094 More Than Muscle: Lifting Weights for a Quiet Mind

If you’ve ever believed strength training was all about sweat, speed, and pushing hard, this episode is here to gently challenge that idea.

In this soulful solo episode, Carly shares her personal shift from high-intensity workouts to intentional lifting and the unexpected gift that came with it: a quiet mind.

You’ll learn:
 🧠 Why strength training can be a powerful tool for calming anxiety
 🫁 How rest periods support both your muscles and your nervous system
🌿 Three simple ways to stay present (instead of scrolling) between sets
💛 The science behind strength and stillness, and why it especially supports women in midlife

Whether you're brand new to lifting or have been training for years, this episode invites you to experience strength as a pathway to peace... not pressure.

Book a free clarity call to explore how strength training can support your nervous system and goals at carlykillen.com

Thanks for listening to the Strong Bones Coach Podcast

If you'd like to get in touch to ask a question about today's episode or to find out how you can get support from my coaching, reach out on the following links:

hello@carlykillencoaching.com

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Thanks for listening to The Strong Bones Coach Podcast!

If you’d like to get in touch with a question about today’s episode or find out how I can support you with coaching, here’s how to reach me:
📧 Email: carlykillenpt@gmail.com
📱 Instagram: @thestrongbonescoach

Do you crave unshakable confidence in your strength from midlife and beyond? Would you love to achieve your goals without sacrificing family time or self-care?

Ready to take your strength to the next level? Start building a stronger body and healthier bones with my Strong Bones Starter Kit—your step-by-step guide to safe and effective strength training at home.
👉 Click here to learn more and access today

🌟 Stay connected and inspired with daily wellness tips on Instagram @thestrongbonescoach.
🌟 For tailored advice or personal queries, email me at carlykillenpt@gmail.com

Thank you for being here, and I look forward to supporting you on your journey to strength, health, and confidence! 💪🦴✨

Transcript

Carly: 0:37

Hello and welcome back to The Strong Bones Coach Podcast with me, your host, Carly. Today I want to talk to you about something that you might not expect to find in your strength training session, and that is peace. And I don't mean the collapse on the couch after a bootcamp class. Kind of peace. I'm talking about the quiet that settles between those reps. The breath you finally feel drop into your body. The moment when a client tells me, my mind has never been this still. For so many of us, especially in midlife, we've been taught that movement needs to be hard, loud, intense. I used to believe that too. And for years, I chased the adrenaline highs of high impact classes. I thought if I wasn't dripping in sweat and barely breathing, it didn't count. But here's the thing, I was exhausted, hungry all the time, and despite all that effort, I didn't feel stronger. I didn't feel calmer and I didn't feel better. So today I want to dive in a little bit of the personal background behind this and some science as to how strength training can help you find that inner piece. Now, for me, it wasn't until I began lifting weights with intention where I really sensed that something shifted. At first, I really resisted. I was not up for any kind of slow classes, anything like yoga or stretching. It was all too slow, too quiet, and it felt the same with strength training at first as well. But over time I noticed something strange between sets. I felt this stillness and it wasn't about lifting the weights as fast as I could or as hard as I could. It was really doing it slowly with intention, feeling the muscles working, really paying attention to what I needed to do. And yeah, the weights were heavy enough to make sure I had to do that. But this stillness, it didn't just come from the physical side. It was this mental stillness. I just wasn't used to that noise in my head would soften, overthinking, paused for the first time in years. Since becoming a coach, I've seen this in my clients too. Honestly, it's what got me hooked on strength training, and I think that's why my clients stay as well. And many of them have told me that lifting is the only part of that week where they don't feel overwhelmed. So it's not just a workout for them, it's a reset and often a transition from work to home, from busy to grounded. So let's just pause here a minute, because I know many of us didn't grow up thinking of lifting weights as a path to peace. Most of the fitness messaging we absorbed, especially as women, was about shrinking, not strengthening. It was about burning calories, keeping up in aerobics classes, or making ourselves smaller, tighter, or toned. Heaven forbid we lift anything heavy because what if we got too bulky? Does that sound familiar? Well, yeah. We weren't taught to trust our bodies. We were taught to manage them, punish them to believe that anything, to believe that being out of breath meant it was working, and that stillness meant we were slacking off. If you ever felt like high intensity workouts left you feeling more wired than well, then yeah, you're not alone and that's not a flaw. And is your body trying to tell you something? And I absolutely used to think that slowing down meant I wasn't working hard enough. I know it takes tremendous strength to move with intention mentally and physically. To be able to pause and breathe, to feel into your body instead of pushing past it. It can bring up a lot. It can remind us of all those years where we've forgotten to listen to ourselves, and that can be really tough. So as well as coaching my clients with how to lift weights, I'm often holding space for them as they have these realizations so they don't abandon themselves anymore. It can stay with it, even though at times it can feel a little bit difficult, but it's absolutely worth it in the end. Now for those of you that know me, you know, I like the science as well, my dietician background. Um, we do have science to back all of this up as well. There is real science behind strength and stillness. So there is a growing body of research,. The paper I'm talking about is from 2014. This is published in Frontiers in Psychology, and it's all about how training has lytic effects. In other words, it helps to reduce anxiety. Not just in long-term training, but even after a single session. And here's what's key. The intensity does actually matter. So even from low to moderate intensity strength training, and by that I mean how heavy the weights feel for you. So lifting what feels around 40 to 60% of the most you could lift. And if you're not sure about how to figure this out or how to do this, this is where a coach can come in. They can guide you on how to lift. Well establish your technique properly before you test just true strength. But once you're more aware of this, once you're able to lift relatively well, you'll be able to push those intens a little bit more. And this has been shown to have the strongest calming effects, and this is how it works. It activates your nervous system just enough to build resilience, but not so much that it overwhelms your system. So it activates what we call your sympathetic nervous system that's designed to support you in the fight or flight. Now, this might not sound very positive to you. If you've been reading anything about the nervous system, you might have been taught that this is something we want to avoid, but this is a natural function of our body. We need to be able to move out other way fast if we are in actual danger. So it really isn't a bad thing to activate the system now and then. A level that we can recover from. And as we recover, we drop into that parasympathetic nervous system, that part of our nervous system that has us feeling relaxed, that rest and digest. So once you stop moving, after pushing that intensity, your body naturally shifts into recovery state. So that post lift calm is not a fluke. It's your biology. You're creating a natural contrast, and this is a great way to improve your nervous system fitness, if you like. So what's even more interesting is the study notes that these effects seem especially powerful for women, possibly because we're more attuned to the mind body shifts that come from strength work, or at least this can happen with practice time and attention, and a lot of self-compassion for ourselves too. Of course, this isn't to say there is no place for high intensity workouts or cardio workouts. We need to look after our heart and lungs too. So if you love them, beautiful, keep it in the mix. If you like to leave the gym hot and sweaty out of breath, it's the kind of how you enjoy. Of course, you can absolutely do this. It's just to remind yourself. This is not the only way to train. It's always good to have a balanced mix and plenty of joy in there too. So if you have been feeling more anxious wired depleted, you're just craving quiet, you might want to consider a shift. So not to do less, but perhaps to do it differently, perhaps to move with more presence, to lift with your breath. And so that's strengthening Anchor, not a pressure or performance. Now I mentioned having rest in between our reps. Hmm. So with strength training you, if you are not familiar, we often program our movements or exercises in what we might call sets and reps. So a rep is each time you lift a weight, a set is the group of the number of reps you might do. So, for example, you might decide to. Do a chest press or 10 lifts, 10 reps, and we'd call that one set. Now, in between these things we call sets, we have a rest period, and there's a very important reason for this. So let's talk about rest periods for a moment. Because in strength training, they are not optional. They are absolutely essential. So when you lift weights, especially at moderate to heavy intensities, your body use up a fuel called a ATP, adenosine Tri Phosphates, and this takes a bit of time to replenish. It's a bit like your body's energy currency. So depending on your lift, your recovery capacity and the intensity, it can take around 60 to 120 seconds. That's one to two minutes, maybe sometimes a bit longer for this to fully replenish before you're ready to do your next set at a relatively good intensity. Again. So this is why I program rest intentionally. It's not just to catch your breath, it's to help your nervous system reset, your muscles recover, and your body come back to the next set with integrity, essentially. But here's the thing. I've noticed something I struggled with that I see many women struggle with in the early days of us working together. Many of us struggle with rest. We've been taught that if we're not moving or wasting time, that stillness is laziness. We need to earn our worth through effort. So when we're told to pause for 90 seconds between sets, the instinct might be to fill that time, to fill that gap with scrolling, checking emails, fidgeting until it's time to go again. And I get it. I catch myself reaching for my phone too. What if those rest periods were the real practice are moments of feel into your breath. Check in with your body. I notice the stillness, you're usually too busy to meet. It's not always easy, but it's worth it because strength isn't just about what you lift, it's about what you can hold with presence. So for those of you thinking, Carly, seriously, how am I supposed to do this? I can't get through a minute of the day without my mind racing. Every time I'm at a traffic light in the car, I just can't wait to get going. It absolutely winds me up. Now you're telling me I have to sit still in the middle of the gym or at home with my weights on the floor, so don't worry. I know how hard it is and. I'm here to help out with this, so I'm gonna give you three ways that perhaps you could try and rest without losing your presence. So if you do struggle with rest, either rushing through it or disappearing into your phone until you forget what set you are on, you are not alone. Rest can feel unfamiliar, as we said. Can even feel uncomfortable. So I'm gonna share with you three simple ways you can stay present in those in-between moments. So firstly, you can breathe through your nose and nasal breathing during rest periods and all the time it does more to calm you, but you might feel more inclined to breathe through your mouth if you are a little bit out breath. So if you can focus on returning to nasal breathing. As soon as possible. It not only guides you back to calm, but it gently guides your body back towards that parasympathetic state, your rest and repair mode. So yes, we can even manage to get somewhere near this, even in the middle of a workout, but it also supports the production nitric oxide or nitric oxide. And this is a naturally occurring gas within your nose that plays a role in blood flow recovery and even growth signaling. So in other words, calming breath is still doing the work. It's just in a different way. Secondly, we could try a sensory check-in. So we can try the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 grounding practice. It's a beautiful use of 60 to 92nd rest period. Kind of gives you something to do as well, but still guide your body into that nice restful state. So we might start with five things. You can see, you can name them in your mind, you can say them out loud if you want. Notice four things you can feel, three things you can hear. Two things that you can smell and one thing that you can taste. Maybe that's your water but perhaps if that's not practical, one thing you appreciate, this is a way to bring yourself back into your body, back into the room and back into the now. And thirdly, you could do a mild mindful stretch. So if stillness feels really foreign, it is okay to give your body something gentle to do. This can really help You could do a light chest opening, stretch, hip stretch, even a wrist release. It can keep you grounded without overstimulating your system and it perhaps can bridge this go, go, go response and keep you feeling present whilst not having to deal with the monkey mind too much. And as a little bonus, just one more thing, connection matters. So for some, the gym can feel really isolating, but connection is also a form of nervous system regulation. So whether it's a friend you live with, a smile at a regular, a conversation in a strength circle. Humans are meant to co-regulate, are meant to connect with each other. That's why I create a strong bones club. Women there know each other. We lift, we laughed, and we share together. The connection is just as powerful as the reps. So as we close, I have an invitation for you. Next time you lift. Notice the space between the sets, the stillness. After each rep and the quiet inside the efforts, maybe like me and my clients, you'll find that strength is about so much more than muscle. Maybe it's about coming home to yourself too. So if strength has always felt like something loud, fast, or forced, I hope this has given you a new lens to look through. Maybe strength can also be that quiet, rooted, restful place as well. and maybe it's the way for you to notice your body saying, that's enough for today. And then actually, listen. So if you're curious about how strength training can support your mental clarity, your nervous system, or your midlife transitions, I'd love to help whether you're local or halfway across the world. I offer online coaching and clarity calls to help you figure out. What kind of movement and support might feel good for your season. So you can book your clarity call for free by the link in the show notes at carlykillen.com. So until next time, stay strong. Take care, and I'll see you soon.