug for getting stronger.  All in all, I have added about 20lbs of muscle since I began consistently barbell training. My body has responded very well and even small aches and pains that I used to experience and that held me back (such as a knee injury I used to have) have subsided (and have now been replaced by a healthier, delayed-onset-muscle-soreness lol).

Anyway, this is my first blog post and hopefully helps to explain a little bit more about me, where I was, where I am, and where I hope to be going. If you are on the fence about resistance training, please feel free to reach out to me and I would be happy to try to point you in the right direction. Thanks for reading 🙂