Meet Teresa. She’s a 50-year-old mom of 5 grown kids and grandma of 2 grandkids. Despite a long corporate career with a major bank, she was on disability for over 10 years before she started working with me. Why was she on disability? Because she got dealt a bad hand in life:
- In 2011, she suffered a head injury causing concussion and cervical spine injury. After that, she got into a car accident. The combination of both of those things triggered anxiety and depression. Eventually, fibromyalgia was added to that list as well.
- She had a brain aneurysm.
- She experienced dizziness, balance and hearing issues.
- She was going through peri-menopause and menopause.
Teresa
Fast forward to now, and she’s doing a lot better. The effects of fibromyalgia have drastically reduced. She’s now swimming, doing karate and lifting weights. Oh, and she’s quite a bit leaner, stronger and healthier.
In this article, you’ll learn how she did it. But if you want to see her tell everything in her own words, check out this 17-minute video:
And if you want help putting together a personal exercise program for your fibromyalgia, we have a special program called “FibroFit.” If you want to see whether this program is for you, just fill out the application form on our home page. This doesn’t obligate you to anything. All that responding to this email will do is simply set up a quick, 10-15-minute chat where we’ll discuss your situation, and see if we can help you. There’s no pressure, sales pitch or obligation.
Teresa’s Life Before
Teresa has always been active and fit. She did yoga, walked a lot, and even got her black belt in taekwondo at the age of 40.
In 2011, everything changed, when she acquired a minor brain and cervical spine injury. Later that year, she was rear-ended by another vehicle coming off the highway. Soon afterwards, she developed general anxiety and major depression. Some time later, she was also diagnosed with fibromyalgia.
If you don’t know what fibromyalgia is, let me explain. It’s a condition where the body’s pain system isn’t working normally. There is pain, when there is no mechanical reason for the pain (there’s more of a neurological reason for pain, and you can see it in brain scans, but not body scan. However, that’s a topic for a different article). It’s very frustrating explaining to medical professionals that your pain is real, even when they can’t find anything in x-rays, MRIs, etc.
But it’s not just pain. There are other complaints that come along for the ride:
- Extreme fatigue, even after a full night of sleep.
- Sometimes, memory and focus can feel foggy. That’s called “fibro fog.”
What’s even more frustrating is that from the outside a person with fibromyalgia looks “normal.” You can’t see how much pain they’re feeling, how tired they are, or how foggy they feel. But it’s real.
Recently, there’s been a big advancement in the understanding of fibromyalgia, because only in the last 25 or so years have doctors been taking it seriously, and not just chalking it up as a psychosomatic condition (i.e. the patient is just making it up).
In addition to that, around the same time Teresa was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, and also suffered a small brain aneurysm.
Over time, her life had completely changed.
- She went from being really active, a working mom, to almost completely sedentary.
- Even a 20-minute yoga class would knock her out for a week or more.
- She went from working a corporate job at a big bank, to being on disability.
What Teresa Tried to Improve
Fibromyalgia makes self-care difficult, because the energy levels can be so low. Unlike other conditions, like osteoporosis, diabetes or high blood pressure, where someone can basically function normally, with fibromyalgia, it’s hard to do that. Despite that, Teresa has tried a few things.
- Early on, she tried medications, but she didn’t like how they made her feel.
- She’s tried whatever exercise approaches she could manage, but although better than nothing, those approaches were focused on not worsening her conditions, as opposed to actively making them better.
- She went for walks. And just like other exercise approaches – walking is certainly better than being sedentary, but it wasn’t enough to make her better.
Fast forward a few years, and she ran into me, when I was doing my book signings at Starbucks during my mental health book tour. She signed up for my newsletter, and she had been receiving it for about 5 years before she saw an email that I had a rare opening in my schedule to take on a new client. So she jumped on it, and we got to work.
Although it wasn’t without hesitations. She certainly did hesitate (in fact, she had toyed with the idea of working with me a few years earlier). Why the hesitation? Price. My prices are very, very expensive. I might be the most expensive trainer in the Greater Toronto Area, but that’s just me. My team is much lower-priced, and affordable by many more people.
She was also on disability at that time, and felt she was just keeping afloat financially. Nonetheless, when an opportunity for a little extra income arose, she prioritized her health enough to use the available funds to hire me specifically.
At the time she saw my email, she had just turned 49, so her 50th birthday was just a year away. She wanted to give herself the gift of health, and be in better shape at 50 than she was at 49.
The reason that she wanted to work with me specifically is because:
- She’d been reading my newsletter for 5 years, and understood that I had a fairly good knowledge on chronic illness and I don’t push too hard. You can’t do that to someone who has fibromyalgia. Yet, unfortunately most trainers have no clue how to work with clients who have it.
- She wanted someone who understood fibromyalgia. She took advantage of a 15-minute talk with me that I had a few years ago and learned that I had good experience and worked with people who had fibromyalgia. That emboldened her.
- She wanted someone who was beginner-friendly, and won’t be intimidating to her. That’s me. Nice boy. Very small.
With those hesitations out of the way, we got to work.
Highlights of Teresa’s Program
Here are some highlights from Teresa’s program, along with the thought process behind them.
Teresa’s First Workout
Her first workout was super easy. Much easier than I would have someone without fibromyalgia do. Why? The goal was just to gauge how her body would react in the aftermath of that workout. It’s normal for a person without fibromyalgia to be sore after a workout. But the soreness of fibromyalgia can be exaggerated by a lot.
I didn’t want what seemed like an easy workout to take her out for days or weeks. So we made the easy even easier.
Good thing we did, because as predicted, she was sore. But as predicted, it was a tolerable soreness, not a debilitating one. It went away after 5-6 days.
I was glad I made that workout super easy. Otherwise, if I had given her the difficulty level that I give most clients in their first workout (which even in those cases is not terribly difficult), the soreness would be much greater.
At the beginning of the following workout, I asked her to rate her soreness on a 0-10 scale. She rated it about an 8/10 about 2 days after the workout, and by the time I saw her again (a week later), it was already down to about 2-3/10.
The Following Workouts
With a client who doesn’t have fibromyalgia, we progress them relatively quickly (as fast as their body allows). They’ll go from 1 set to 3 sets over the course of 2-4 workouts. With Teresa, we stayed at 1 set for 5 workouts.
And again, at the beginning of each subsequent workout, we’d start with a rating of her soreness levels after the previous workout.
After the 5th workout, the peak of her soreness didn’t go any higher than 2-3/10. At that point, her body was ready to advance to 2 sets, and a few more workouts later, 3 sets.
There’s both an art and a science to balancing workout difficulty. On the one hand, you don’t want to progress so slowly that you fail to make appreciable progress. On the other hand, you don’t want to progress so quickly that you risk injury and burnout. That is doubly true for someone with fibromyalgia. So we err on the side of too slow as opposed to too fast.
The Exercises Themselves
Here were the actual exercises that we used in her first program (she did 4 different programs over her entire time with me):
1-legged deadlifts
Lat pulldowns
Barbell overhead press
Squats
Seated rows
Incline pushups
Standing calf raises
The purposes behind all of these exercises were:
- To give her both a strength and a cardio benefit. Circuit training (moving from one exercise, to the second, then the third, etc., before coming back to the first) gives both strength and cardio benefits. But cardio only benefits cardio. Cardio doesn’t strengthen your muscles – only your heart. Circuit training strengthens both the muscles and the heart.
- To make her life outside the gym easier. There are a million different exercises for each body part. Why did I specifically select these exercises? Because there are 6 criteria to good exercise selection. I go over them in great detail in this 10-minute video. Basically, the idea is to make Teresa’s life outside the gym easier. These exercises were chosen because most of them replicate real life motions. If you can lift a dumbbell of 20 pounds, lifting 10 pounds of groceries becomes easier. But if you can lift a dumbbell of only 12 pounds, those 10-pound groceries represent a significant chunk of your strength.
These are just the highlights of Teresa’s program. There were more elements to it, and it evolved over time (she didn’t stay on this program forever).
Furthermore, if you just read about the exercises, you’d miss the “secret sauce” of the exercise program – the progression model, and the workout-by-workout adjustments that were made based on Teresa’s progress from the previous series of workouts, energy/fatigue levels, and more. After all, no exercise program should be a static program, where you’re doing the same exercises for the same weights, sets and reps every single time. An exercise program should be dynamic, intelligently, purposefully, and systematically changing the exercise variables to move the client forward… as opposed to haphazardly changing the program whenever you feel like it, without rhyme or reason… like a lot of personal trainers do.
Teresa’s Second Program
After a year of training with me, we took a 4-month break before resuming. During this time, Teresa’s function continued to improve, and she came back with a new goal: fat loss.
Smack dab in the middle of menopause, she was noticing some changes to her body that she wasn’t happy with, particularly, the gain of body fat. As I state in my menopause book (which is also relevant to postmenopausal women – even if menopause was 30 years ago), for a woman who was either underweight or normal weight before menopause to gain some body fat might actually be a good thing. So for women in those categories, I advise against directly trying to lose fat.
I recommend more optimizing exercise and nutrition – if body fat is lost as a side effect, great. If not though, then the body needs that fat, so let it be.
As I’ve written about endlessly, the only 2 things that matter when it comes to fat loss (at every age) are calories and protein.
Teresa wasn’t overweight, which means that there wasn’t much of an opportunity to improve her caloric intake. The greatest opportunity came from optimizing her protein intake. There are different approaches to fat loss – some people like counting calories and others don’t. Teresa didn’t mind counting both calories and grams of protein, so it made things easier.
We knew that she weighed 129 pounds when she started. A 129-pound, 50-year-old woman who exercises 3-5 days per week burns approximately 1,420 calories per day. We set her caloric limit at 1,350. Not a huge drop, but she didn’t need a huge drop.
We also calculated her protein requirements. Her minimal requirements were 94 grams/day. But what she was actually getting ranged from 30-50 grams/day. She needed a drastic increase.
Why protein specifically? Because of a fascinating phenomenon called the “thermic effect of food.” Whenever we eat food, we don’t absorb 100% of the calories that we eat. We use some of those calories to process the food that we ate and power the digestive process.
- Dietary fat (like butter, olive oil, nuts, eggs, etc.) has a thermic effect of only 2-3%. That is – if you were to eat 100 calories from pure fat, you’d spend 2-3 calories burning that food.
- Carbs have a thermic effect of 5-10%.
- Protein has a thermic effect of 25-30%. That’s super high. That means that you can have 100 calories of pure protein (the sources that come closest to 100% protein are things like lean turkey breast, shrimps, oysters, etc.), but only 70-75 of those calories will end up in your body. Furthermore, those calories are more likely to go into muscle stores as opposed to fat stores (like carbs and fats).
A bonus to having this kind of protein intake (this, by the way, is considered adequate protein, and not high protein. A lot of people think of it as “high protein”, but that’s just because it’s higher than what they’re used to eating. Realistically, this kind of protein intake represents only 20-30% of someone’s daily calories – definitely not a high-protein diet) is that of the 3 macronutrients (carbs, protein and fat), protein is the most filling. It allows you to eat less food without being hungry. Benefits all around.
Teresa’s Results
Teresa’s results are nothing short of inspiring. Here is her “gym progress”:
- Her lat pulldowns improved by 27% (in other words, her mid-back and biceps are a lot stronger).
- Her squats improved by 81% (so her legs and butt are stronger – it’s easier getting off the ground).
- Her overhead press improved by 54% (so her shoulders and triceps are significantly stronger).
- The fat on her love handle dropped 25%.
- Her belly fat also dropped 25%.
- She dropped 5 pounds – particularly impressive when you consider that she was relatively lean to begin with. For an obese person to lose 5 pounds, it’s pretty easy. For a lean person to get leaner – that’s impressive.
These are of course just the highlights. She had way more results than that, but this article is already long enough as it is.
Teresa’s Obstacles
Just so you don’t think that it was a straight line to success, it wasn’t. Teresa had a bunch of obstacles in her way, and achieved what she achieved in spite of them.
Logistics
Do you remember how I mentioned that Teresa is a mother of 5 grown kids and grandma of 2? Well, towards the beginning of the second time we worked together, 5 additional kids, in-laws, and grandkids moved in with her into a 1,200-square-foot apartment. Meal prep was a nightmare. Yet, she managed.
Fibromyalgia
Although she was exercising directly to improve fibromyalgia, it was an obstacle nonetheless. The fatigue, the brain fog, the aches, everything that goes along with fibromyalgia.
As mentioned earlier, fibromyalgia is largely an oversensitive pain system – nothing is mechanically damaged in the body. The brain’s perception of pain is just highly sensitive. So I kept reminding Teresa that feelings lie – we have to distinguish between the subjective sensation of fatigue, and objective performance. Let performance be your guide, and not your fatigue.
She’d often come in feeling tired and frazzled, and yet, her performance was better than the previous workout. Of course, that didn’t happen every time. Sometimes, her performance did dip, and we adjusted her intensity.
Finances
As mentioned earlier, there were 2 challenges to finances:
- The fact that she was on disability.
- The fact that my own prices are well… really high.
Despite that, she valued and prioritized her own health enough to find ways to make it work. Kudos to her.
How Teresa’s Life is Different Now
Yes, improvements in the gym are nice, but how does that affect life outside the gym? In Teresa’s case, dramatically!
- First of all, her fibromyalgia is significantly better – she’s less tired, more capable, and has much fewer body pains. That’s a huge win!
- Her flare-ups are both significantly less frequent, and when they do happen, the duration is shorter.
- She went from getting wiped out with a single 20-minute yoga class to now, exercising 4-6 days per week. She swims 1-3 times per week for 30-60 minutes, strength trains twice per week for an hour, and does karate twice a week.
- She attributes her ability to do the swimming and karate to strength training. Like I always say: “Life is easier when you’re stronger.”
- Household chores are just chores now – not a mountain to be conquered.
- She can also now take her grandson to daycare, lift him up into his stroller, and not be wiped out.
- She’s nearly ready to go back to some type of work, which she feels is just around the corner.
Overall, I’m very proud of Teresa, and how much progress she’s made, in spite of all of her obstacles.
If Teresa’s story resonates, and you’re curious whether we can help you too, just fill out the application form on our home page. We’ll set up a no-pressure 10–15-minute chat.
