Why Don't I Trust My Body Anymore?

When muscles become weaker, confidence often disappears with them. The good news is that both can be rebuilt.

Have you stopped doing the things you love because you're afraid you'll get hurt?

Maybe you've had a fall. Surgery. Chronic pain. Or maybe your body just doesn't respond the way it used to. Over time, those experiences can make you question every movement—and slowly chip away at your confidence.

In this episode of Making Muscle Memories, Lauren Eirk, MS, explores why so many adults over 50 lose trust in their bodies and, more importantly, how to rebuild it. Drawing on 40 years of experience in fitness, rehabilitation, yoga therapy, and muscle health, Lauren explains why confidence isn't created by pushing harder—it's built through small, successful movement experiences that teach your body it's capable again.

You'll learn:

Why fear of pain often becomes fear of movement.
How past injuries and setbacks influence your confidence today.
Why progression matters more than intensity.
How celebrating small wins retrains both your muscles and your mindset.
Practical strategies to help you move with greater confidence and trust again.

If you've ever thought, "I'm afraid I'll make it worse," this episode will remind you that strength isn't just about muscles—it's about believing your body can support you again.

Timestamps:
00:00  Why Don't I Trust My Body Anymore?
01:02  Why We Lose Confidence in Our Bodies
01:42  What Teaching Yoga Taught Me About Fear and Confidence
05:48  Falls, Surgery, and Pain Change More Than Your Body
08:18  What Qualities Make a Great Instructor
10:16  Small Successes Create Stronger Muscles and Greater Confidence
13:21  Why Progression Matters More Than Intensity
13:43  Failure in just information
14:06  Conclusion

If you’re ready to build strength in a way that supports your joints, reduces pain, and helps you stay active as you age…

You can explore my full training platform, FIS OnDemand, at www.fisondemand.com

WHO IS LAUREN EIRK?
Lauren is a 40-year fitness veteran, MAT-Rx Full-Body Specialist,  specialist,  Certified Yoga Therapist  C-IAYT, and Certified Yoga Instructor E-RYT 500.   She is the founder of FIS OnDemand™, The 5-Step Isometric Method™, and Fitness Integrated Science. She focuses on joint longevity for adults 50+ through science-backed resistance training to help you pinpoint your weak areas, correct strength imbalances, reduce pain and inflammation, and restore mobility.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you're someone that has ever said these things to yourself, such as I don't trust my body anymore, I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to keep my balance. I think if I do this activity, my pain is going to come back. This episode is just for you. I'm going to talk with you about some real scenarios where this has happened from a group fitness perspective as a health professional and give you some actionable steps that you can take for yourself to rebuild trust in your body. After 40 years of work in the fitness industry, I have learned that real strength isn't just built through exercise, but through experience. I will share with you some of the science as well as the stories that have shaped my work. We are all building muscle memories. One rep, one story, and one day at a time. Welcome to the Making Muscle Memories Podcast. My name is Lauren Irk and I will be your host. In today's episode, I'm going to tackle the common question of I don't trust my body. Now for all of us, as we get older, we definitely notice our body going through some changes. Everyone sees a change in their mobility, they see a change in their strength, and they see a change in their overall energy. But throughout all the years that I've been involved both in group fitness as well as in personal training, I hear clients say these things a lot. I don't trust my knee because whenever I garden it hurts, or every time I do this type of exercise, I wake up the next day and my lower back is painful, or whatever. And what happens is that people become fearful of taking part in exercise or activities and they don't really participate as well as they could be in their life. Now, many of you that know me, you know that I spent many decades studying and teaching yoga, both from a teaching instructor's perspective as well as teaching students' perspective, as well as being a student myself. Yoga, I feel like when a if you think about it, if somebody has like a mobility issue, or if someone has a chronic pain issue, if someone has a chronic disease process going on, if they have to take a break from their sport, guess where they're gonna go? Their doctor is gonna say, try a yoga class, it's gentle, right? And many of the people that come to yoga are coming to those specific types of classes or specific types of practices because they're dealing with those things. Now, when I was teaching yoga, I used to own a yoga studio and I employed about 12 yoga instructors, and I did regularly two to three teacher trainings a year. So I was having instructors coming in and learning, and I was always seeing people coming off the street as well, and I was managing instructors. One thing that I have seen across the board, when you're teaching from an instructor standpoint, in the beginning, when you first get out of the starting gate and you're out there and you're teaching yoga and you're just going with guns blazing, everybody always wants to teach the advanced stuff. Especially if you're good at that stuff. Like I remember when I was teaching Ashtanga yoga, that's all I wanted to do. I wanted to do power yoga, fitness yoga. I was in the middle of a gym, that's what I was interested in. But the thing is the people that come to those classes, they have issues, they have problems. I mean, well, a lot of the problems are uncovered as of yet, but they do have issues. But they usually are really up for anything that you want to do. Like you could just drive in there one day and just kind of off the top of your head, I'm gonna try this sequence today, I'm gonna try to do this arm balance today. Most of your students are gonna be up for that, and it's gonna be a great class, and which is, you know, back then I wanted to get a good workout myself, so all that was accomplished in a class. But as I got older and I became more wise, more mature, I realized that, well, for one thing, my own body wasn't gonna be able to keep up with that. But secondly, the people that were coming to me were not always advanced. You get people coming in off the street that would always overturn the apple cart, you'd have all these things that you have planned, and then this person would walk in, you're like, oh, I can't teach that today, or I better try to find a new way to frame this. And then over the years, I became much more interested in gentle classes. In the beginning, I thought gentle classes were stupid. You know, it's like, oh, I'll do that sometime when I'm retired. As I got older, I realized they were the most interesting. But people that come to those types of classes are the hardest to teach. Those are the ones that are always unsure of their balance. So they walk in the first day, they always grab their chair, and they want to, you know, get that chair next to them so that if we did anything, we're transitioning from being on the ground to standing, or if I'm doing a pose where I'm asking them to go on one leg or some sort of a challenging standing posture, they want to make sure they have a chair there. They're also much more unsure as to advancing to something new. A lot of times they would be very comfortable doing some of the same things each week, and they sort of became accustomed to that. But if you would come in with something new, you'd have to be very aware that yes, I'm gonna be bringing in this student that maybe have had suffered from something, so I'm gonna have to like give them a lot of what they knew and then introduct something that was br that was different. And then by the same token, many times they, if it was an instructor there that was a substitute or was this something that they weren't used to, they were unsure, they didn't come to class. I've even seen students turn around and walk out of my facility because their instructor wasn't there and they didn't trust that person. In the beginning, I remember feeling frustrated by this because I was a younger teacher and you know, to me, it was nothing. I was doing a gentle class. But as I as I started to listen to these people, and especially you know, working with them one-on-one in yoga therapy sessions and muscle activation technique sessions, certain things became more apparent. Number one, many of them had suffered from some serious falls. And you've ever seen someone, I know I've had falls before. I mean, I slipped on some ice once on a parking lot, and now when I'm on ice, I'm like really careful because I fell directly on my hip. But imagine if this happened to me when I was 70, you know. That's gonna definitely change my ideas about balance. Um, maybe I've suffered from some side of a surgery, you know. Having surgery, going through surgery is a very traumatic experience. The driving there, the preparation, the going through it, the pain after, the anesthesia, the recovery, the PT, having your body not feel the right way and wanting to avoid a surgery in the future. And that leads to maybe feeling embarrassed, you know, like I don't really trust my body. And so when you ask, when you ask me to do something different, you know, you're trying to tell me I need to try this new pose or try to do this thing without a chair or try to do these things a lot quicker, it makes me feel embarrassed because I don't want to look stupid in front of the other people that are in the class. These are all very real reasons why people simply don't trust their body anymore. One of the big reasons I would think is going to be that they were having pain. Who wants to feel pain, right? There's absolutely nobody that wants to go into a class and start having pain or to or to leave a fitness experience with a trainer or whomever, and then they go home and they have to be on the couch rest of the day because their back hurts. So this idea of having pain can actually lead to, you know, this sort of feeling of every experience is going to be like what I experienced in the past. And that's exactly what we don't want our students to go through. Now, when I owned my own studio and I had all these other instructors, over the years I learned who the best teachers were and who I wanted to hire. You'd always have these people that would come out of your teacher training and they always wanted you to hire them. And I did that in the beginning, and boy, did I get burned because I'd take somebody out of the teacher training and I would say, Okay, I need an instructor, I'm just making this up. Tuesday night at six, I have no instructor, and I'd throw them in there, and all they knew was like one thing. And so they would go in there and they'd give everybody a hard workout. I remember I had this one teacher, she was in the military, and and she was a sweet, sweet person, but she loved push-ups because that's what she did in the military. And she or to her, that went meant a good routine. And so she didn't have the discernment to take those out of classes that were more gentle. And so, me being the manager, all I would hear would be lots and lots of complaints from clients. So I learned that the some of the best instructors, the ones that I wanted to hire, were doing it not, and I'm not saying that these instructors did this knowingly. They knew enough from past experiences, they knew enough to not think about themselves when they taught. They knew to look at the student when they taught because they wanted to give the student an experience when they felt good about themselves, that they had a student that was older or someone that had maybe had a past experience or they fell or had pain. They want to make sure that they ease that person into it very gently. Secondly, those instructors celebrated their wins. And this is something you can do for yourself, right? So many times we focus on the things that we didn't do right. We focus on, you know, times when I tried something and fell, or I tried something and didn't feel good, or I tried something and I was embarrassed, or I wasn't able to do something because I didn't have the endurance or the abilities. Instead of celebrating when we did. And so, as an instructor from that kind of a standpoint, I always used to teach them don't worry about teaching this big, huge posture. Break the pose up into a million different steps. Look at all the different joints that are required to be in that pose and teach all of them one step at a time so that they can experience some wins. And I would say that too for yourself. Maybe you have the idea that I want to go from, I don't know, I want to go and from from walking in my neighborhood to running my first race, maybe a three-mile race. Maybe that was my goal. Well, maybe running out and taking the three-mile race is gonna create pain, it's gonna create soreness, it's gonna create feeling embarrassed and feeling sort of goofy and not able to do the thing. But what if I just walked a little longer, walked a little faster, maybe have a little jogs here and there, maybe tried a 20-second run or a minute run or a five-minute run and just sort of did that over time where I could experience one little success at a time, then when I went and did the run, I would have a great experience and feel good about myself. So I always loved instructors that would do that. I also love instructors who could progress a student from point A to point B in a way that seemed seamless. And this is something that I myself have learned and tried to craft throughout my entire career. This is how I have structured everything on FIS on demand. Everything is a process from where that person is to where they want to be, and there's all kinds of different ways to do it. Whenever I teach a class, I always give millions of ways, I say millions, hundreds of ways over the course of time when that person is studying with me of how to modify something. Not from the standpoint of if you modify this, you're not in you're not in shape. It's if you modify this, you're honoring your structure, you're honoring your current abilities, right? So the best instructors that I have seen were able to take this person into something that they formerly thought was challenging and they didn't even realize it because they layered one thing at a time. They went from non-moving to moving. They went from two feet on the floor to one feet on the floor, they went from shoes to no shoes, they went from stable to unstable, they went from slow to fast, they went from still to movement, right? And over time, this person was able to experience some of those wins, and that actually makes the person more comfortable and want to stay in the game longer. So if you want to learn how to trust yourself again, first of all, you have to be willing to show up for yourself. That's most important. You have to let go of whatever it was that failed you in the past. Maybe you can went to the wrong instructor. I mean, I wish I could call some of my ex-students back that had a bad experience, that left my studio, and maybe the class wasn't ideal for them. And I'm certainly have been on the receiving end of that. I've had experience where I felt that it was just daunting. I remember walking into my first hot yoga class and thought, oh my God, I'll never be able to do this. I ended up being an instructor for one of them. How I don't know, but I did. If I could tell you one thing though, don't look at your past experience as indicative of future results. I think that's actually a commercial, some kind of a sub prescription that uses that. But anyway, there's something to be said from that. Give yourself another do-over, right? An infinite number of do-overs. And if something doesn't work, try something different. If you can't get through a full hour of something, try 20 minutes. I love it when clients start with 15 minutes with me and they can work their way up to 30 and they text me and they say, I did 30 minutes a day and I didn't get hurt. Or I was able to walk through the airport today and pick up my luggage and I didn't get winded. Or I went on vacation with my girlfriends, they all had to rest and I climbed right up the hill and I don't even do cardio anymore. All of these things are ways to help your body get stronger. Don't focus so much on the task. Focus on the individual parts, right? If I want to eventually climb a mountain, I'm just going to train all the individual parts of that mountain. You don't necessarily have to climb mountains to climb mountains. And you don't necessarily have to run fast to run fast. You just show up for yourself every single day. Keep showing up for your body, keep giving it what it needs. And don't ever put yourself down if you failed. Failure is information. It's a way to do something different. Every time that I have failed, it showed me again, just like Thomas Edison said, of what not to do. So I can make a little tweak and try it again, right? If we're gonna do this thing, exercise, and do it for the rest of our lives, let's let go of being perfect. Let's just be consistent, be gentle, and be accepting. If this episode helped you, I'd love it if you would give me a thumbs up. Also share it with anybody that you know that I could help. And if you think about giving me a great review, I'd love that. It helps to push the algorithms out to more people. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next episode.