Easy Weight Maintenance - Weight Training Routine

Just about every time I talk about Food Freedom I get a handful of questions about my fitness routine. I think the reason I don’t talk about fitness a lot is twofold. For starters, to me personally it’s very minimally connected to my food intake – I eat based on my hunger cues rather than what I should be eating*.

Secondly, to be honest I’m just not super passionate about fitness! Food and Food Freedom is a much larger part of my life that I’m passionate about, whereas fitness is kind of just a “side thing” or add-on to my life. Basically, I’ll probably never be one of those #fitfam gals making YouTube videos of my workouts.

*The exception to this is I’m mindful of eating protein after my workouts, but I typically have enough protein in my meals to begin with.

With that being said, I know fitness is important to a lot of you, and I also believe that my current routine has had a significant part to play in furthering my Food Freedom + promoting weight loss/maintenance in my life. So here are some deets on my current fitness MANTRA and routine. Please remember that I am not a health/medical/mental expert, and this is just my own experience/opinions. Please seek a professional before making any changes to your health routine.

My Fitness Mantra

My mantra when it comes to fitness is one that I try to apply to most areas of my life, and that is doing the MINIMUM EFFECTIVE DOSE (which I learned from the king himself, Tim Ferriss). Basically what that means is “the smallest dose that will produce a desired outcome,” and anything beyond the MED is wasteful. So I aim to do shorter & more efficient workouts as much as possible. Ain’t nobody got time to slave away on the treadmill for an hour a day. Gross.

My Fitness Routine

Because of the MED, focusing on building muscle is my top priority.

I lift weights (usually as heavy as I can) about 3 times a week, and I do tend to focus on lower body more than upper.
I keep my strength workouts pretty short – max 30 minutes but usually closer to 20.
The moves that I do tend to vary, but I’m always following the inspiration of Abby Pollock. I watch her YouTube videos and her Instagram videos are also super helpful.
Some of my favorite lower body moves that I do regularly are deadlifts (single-leg and Romanian), wide stance squats, leg press machine, weighted bridges (I actually prefer over hip thrusts right now because they were hurting my back), cable donkey kicks, lying leg lifts, clams & kick backs with resistance band.
I do upper body/abs just 1-2 times a week. More on my routine/moves I like can be found in my Fitness Story Highlights on Instagram.
I only do intentional cardio about once a week – sometimes twice and sometimes none at all. This is a far cry from my cardio bunny days. My cardio of choice is SoulCycle, boxing, CorePower Yoga Sculpt, or the Stair Master.
I also make it a point to walk as much as possible. I don’t track my steps (I used to and it got annoying) but I’d say I probably hit 10K steps on most days.

Why I “Broke Up” With My Old (Intense) Cardio Habit

Quitting the obsession with cardio (4-5 times a week) was one of the best things I’ve ever done for my body, and it even resulted in me losing weight. You’ve probably heard that a million times before and thought “yeah right, I could never give up my cardio,” because I used to think the exact same thing. But for me at least, over the course of the past year+, it’s been the unexpected truth.

Here’s why:
1. My body pretty much revolts against me when under stress, and the constant physical stress I was putting on my body from intense cardio simply wasn’t good for me physically, mentally, or hormonally, so I think my body was actually trying to hold onto weight as a defense mechanism. Umm NO THX.
2. I switched my fitness priority from burning calories to building muscle (as noted above), and it has transformed my body in a way that cardio never did.
3. My high intensity cardio habit made me hungrier, plain and simple. Whether it was legit or mental, my appetite was significantly larger than it is now.