Weight Lifting vs Life at a Gentler Pace: Finding the Harmony Your Midlife Body Needs

Have you ever felt torn between enjoying a peaceful yoga session, a mindful walk, or time in the garden — and feeling like you should be in the gym, lifting weights and tracking protein? This is one of the biggest tensions for women in midlife.

In this episode, I explore the midlife paradox: the pull to slow down, rest, and embrace mindfulness versus the push to stay strong, build muscle, and prioritize your health through weight training for women. How do we honor both needs without feeling like we have to choose one over the other?

We’ll dive into why this tension exists, practical ways to integrate mindful movement with weight training for women, and tips for creating a lifestyle that supports both calm and strength. You’ll discover how slowing down doesn’t mean giving up, and building strength doesn’t mean losing your softness — both can coexist beautifully.

While this episode is designed for you, it’s also something I’m navigating myself. Over the years, I’ve learned that mindful rest and intentional strength training aren’t opposites; together, they create resilience, vitality, and balance.

By the end, you’ll feel empowered to embrace both sides of the paradox — cultivating mindfulness while protecting your body and health through weight training for women. It’s about creating a midlife rhythm that works for your energy, your body, and your lifestyle.

Transcript

0:01

Have you ever felt torn between wanting to slow down to enjoy your morning yoga, your walks your garden, and feeling like you should be in the gym, lifting weights and tracking protein? It's such a midlife paradox, isn't it? The world tells us to slow down to be more mindful. Then in the next breath tells us to build more muscle, lift heavier and move faster to protect our bones and hormones. So how do we find that balance between peace and power between rest and resistance? Welcome to the podcast. I'm Beth Goodham, and today we're diving into something I think every woman in midlife has felt. At some point, we are told to slow down, to savor, to breathe, but also to train harder, lift heavier, and build muscle to stay strong. And somewhere in that mix we start to wonder, does slowing down make me look old? Does resting more mean? I've given up. In this episode, we'll explore why this slow versus strong tension exists in the first place. How to reconcile the two so you don't feel like you are choosing sides, and some simple ways to find your own version of midlife strength without losing the softness you crave by the end, I want you to feel permission to create your own rhythm, one that honors your energy, not someone else's expectations. Before we go any further, if you're new to the podcast, I just wanted to give you a really warm welcome and to say that I hope you enjoy being here for me. It's great to have you along, and I hope that you will join me again at the same time next week. Now, let's dive in. This slow versus strong tension is something that I've been thinking a lot about recently. Over the past few years, I've been making a conscious effort to slow down. I dunno about you, but I used to hate doing things slowly. Shaana at the end of a yoga session was my idea of an absolute nightmare. I would lie there and think to myself. Doesn't this yoga teacher realize that I've got kids to get home to. I've got washing to do, I've got meals to cook, I've got homework to attend to with the kids. But then several years later I started to go on retreats and cold water dips and take saunas and journal and make my sourdough. All of which are designed to slow me down. And I think if you do these things in your thirties, forties, and even early fifties, it doesn't necessarily cross your mind that doing these things might actually tip you into the cusp of turning into an old lady. They're definitely more about mindfulness, but the slightly older I've got, the more I've thought, oh crikey. If I'm slowing down, does this mean that I'm now also turning into an old lady? Anyway. Then when I recently joined a health program, as part of which I'm doing a lot more weight training and health sprints, I started to think to myself, Hmm, I don't quite know how all of these things fit together. I'm meant to be slowing down, but speeding up, resting, but lifting more, being led by my heart whilst having a certain amount of timetabled sessions each week. So what does that look like? Bizarrely? I was looking at Instagram the other morning because I wanted to see where my friend Becky, who runs the brand Bricks and Stitches, was going to be in the upcoming weeks. She travels around the country doing lots of fair and I just wanted to check if she was going to be at one near to me. Anyhow, I somehow randomly arrived on the explore page or something on Instagram and there was one post that was saying. Embrace stillness. The next said, you'll lose muscle after 40 unless you lift weights three times a week. Another one told me that I had to do Asian Pilates, although only for seven minutes, every day to look amazing, and I thought, which is it? Am I supposed to be a serene yogi or a gym warrior? So. Feeling overstimulated to use a quote from my 17-year-old daughter. I quick footed it out of there. I went for a lie down. If you are listening to this, you might think, look, just take a chill pill. But do you know this confusion isn't accidental? We are living in a time where two narratives collide. There's the wellness culture, which is about slowing down. Grounding, breathing all to regulate our nervous systems and to be mindful and to step off the treadmill of doing. And then at the same time, coming up is the longevity culture of biohacking, strength training, and optimizing. Both of these have merit. Both of them have wisdom. I definitely have a foot in both camps to the extent that I'm almost doing the box splits at the moment. And the thing about them is they often sound as though they are competing. In our twenties and thirties, I dunno about you, but life was fast. It was career, family energy, go, go, go. But now in midlife, whilst all of those things are still going on, they've taken a little bit of a backseat. And now our bodies are whispering, please slow down. But society's whispering back don't look like you've slowed down. And then there's that subtle fear that if we choose gentle movement, we'll somehow appear old. Fragile, and frankly, neither of those appeal. So there's no wonder that so many of us feel caught between two versions of ourselves, the peaceful one and that powerful go-getting one. But what I have come to realize, having sat with this for one, having thought about it, is that slowing down doesn't make us old. It makes us present and building strength doesn't make us masculine or over bulky. It makes us resilient. Midlife shouldn't be about choosing one. It's about weaving them together. And as women, we are experts in that, the woman who builds muscle and sits in stillness. She's not confused, she's not conflicted. She is whole. So it doesn't have to be either or. It's a case of yes. And if you think about it yes, we can lift weight and lift our spirits. Yes, we can slow down and stay strong. Yes, we can garden. Oh, I must order those dailies whilst I think about it and increase our running pace because both of them keep us vital. One grounds us, the other fortifies us. Actually, when you think about it, that is kind of a perfect balance. So we don't have to pick a side. We can be the woman who loves yoga and lifts weights. We can be the woman who gardens mindfully and loves watching her biceps tone up. The way to look at, I think, is more about integration and less about contradiction. So years ago, for me, slowing down used to feel like stopping. I was like, if I wasn't busy, I was wasting time. I felt that I wasn't creative, I wasn't productive. And if I'm honest, it's still something that I struggle with today but I'm slowly shifting and realizing that slowing down isn't about doing less, but it's also about what matters the most I think when we think about doing less in midlife, it's about doing less of the things we don't really want to be doing, like having a bit of a sort out and doing more of the things that create a deeper connection, whether that's to our bodies, to nature, to our intuition. For many of us, we've been conditioned to equate slower with older and older with less valuable and also weaker. And it's probably that mindset that needs a little bit of a reframe because slowing down can actually make time feel as if it's better spent, which makes it feel more productive. So think about it, when you're fully present on a morning walk or in my case, making sourdough, it can stretch into something really meaningful. And that isn't about aging, that is about living in the moment and having a really fabulous experience. But at the same time, strength training or lifting weights isn't about chasing youth. It's about protecting our future selves. We're not doing it to fight aging. We're doing it so that we can live fully at every age, because hopefully, if we are lucky, we are going to be living longer than people were generations before us. So we want to be living as healthy as possible for those years, which is where this whole issue, I think, has started to come in more than perhaps it did for our parents' generation. And I also think there was an acceptance with them that as you get older, you get weaker and there's just this natural path of decline that you follow. And of course. Her bodies are getting older, and that will happen to a certain extent, but I do think there's been a reframing around what old age can look like for people. We only have to look around us to see that. So the secret isn't necessarily to slow down or to speed up. It's about aligning our movement, our energy, and our choices with our values. At which point you might go, okay, well that's great, but how do we do that? Because then the next big question is how do we integrate these two colliding narratives, the narratives that I talked about earlier, the wellness culture of slowing down, grounding, breathing, regulating our nervous system, and being mindful with the longevity culture of biohacking, strength training, and optimizing. I think we're the first generation that has come up against this, and I think we are going to have to be the ones that figure it out. When it comes to finding our own rhythms, it's about balancing those feelings of, I love yoga, but I feel guilty if I don't do weights with when I do weights. I miss the stillness of yoga. And maybe our strength is in that awareness of them not being an either or, but there being room for both approaches in whatever we're doing. Maybe we don't need to choose. Perhaps this is where the two weave together. Maybe we can lift weights mindfully. Maybe we can stretch intentionally. Maybe we can meditate after a sweaty run or run home after yoga. We can think of our week as an ecosystem, not as a list of workouts. Some days are for strength, some days are for stretching, some days are for stillness. Our hormones, our energy and emotions all fluctuate. So our movement can too, and that's not inconsistency. That's wisdom. And we all know that we are very wise or a second approach is it might look like going, you know what? Time is short for me and I need to maximize and optimize how I use my time. So the best thing for me to do is to swim as that's a great all round form of exercise. Or I'll do yoga because that's weight bearing and great for my strength. And I think we all have weeks like that. So maybe it is just. Doing what we can, which is as multifunctional and as multi beneficial if there is such a word as it can be, or. A third approach is it might just look like making it up a little as we go along, depending on our commitments for the week with the aim that we will get in a combination of some strength training, some stretching and some cardio activity. So your weekly rhythm might look like a slower morning routine with T and journaling to get the slowness in and the mindfulness in a couple of strength sessions a week to protect muscle and bone, a yoga session, to balance cortisol and a combination of some walking or running or swimming for cardio, strength, and a day of nothing at all. And that's not sewing down, that's living in sync. That's balancing all of these things together. But what I really wanted you to take away from this episode more than anything else is that you are not alone. If you do feel like this, there is a midlife paradox in existence, depending on who we listen to. The world is telling us to slow down, to be more mindful, but in the next breath tells us to build more muscle, lift heavier, and move faster to protect our bones and hormones. And somewhere in the mix we start to wonder. Does slowing down make me look cold? Does resting mean I've given up? So to wrap this up, slowing down doesn't mean you're giving up and staying strong doesn't mean you're resisting age. It's about insofar as possible, weaving the two together, the softness of rest and the power of movement, and some questions that it might be worth asking yourself is. Where and at what times of the day am I craving calm? Because amongst all of this, we've really got to tune into what works for us. As you know, I'm all about consistency and I think things have to fit into our lifestyle and fit into what we enjoy doing for them to be consistent because otherwise we hate doing them and either we are not going to do them again or probably even worse than that, we will do it, but we will hate the time that we spend doing it and that is no way to live life. So ask yourself where and what times of the day am I craving calm? Are you somebody that is better having calm time in the morning just to gently introduce yourself into the day? Or do you perhaps need calm at the end? Maybe you need. A bit of calm either end of the days, but just have a think about where your energy levels are, your peaks and your troughs during the course of the day. Whilst I know you've got to factor in other things, like the demands from work and people around you, another question to ask is, where do I have the energy for strength and speed? So for some people that might be first thing in the morning, maybe they're better getting up. Blasting out your workout and you are done for the day. Or maybe you are someone who's better blasting out a workout after work because it releases energy and just sets you up for a good night's sleep. So have a think about that. And then the next question is, How can I let both coexist in this season of life so that I'm doing the best for myself that I can? And I don't really think that we can ask more of ourselves than that. If this episode resonated, I'd love to hear how you are finding your rhythm right now. If at all, if you've enjoyed this episode, or if it made you think of a friend. Who'd love it to, it would mean so much to me if you shared it with them. It's really easy to do. Just tap the share button wherever you are listening and send them the link in a message. It's such a lovely way to spread the word and help more women discover these conversations, especially those who might need a little lift or a bit of inspiration right now. And if you'd like to make sure you don't miss future episodes, tap, follow, or subscribe in your podcast app. It means each new episode will drop straight into your feed. No searching, no remembering. Just a little moment of calm and connection waiting for you each week. I'm Beth Good Jim, and I just wanted to remind you as busy as you are and as cheesy as this sounds, show up for yourself every day. I'll be back next Monday morning. So until then, have a great week and bye for now.