Charmaine is the kind of story that dismantles excuses. Not in the way that’s meant to shame people with genuine limitations, but in the way that reframes what “genuine limitations” actually means.
She was working remotely for the defence force: a demanding, high-stress context that doesn’t exactly optimise for consistent training. She was dealing with chronic back pain that had been a feature of her life for long enough to feel permanent. And at some point during her time at The Evolved, she broke her leg. Not before she started, during.
She trained through it anyway. She adapted, she modified, she showed up. She lost 10kg in 6 months.
What Training Through Injury Actually Looks Like
The response many people have to injury, and the advice many people receive from well-meaning friends and sometimes even medical professionals, is to stop. Rest. Wait until you’re fully recovered. The problem with this advice, applied broadly, is that it assumes the alternative to injured training is rest and recovery. In practice, for most people, the alternative is deconditioning: the gradual loss of muscle, aerobic capacity, and movement quality that accumulates during extended inactivity.
Intelligent training through injury looks different. It means identifying which parts of the body are affected and adapting the programme to work around them. A broken leg doesn’t prevent upper body training. Chronic back pain doesn’t prevent work that builds the posterior chain musculature that, progressively loaded and correctly coached, is often the solution to the pain rather than the cause of it.
Charmaine’s coaches adapted her programme when her leg was broken. They kept her training. The result was that her twelve weeks of injury didn’t become twelve weeks of inactivity. They became twelve weeks of modified progress. When she recovered and returned to full training, she was still on track.
The Back Pain Resolution
Charmaine came in with chronic back pain. This is a presenting condition that strength training coaches encounter frequently, and which the research consistently shows responds well to progressive resistance training when the programming is appropriate.
The logic is counterintuitive to people who experience pain as a signal to do less: the back hurts because it is weak and unsupported. The musculature of the posterior chain, glutes, hamstrings, erector spinae, and supporting structures, when underdeveloped, transfers excessive load to passive structures: discs, ligaments, joints. Building the muscles that are supposed to carry that load removes it from the structures that can’t.
For Charmaine, this meant that the strength training which might have seemed like a risk given her pain was, in practice, the intervention that addressed it. The pain didn’t stop her from training. The training stopped the pain.
The Defence Context
Remote work in the defence force is not a nine-to-five lifestyle. It involves irregular hours, high cognitive demands, significant stress, and the particular challenge of maintaining physical discipline without the social structures of a conventional office or training environment. Charmaine found those structures at The Evolved: a scheduled time, a committed community, and coaching accountability that made consistency possible even when everything else was variable.
No excuses. Just progress. If you have been waiting for your circumstances to be more favourable before you start, Charmaine’s story is worth reading as a question: what would you be able to achieve if you started now, with the constraints you actually have?