The exhaustion you think is evidence

Hi Reader

There is a moment at the end of a training session that a lot of the women I work with are quietly waiting for. The one where they feel completely spent. And if it does not come, something feels off — like the session did not count.

I have been having a lot of honest conversations lately about the difference between building capacity and spending it. Many of us — and I include myself in this — learned to use exhaustion as the metric. If we pushed hard enough, worked late enough, trained intensely enough, we had done enough. The tiredness was the point.

What we rarely questioned was the cumulative cost of that. The sessions piled onto already stretched nervous systems. The weeks with no variation, no intentional ease, no acknowledgement that the body carries more than the load in the gym. It carries the job, the family, the mental pace that never fully stops.

Periodisation — real periodisation, the kind that athletes have trained by for decades — is simply the intelligence of variation. It builds in harder efforts and lighter ones. It treats recovery not as what happens when you cannot train, but as part of what makes training work at all.

For the women I coach, the shift is rarely about doing less. It is about doing the right thing at the right time. Understanding when your body has more to give, and when it is asking you to consolidate rather than accumulate. That might mean adjusting load across your menstrual cycle. Or it might mean something simpler — designing a week that includes actual rest, not rest that is quietly filled with everything else.

If you are training consistently but finding that your energy, strength or focus feel unpredictable — working with a coach who understands the full picture can change that. My 1:1 spaces in my South East London studio are open. You can find out more here.

Seema x

PS

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