Libsyn Directory

The True Meaning of Strength w/ Alyssa Ages

Release Date: 10/15/2024

Pre-Workout Nutrition for Early Morning Training Sessions

Fuel Your Strength

If you train early in the morning, you might be wondering what to eat before your session to arrive fueled and perform well. In this episode, you'll learn how to approach pre-workout nutrition for early morning workouts, especially when you’re short on time but still want enough fuel to make it through your session without gassing out. You'll learn how to factor in training intensity, how much time you have before your session, hydration, and what you did the day before. This is a practical episode for athletes over 40. What you’ll learn in this episode: How to fuel early morning...

How to Strength Train as a Hobbyist Athlete

Fuel Your Strength

If you’re a hobbyist athlete over 40 who loves your sport – cycling, running, pickleball, martial arts to name a few – but you’ve been hesitating to start strength training, this episode is for you. In today’s episode of the Fuel Your Strength podcast, you'll hear exactly how to strength train as an athletic woman over 40 without sacrificing time for your sport. This is a simple, sustainable blueprint for building muscle, improving power, preventing injury, and staying in the game long-term – without living in the gym five days a week. What you’ll learn in this...

How to Stop Quitting the Gym

Fuel Your Strength

Story time! I'm sharing a personal story from my early triathlon days that still shapes how I coaches lifters today. What started as a scary open-water swim became a powerful lesson about progress, patience, and why perfection is not required to move forward. In this episode, you'll reframe how you think about missed workouts, imperfect weeks, and all-or-nothing thinking in fitness. If you’ve ever felt like skipping one session meant you blew it, this episode offers a grounding reminder: that forward progress counts, even when it doesn’t look pretty. What you’ll learn in this episode: ...

Strength Training Lessons from 15 Years of Lifting Weights

Fuel Your Strength

If I could go back and talk to beginner-me in 2010, there are a handful of strength training lessons I would absolutely whisper in her ear. Not because I did everything wrong, but because so much frustration, second-guessing, and spinning my wheels could’ve been avoided with a little context and coaching. In this episode, I’m reflecting on more than 15 years of consistent lifting, coaching, and learning the hard way. Whether you’re brand new to strength training, a few years in, or coming back after a break, these lessons will help you train smarter, progress more confidently, and stop...

Rebuilding Strength After 80? Change How You See Aging

Fuel Your Strength

Is it really never too late to start strength training – even if you’re in your 80s and you’ve never touched a barbell? You'll hear from journalist Clare Johnston of the “Rebuilding Mum and Dad” project, about what happens when older adults begin true progressive strength training from scratch – and why the results can feel straight-up miraculous (without being magic). Clare shares how her parents started lifting in their 80s after years of mobility decline, osteoporosis concerns, and “we’ve tried everything” frustration. Together, they built a simple garage setup, worked...

Women’s Fitness Over 40: Cutting Through the Confusion with Nikki Naab-Levy

Fuel Your Strength

If you’ve been feeling like women’s fitness over 40 is a nonstop back-and-forth debate - like you’re courtside at Wimbledon watching the ball whip from one hot take to another - you’re not imagining it. Social media is loud right now, especially when it comes to what women should or shouldn’t be doing in midlife. That noise can make it hard to trust your instincts or know what actually matters for building strength and aging athletically. In this episode, I’m joined by strength for hypermobility & nutrition coach Nikki Naab-Levy. Together, we unpack the most confusing fitness...

How to Be More Consistent in the Gym Over 40

Fuel Your Strength

Life is life-ing especially in midlife. One day you’re fired up, smashing your lifts, and thinking the whole week will be a highlight reel; two days later you’re sleep-deprived, stressed, and wondering who parked a bus on your quads. In this episode, you'll learn a structured-yet-flexible strategy to use with your lifting to ride the wave of real-life energy swings so you can keep showing up, build muscle, and actually enjoy the process. We’ll break down how to anchor your week with strength, layer in cardio, and use auto-regulation (RPE/RIR) to dial intensity up or down without ditching...

The 5 Hard Truths Your Lifting Needs After 40

Fuel Your Strength

If you’ve ever heard a coach say “it’s not wrong, but it’s not right either,” you’ll resonate with this episode. Dive into the nuance that gets lost in punchy social media hot takes – especially for athletic women over 40 who want strength, muscle, and better performance without the fluff. Get insight into why your progress may feel stuck, what to do about it, and how to build muscle with less frustration. Get practical coaching on progressive overload, program hopping, hypertrophy, auto-regulation, and why DIY training isn’t actually “free.” What you’ll learn in this...

How to Adjust Workouts When You’re Short on Time

Fuel Your Strength

Life doesn’t always respect your perfectly planned training week. If you’re a woman over 40 following a strength training program, you might be juggling sleep swings, work crunches, hormonal shifts, caretaking, and everything in between. This episode breaks down how to keep your momentum without falling into the all-or-nothing trap so you still get a damn good training stimulus on busy days. Steph explains a simple framework for structured flexibility – keeping the big-picture plan while adapting the day’s session. You’ll learn three practical ways to modify workouts using RPE / RIR,...

The Over-40 Lifting Formula I’d Follow If I Started Again Tomorrow

Fuel Your Strength

Feeling like the Tin Man when your feet hit the floor – and winded on a single flight of stairs – doesn’t have to be “just your 40s.” In this episode, we call BS on the idea that midlife means inevitable decline and lays out a clear, doable plan for rebuilding strength, muscle, and pep in your step over the next six months. No doom and gloom here – just evidence-informed training that respects your real life. You’ll learn exactly how to structure your workouts for results: which compound lifts to prioritize, how to sprinkle in isolation work the smart way, and why adding power...

More Episodes

Have you ever asked yourself what there is to learn from the pursuit of strength? How do the lessons we learn in the gym translate to our lives outside of strength? Alyssa Ages set out on a quest to answer these questions, and in return found a multitude of answers that can help any athletic person get more from their training regime and their life.

Key Takeaways

If you are curious about the true meaning of strength, you should:

Connect with your deeper why of strength training outside of the aesthetic value
View strength training as something that can connect you more deeply to your body
Be aware of the ways in which the strength training mindset can improve your life outside of the gym

Strength In and Out of the Gym with Alyssa Ages

Alyssa is a Toronto-based, New York-born author, freelance writer, and copywriter. She is a mom, strongman competitor, endurance athlete (six marathons & an Ironman), rock climber, CrossFitter, and former member of the Jersey City Bridge & Pummel roller derby team. Her debut book, Secrets of Giants: A Journey to Uncover the True Meaning of Strength, was featured in The New York Times and Publisher’s Weekly, among others. The book, part personal narrative, part research mission, part midlife crisis odyssey into the world of strength to answer the question: What if strength isn’t about how much we can lift, but how we manage life’s struggles?

The True Meaning of Strength

There is something about strength training and the pursuit of strength that is addictive and keeps bringing us back. But why do we love it so much, and feel so satisfied even when it feels hard? It all comes down to the story we tell ourselves. If you view yourself as a person who is able to handle hard shit, there's a good chance you don't mind getting comfortable with discomfort. Through Alyssa’s research, it became clear to her, that if you are purposefully able to do difficult things, the easier all of the things that you encounter in your daily life will start to feel.

You Can Do Hard Things

Building strength, physically, mentally, and emotionally, is all about pushing the boundaries of what humans can do. When strength is a part of your identity, you can discover things about yourself through the training process that will help you both in and out of the gym. Building strength is not just about looking good or feeling good, it is about having agency over your life and what you are doing. The ability to fail over and over again safely, allows you to learn something that is applicable in every other area of your life. That might be why we love it so much.

If you are also searching for the true meaning of strength, share your thoughts with me in the comments of the episode page.

In This Episode

Learn about the genre of Strongman Strength Training and the role it played in Alyssa’s journey (8:43)
Explore what it means to be an athlete or athletic person (19:13)
Flirting with the edge of being uncomfortable and being in your comfort zone (23:42)
What Alyssa discovered about women in strength throughout her research (30:10)
How to address issues that come up when it comes to your strength training abilities or practice (38:24)

Quotes

“In the book, there is very little about what [strength] does physically to your body and your muscles, and almost exclusively about how it impacts everything else you do in your life outside of a gym setting.” (7:50)

“Strongman really showed me that actually, failing was really ok and kind of awesome. Because it was the only way to understand what I actually could do.” (17:23)

“It was just that little shift in mindset that gave me the courage to actually do it.” (20:05)

“It was really incredible to hear from so many women that they said ‘Doing a strength sport taught me that I could love my body not for how it looks, but for what it is capable of doing’.” (30:32)

“Once I started to continue with this routine of going back into the gym, with my coach and trying to do everything really safely as I was going through all of this, it helped me to start to regain this feeling of trust and this feeling of capability in my body.” (42:03)