Different Forms of Movement
There isn't one path to fitness, and I think a lot of us grow up believing there is. The gym. Running. A specific class everyone swears by. Somewhere along the way, fitness got narrowed down to a handful of "acceptable" options, and if none of them appeal to you, it's easy to assume the problem is you, not the options.
It isn't. Fitness can look like strength training, Pilates, running, tennis, swimming, dance, climbing, a home workout, a weekly class, or simply moving in a way that doesn't feel like punishment. It can also be a combination: doing the gym because it works, paired with something you actually look forward to alongside it, like a sport or a class. What matters far more than which one you pick is whether it's something you can actually stick with.
That matters even more once life gets fuller, especially with children in the picture. Being told you need five gym sessions a week, or a perfectly clean diet every day, to be "doing it right" is simply too overwhelming when it doesn't have to be. Some days you won't have the time or energy for a workout. Other days, a proper meal isn't realistic either, and a quick snack from the cupboard before your little one needs you again is genuinely the best you can do. That's not failing. That's just life.
A lot of the pressure around this comes from myths that get repeated so often they start to sound like fact. So before we talk about movement itself, I want to clear a few of these up, because I think they're a big part of why so many people feel stuck doing something they don't enjoy, or avoiding exercise altogether.
Myth: strength training will make you bulky
This is probably the one I hear most often, and it's simply not true. Women have roughly ten to twenty times less circulating testosterone than men, and testosterone is one of the main hormones responsible for building significant muscle size. Research consistently shows that while women can gain strength at a similar rate to men, the actual increase in muscle size is far smaller, purely because of that hormonal difference. "Toning" isn't a separate physiological process from "bulking" either. There's one process, hypertrophy, and what you see on the outside depends on how much muscle you've built relative to how much fat sits over it.
What strength training actually tends to do for women is build a strong, capable, healthy-looking body. Not bigger, just more defined, more functional, and better supported, joints included. Plenty of women who train regularly and seriously have completely normal, healthy, strong physiques, nothing like the "bulky" fear suggests.
Myth: cardio is the secret to weight loss
This one's more nuanced than a straight yes or no, so bear with me. The research is fairly clear that diet plays a bigger role in weight loss than exercise does, simply because we have far more control over how many calories we eat than how many we burn. Most of our daily energy use goes towards just keeping us alive, not towards the workout we did that morning. So if the goal is purely to create a calorie deficit, what you eat matters more than whether you ran, cycled, or did an hour of cardio.
Where it gets more interesting is what happens after you've lost the weight. Research has found that physical activity seems to matter more than diet for keeping weight off long term. So cardio, and movement generally, isn't where the magic happens for losing weight in the first place, but it's a big part of why some people manage to keep it off and others don't.
As for strength training specifically: I'd still push back on calling it a dramatic fat-burning secret. The effect on your resting metabolism is real, but modest, not the overnight transformation it's sometimes sold as. That said, I wouldn't put it on equal footing with walking either. Unless you have a genuine health issue that limits you to walking or brisk walking, I think everyone should be strength training in some way. It builds things walking alone simply can't: muscle, bone density, and body composition changes that actually last. That doesn't have to mean a traditional gym session either, a sport like tennis, in my case, builds muscle too, just through a different route.
There's also a practical upside worth mentioning: once you've built muscle and reached a body composition you're happy with, maintaining it generally takes less effort than building it did in the first place. You don't need to keep adding more weight or reps forever, you mostly just need to keep showing up consistently. (If you haven't come across the term, progressive overload just means gradually asking your muscles to do a bit more over time, whether that's a bit more weight, a few more reps, or better form, so they keep adapting. It's what gets you the results in the first place, not something you have to chase forever once you're happy with where you are.)
So, no single thing is "the secret." Diet creates the deficit. Movement, muscle included, is what makes the result sustainable.
Myth: you can never have a treat if you want to be fit
I'm not going to pretend sugary food and drinks are good for you, they're not, and they tend to leave you feeling worse, not better, once the initial hit wears off. But let's be honest: telling yourself you can never have a dessert or eat out again isn't motivating, it's miserable, and it rarely lasts.
Eating clean the majority of the time, with room for a treat or a meal out once a week, still means you're making the better choice far more often than not. That's not a cheat, it's balance, and it's a big part of why some people manage to stay consistent for years while others burn out after a few weeks of restriction. The same goes for holidays. You're there to switch off and enjoy yourself, not to white-knuckle your way through every meal. A week of relaxing isn't going to undo months of consistency.
Finding what works for you
For me, that's a combination of the gym and tennis. To be clear, I'm not bashing the gym, I genuinely love training and think it's one of the best things you can do for your general fitness, strength and health. Agility and sport-specific endurance are a slightly different story, that's where something like tennis comes in for me. But on its own, the gym can still feel a bit repetitive, which feels a bit ironic given what I do for a living. You can absolutely love the routine of going and love knowing you're improving and looking after your health, while still enjoying it more with something else alongside it. For me, that something is tennis.
What I love about tennis is the adrenaline, the competition, always striving to win, always having something specific to improve if I want to get there. It also makes me better at tennis itself, training in the gym directly carries over to my game. The gym is a different kind of challenge. It's mostly you against yourself, there's less of that constant external feedback, and the way I train reflects that: I've stuck with largely the same compound movements for years, because consistency with the big lifts is what actually gets you the most progress. I'll add a new isolation exercise here and there, but the foundation barely changes.
I want to be clear that sticking with the same routine isn’t because I don’t enjoy the gym, it’s because this is simply how you make the most progress, and it’s something we’re taught very early on as PTs. It’s actually one of the harder things to get clients to accept. Progress usually comes from consistency, not novelty, but a lot of people want training to feel new and exciting from day one. But constantly changing things isn’t necessarily what will get you the best results in the long run.
This is exactly the kind of thing I mean when I say fitness should fit you. I could force myself to find the gym endlessly exciting on its own, but I don't have to, because I've found what works for me instead.
What I've seen firsthand
I’ve also seen how much finding the right approach can change things for other people, not just in my own training.
Since my husband is a personal trainer and nutritionist, his clients get both nutrition and training guidance together, and he takes me along to most sessions, so I've genuinely sat in on a lot of this. I've seen the same pattern play out again and again: someone changes their diet, starts training consistently, and becomes a genuinely different person for it. More energy, more confidence, visibly healthier, and of course a healthier weight too. It's not a one-off. It's what happens when the approach actually fits the person and they stick with it.
One client told him afterwards that she believed the programme he'd built for her, training and nutrition together, was a big part of why she had a straightforward, natural birth. I can't say that with certainty for her specifically, there are so many factors involved in how a birth goes. But her instinct isn't unfounded. Research has linked resistance training during pregnancy to a higher likelihood of vaginal delivery, and to a lower risk of babies being born significantly larger than average, with no evidence of harm to the baby's development. It's a topic I think deserves its own proper deep-dive, so I'll be covering fitness in pregnancy in more detail in a future post.
The takeaway
There's no one right way to be fit, and most of the myths that make people feel otherwise don't hold up once you actually look at them. Strength training won't make you bulky. Cardio alone isn't the answer, but neither is chasing muscle for muscle's sake, it's diet and consistency together that get you there. And you're allowed to enjoy your life while you do it.
It’s also worth remembering that movement isn’t just about how your body looks or performs. Whatever you choose, moving regularly tends to genuinely improve your mental state too, partly thanks to the feel-good chemicals your brain releases during exercise. That effect seems even stronger when you’re actually present for it: focused on the exercise in front of you, rather than going through the motions on autopilot. Of course, being present during exercise isn’t the only thing that can influence how good it makes you feel, but it is one of them, and personally, it’s my favourite.
At the end of the day, there isn't a single right way to move, only the way that keeps you consistent, healthy, and genuinely enjoying it. Find that, in whatever combination works for you, and the rest tends to follow.
supporting research:
Refalo et al., "Sex differences in absolute and relative changes in muscle size following resistance training in healthy adults: a systematic review with Bayesian meta-analysis," PeerJ, 2025. peerj.com/articles/19042 — 29-study meta-analysis confirming women build muscle at the same relative rate as men, with men's higher starting mass (driven by testosterone) explaining the absolute difference.
Verboven & Hansen, "Critical Reappraisal of the Role and Importance of Exercise Intervention in the Treatment of Obesity in Adults," Sports Medicine, 2021. doi.org/10.1007/s40279-020-01392-8 — concludes dietary intervention is substantially more effective than exercise for reducing body weight and fat mass.
Ostendorf et al., "Physical Activity Energy Expenditure and Total Daily Energy Expenditure in Successful Weight Loss Maintainers," Obesity, 2019. doi.org/10.1002/oby.22373 — the long-term weight-loss-maintenance study behind the "cardio matters more for keeping it off" point.
Smith, Hawkeswood & Dalton, "Cognitive and weight-related correlates of flexible and rigid restrained eating behaviour," Eating Behaviors, 2013. sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1471015312001237 — flexible restraint predicted more weight lost and better long-term maintenance than rigid restriction.
Pearson et al., "Flexible vs. rigid dieting in resistance-trained individuals," Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 2021. DOI: 10.1186/s12970-021-00452-2 — rigid dieting linked to higher risk of weight regain and disordered patterns around food.
Liu et al., “Mindful exercise intervention on exercise affect and behavior: A randomized controlled trial,” Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, 2026. DOI: 10.1111/aphw.70153 — found that mindfulness during exercise enhanced positive affective experiences, with higher enjoyment and exercise intention compared with distraction.