MY TRAINING PHILOSOPHY

MY TRAINING PHILOSOPHY

IF IT'S TOO EASY, LIFT HEAVIER. IF IT'S TOO HEAVY, KEEP TRYING.

And how is that working out for you, Pauline?

Pauline Trains Pauline

I AM MY OWN LONGEST-RUNNING CLIENT

have trained myself for decades.

I have been the coach and the person being coached.

I have made plans, followed them, changed them, pushed too hard, backed off, experimented, learned, got things wrong and figured out better ways to do them.

I don't look back at a younger version of myself and think I need to become her again. I don't even want to, all said with love.

She taught me things I use to train myself today.

I'm still me. I'm just not the same person I was then.

My body has changed.
My goals have changed.

Pauline trains Pauline

My knowledge has changed. What I can tolerate has changed.

What I want from training has changed. So my training has changed too.

I don't believe real training means stubbornly proving that I can keep doing what I used to do.

I believe real training means knowing what I'm trying to accomplish now, understanding the body I'm working with now, and finding the smartest way to keep progressing from there.

That is why Pauline Trains Pauline is more than a name for me.

I am still the student.

I am still the experiment.

And I am still training.
And the only real training goal that matters at the end of the day?

To Seize the Training Day.

I AM NOT THE FITNESS MODEL IMAGE

For over 20 years, people knew me through fitness-model photos.I understand why.

That was the image they saw—and I helped create it.

I wanted to inspire people. I wanted to be strong.

I wanted to be the tough one.

I believed in what I was doing, and I was proud of it.

But the fitness model image or the fitness competitor persona were never the parts I loved most.

I loved training. I loved the lifestyle of being an athlete without a sport. I was a gym rat.

The photoshoot was an event.

Training was my life.

When a shoot was over, I didn't want to go out and celebrate being the person in the pictures.

I wanted to go back to the gym.

Looking back now, some of the things I said at the time make me laugh. I had so much certainty about things I had not yet lived long enough to understand. And I love that!

THE BEST ADVICE I EVER GAVE MYSELF

The best advice anyone has ever given me was actually something I gave myself:

“I have a body and I have a strong mind. That means I have everything I need to succeed.”

That sentence reflects the fearless way I approached my life. I had a fitness dream, and I was going to find a way to make it my reality.

I didn't know exactly how.

And I still thank my younger self for that wonderfully blank space in her mind where doubt could have been.

She simply believed she would find a way.

And she did.

I don't look at my younger self with embarrassment or shame.

She amuses me.

I can sit and observe her with pure joy.

I am proud of her, I learn from her, and I am very glad I don't have to remain her.

She knew how to work. She knew how to train.

She had ambition, discipline and enormous conviction.

She also had a limited amount of life experience. Of course she did.

What she didn't know yet was everything she hadn't experienced.

That's one of my favorite things about looking back.

I get to see what I believed before life taught me something else.

I get to see what remained true, what changed, what became more complicated and what I understand completely differently now.

And all of it teaches me.

THIS IS WHERE I AM TODAY

I still train.

Not to recreate an old physique, prove that I can still do what I did twenty years ago, or maintain an image of who Pauline Nordin is supposed to be.

I train because I love training.

I want to be strong.

I want muscle.

I want to keep developing my skills.

I want to understand my body better.

I want to see what I can improve, what I can build, rebuild and keep gaining.

So what if I can't gain more muscle? Whatcha gonna do?! Ha.

I'm still gaining. Gaining wisdom and insights.

I have a body. I am not my body.

As long as I have the privilege to have a body to train, I will.

My body won't live forever but I've committed to never stop building it as long as I can.

It comes down to priorities, not expectations or entitlement.

When it comes down to life philosophy, it's more rewarding to live the strong and fit feeling than to simply look the fit, strong feeling.

Some days I lift heavy.

Some days I have to be smarter than my ego.

I experiment. I adjust. I change my mind.

But I always keep training.

That's probably the most consistent thing about my entire fitness life.And that's where my work comes from today.I don't teach training from something I finished learning years ago.I teach what I practice today.

HOW I COACH TRAINING

Strength training is a technical skill.

The movements you use to build your body are worth learning—and continuing to refine as your strength, experience and physique develop.

I have an eye for what happens beyond standard step-one, step-two exercise instruction.I look at how you perform a movement: your setup, mechanics, control, range of motion, individual structure and what happens as load, fatigue and training experience increase.

Because as you evolve as a lifter, your training needs to evolve with you.

After nearly 30 years of training, and repeatedly rebuilding and evolving my own training after injuries and limitations, I know that progress is not about proving you can still train exactly the way you always did.

TO GAIN WHAT YOU'VE NEVER GAINED TRAIN IN A WAY YOU'VE NEVER TRAINED

Sometimes the strongest thing you can do is check your ego.

I have had to learn when to change an exercise, adjust a load, rebuild a movement and find another way forward.

When something isn't working, my question isn't:

How do I maintain the image of the lifter I think I should be?

It is:

What do I need to do now to achieve the goal I actually want?

I am not attached to making my body—or yours—fit an exercise.

I am interested in making training work for the body, the goal and the lifter.

From the basics to beyond the basics, this is the technical ability behind building your body.

WHERE TO FIND MY TRAINING

SEIZE THE TRAINING DAY

Seize the Training Day is where I put my training into practice and teach you how to use it.

You'll find my training systems, complete programs, workouts, challenges, exercise tutorials, technique, mobility and the training methods I use and continue to develop.

You don't need to do everything.

Choose a program. Take on a challenge. Learn an exercise.

Try a training method. Build your repertoire.

Then take what you learn back into your own training.

This isn't Fitness Netflix. This is training.