Ruth had always had a good exercise habit. She had always shown up. After her second child, like many mothers, she grew unhappy with her body, so she did what she knew how to do: she exercised more. She was told she just needed to accept that her body had changed after pregnancy and that was that. She thought: screw that.
She started lifting weights alongside the classes. She loved it. But when the coach who had shown her how moved on, she drifted back to what felt safe. Classes. Cardio. A little of everything, planned by nothing. Just whatever she felt like on the day.
And then came the endorphins.
When More Became the Only Answer
The rush from every workout became addictive. The ability to escape the world’s problems for an hour became something she needed. She started doing more. Then more again. Eventually she was training twice a day, five to six days a week, easily accumulating ten hours or more. She never really thought twice about whether too much exercise could be a problem.
She was working harder than almost anyone. She was bouncing from program to program, diet to diet. She had done the detoxes, the cleanses, the no-sugar experiments, every approach available. “Everything!” And nothing was working. She kept thinking the problem was the type of exercise she was doing. That somewhere out there was the right version that would finally produce the results.
That is not what was happening.
The Mirror She Didn’t Know She Needed
When Ruth started working with a coach who understood the full picture, the first thing that happened wasn’t a new training plan. Her coach put the mirror up in her face and showed her exactly how much she was doing. She never told Ruth what to do. Instead she taught her to make her own choices.
Slowly, Ruth started to cut back. And in the space that cutting back created, more time in her day, more quiet, less noise, the real issues started to show up. The issues she had been running from.
“For years I had been using exercise as a way to forget about my real, deeper problems. So when I started to do less it was like ripping the Band Aid off.”
She had thought that finding the right programme would be the magic pill she needed. It wasn’t. What her coach helped her realise was that the magic pill was working on the one person who could actually change everything.
Herself.
What Actually Changed
Ten hours of weekly training became three. The sessions that remained were structured and progressive. She stopped chasing exhaustion as proof of effort and started measuring the work against results instead. Nutrition came into focus, not restriction, but adequacy. Protein. Recovery. The basics that the volume had been drowning out.
The body responded. Four centimetres off her waist. Muscle built. The energy she hadn’t felt in years came back, and it was real this time, not the borrowed energy of endorphins. She stopped getting run down and sick as easily. She had more time for her kids and her husband. She found what she describes simply as her self worth.
Her words: “My mental health has improved, I have more energy, and I have a booty now.”
The Lesson She Carries
The biggest thing Ruth learned was to relax. To stop trying to be so perfect. As a mum, the pressure to excel at everything, fitness included, had been one of the invisible drivers behind the overtraining. When that pressure lifted, everything else became easier.
“I needed something different. Everything I had tried wasn’t working.” What she needed wasn’t a harder programme. It was a more honest one, one that looked at the whole picture, not just the training log.
If you are training hard and getting nowhere, the effort is not the problem. It might be that the training has quietly become something else: a coping mechanism, a pressure valve, a way to feel in control. The work worth doing is not always in the gym.