A client sent me a message recently.. 

When she started, she thought she’d manage three months, maybe six, if she really pushed it. She fully expected that, at some point, she would lose interest, motivation or enthusiasm and quietly stop and yet here she is.

Seventy five weeks in, averaging almost two workouts a week across actual life.

I don’t mean seventy-five perfect weeks, where she was always motivated, sleeping beautifully, eating perfectly, stress-free and delighted to train. I mean real weeks.

Holidays, illness, exhaustion, work and life commitments. Weeks where training had to be moved, reduced, changed or skipped completely because sometimes that is the right call.

Yet, she kept coming back.I wish more women could see this.

When people talk about consistency, they often make it sound like something very tidy. A straight line, perfect routine. That could be version of yourself who never gets tired, never loses momentum and never has anything inconvenient happen.

But for most women I work with, consistency looks much more ordinary than that.

It looks like doing what you can when life is busy, coming back after a holiday instead of deciding the whole thing has gone wrong. It looks like reducing the session when your energy is on the floor and letting yourself rest when you genuinely need to, without turning that into a reason to disappear for three months.

A lot of  people don’t stop because they miss one workout, but because one missed workout becomes a story.

“I’ve ruined it.”

“I’ve fallen off.”

“I’ll get back to it when things calm down.”

“I might as well wait until Monday.”

And then Monday becomes next month, and next month becomes the next fresh start, and before you know it, the thing you were trying to build has quietly disappeared again.

And THAT didn’t happen this time and my client kept coming back. And no, it hasn’t all looked the way she hoped it would.

She told me she isn’t any smaller and, if she’s brutally honest, she feels disappointed by that. I don’t want to skip past that bit, because I think we do that too often.

If a woman tells me she is disappointed that her body hasn’t got smaller, I am not going to throw a motivational quote at her and tell her the scales don’t matter as they might matter to her.

Wanting your body to change does not make you shallow, silly or wrong. We live in our bodies every day, and how we feel in them matters. I don’t think it helps anyone when we pretend otherwise. But I am also not going to ignore everything else that has changed and neither is she. 

Her shape has changed, her strength has too. She has definition starting to show in her arms. She can feel her hamstrings in a way she couldn’t before. Her shoulder, which had been affected by an accident, is now around 80-90% of its previous function.

That is her body becoming more capable and perhaps more than anything, she has proved to herself that she can keep going…for seventy-five weeks.

Through tired weeks, messy weeks, interrupted weeks and the kind of weeks where it would have been very easy to quietly stop and that is fucking brilliant.

I will happily take a wee bit of credit for guiding, tweaking, adjusting and supporting her along the way, because that is my job. But she built this, she got out of bed and did the sessions. She came back after the interruptions, kept showing up enough times, over a long enough period, for things to change.

The work is not in finding the perfect programme or waiting until your life is calm enough.

Or becoming a completely different person who suddenly loves every second of exercise and never struggles again.

The work is learning how to keep coming back as the person you actually are, in the life you actually have, with the body that actually turns up that day.

Sometimes that means: 

• training hard
• doing less
• changing the plan
• resting and not turning that into a moral failure

That is why coaching is not just a list of exercises!

A plan can tell you what to do when everything goes well, but coaching helps you work out what to do when it doesn’t.

When you are tired, when your shoulder is playing up, when your confidence has dipped, when you are frustrated that your body has not changed in the way you hoped. 

That is where a lot of women need support because doing this stuff in real life is rarely as simple as just being handed a plan and told to get on with it.

So if you are reading this and thinking, “I never stick to anything,” I want you to know that the goal is not to suddenly become someone who never struggles.

The goal is to build something you can return to, something flexible enough to survive holidays, illness, exhaustion, hormones, work, family, stress and the general inconvenience of being a human being with an actual life.

Because seventy five weeks from now, I don’t want you looking back at another abandoned fresh start.

I want you looking back and realising that, somehow, through all of it, you kept going.

If you are tired of starting again every few months, this is exactly the kind of work we do inside The Midlife Shift Method. Not a perfect plan for a perfect life, but an approach to strength, food and consistency that you can actually keep coming back to.