I Found My Greatest Inspiration, and It's My Mom

Last week I walked into my mom's kitchen and found her doing Quick Minutes.

She didn't know I was standing there. She was just working through the movements between the counter and the stove while the coffee brewed, the way she does most mornings.

My mom is 83 years old.

I stood in that doorway for a second longer than I needed to, and then she caught me watching and we both started laughing. That was pretty much the whole visit.

I want to tell you about her today, because I have been thinking about her ever since I got home, and because I think she has something for you.

A Little About My Mom

She plays pickleball and she plays to win. She runs. She has a social calendar that she protects like a job, and she will move things around for it.

I am the gym person in this family. That has always been my place. She would much rather be in a room with twenty other people or out on a court, and honestly, watching her has made me better about getting out of my own routine.

We cook together when I visit. She eats better than most women half her age and she will tell you what she has had so far today whether you asked or not.

We also make videos together, which many of you have seen. What you do not see is that when I ask her to film something, she says yes before I have finished the question.

Here is what I want you to know about my mom. She is not the exception to what I teach here. She is the proof of it. The strength work, the good food, the daily movement, staying in the game. She does all of it, at 83, and you can see it in how she moves.

The Thing I Figured Out on the Flight Home

You can already do hard things. I know that about you.

You have raised children. You have built careers and started over more than once. You have kept whole households running on days when you were running on empty. And you have done all of it in a body that keeps changing the rules on you.

So the question is not whether you can do hard. You have been doing hard for decades.

The question is whether the hard you are doing is building you up or breaking you down.

Some of it is. I call this choosing your hard, and once you see the difference you will notice it everywhere in your day.

The Hard That Drains You

This is the difficulty that takes something from you and leaves nothing behind:

• Saying yes when you meant no. The event you did not want to attend. The favor you did not have room for.
• Workouts you dread. An hour of cardio you do not enjoy, on knees that would rather be doing something else.
• Under eating all day. Then wondering why you have nothing left by four in the afternoon.
• Carrying the whole mental load. Being the only person in the house who knows where anything is or when anything happens.
• Holding on to an old story. The comparison you keep making, or a version of yourself from twenty years ago that you are still measuring against.

All of that is genuinely hard. It is tiring. It just is not making you stronger.

The Hard That Builds You

This is the difficulty that is uncomfortable in the moment and gives you something back:

• The last two reps. The set you were not sure you could finish, finished.
• Cooking a real meal. On a day you would rather not think about food at all.
• Saying the honest thing. Out loud, to the person who needs to hear it.
• Fifteen minutes of movement. When Netflix is right there and very convincing.
• A boundary that disappoints someone. Who will be perfectly fine tomorrow.

Same discomfort. Very different result.

The trap is that you are already worn out from the first kind, so adding anything at all feels impossible. But being tired from the wrong hard is not the same as being strong from the right hard.

You do not need to add more. You need to trade.

Why This Matters So Much After 45

There is real physiology under this, and it is the part I wish someone had told me years ago.

We start losing muscle in our thirties. After menopause, when estrogen drops, that loss speeds up and takes bone density with it. This is happening quietly in the background while you are busy being strong for everybody else.

And the answer is not to be gentler with yourself. It is the opposite.

Researchers at Griffith University in Australia ran a study called LIFTMOR with postmenopausal women who had low bone mass. These are exactly the women who usually get handed the little pastel dumbbells and told to be careful, because heavy lifting is assumed to be too risky for fragile bones.

They did the opposite. Twice a week, for eight months, these women did thirty supervised minutes of heavy resistance and impact work. Their bone density improved at the spine and the hip. So did their strength, their posture and their day to day function. And the fractures everyone was worried about did not happen.

Here is the study if you want to read it yourself: Watson et al., Journal of Bone and Mineral Research, 2018

Dr. Stacy Sims is the person who shaped how I coach women through midlife. She is an exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist who has run research programs at Stanford, AUT University and the University of Waikato, and she wrote ROAR and Next Level, which is her book on training through menopause. She sums up her whole message in four words, and it is the title of her TEDx talk: "Women are not small men."

If you have twenty minutes, her talk is worth every one of them: Women are Not Small Men | TEDxTauranga

You do not need a softened version of someone else's program. You need a real challenge, built for the body you are in.

The challenge is not the risk here. Skipping it is.

What My Mom Never Picked Up

Here is the part I keep coming back to.

My mom is not remarkable only because of the hard things she does. She is remarkable because of the hard thing she never picked up.

She never took on the job of acting her age. She never decided there is a birthday after which you sit instead of play, or watch instead of join in. That belief is a heavy thing to carry, and most of us pick it up somewhere in our forties without even noticing.

She just never did. She kept the hard that builds and she left the hard that drains, and eight decades of that adds up to a woman doing her fifteen minutes by the stove because that's who she is.

She is my greatest inspiration. Not only because she is my mom, but because she is the clearest proof I have ever seen that this works, and that it keeps working for as long as you keep choosing it.

So here is what I would love for you to try this week. Put down one draining hard thing. Just one. And pick up one that builds you.

I would really love to hear about this one. What are you putting down, and what are you picking up instead? Tell me in the comments and I will be in there reading and responding later today.

Big hug, everyone.

Kate

Quick Minutes Daily

Quick Minutes Daily is the program she does in her kitchen and the one I built for women who do not have an hour to give. Strength, mobility and longevity in 15 to 30 minutes a day, with a community of women moving right alongside you. Start with a free 3 day trial and see how it feels.

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