Elizabeth Davies, a lawyer in her early thirties and mother of two, found herself at a familiar crossroads. Juggling a demanding career, the joys and challenges of parenting young children, and the persistent goal of regaining her pre-baby fitness, she felt the familiar pull of being stretched thin. Her approach was straightforward: dive headfirst into her work, her family life, and her fitness aspirations.
At 33, eighteen months after the birth of her second child, a seemingly innocuous fitness class proved to be a turning point. “I thought I was back to my pre-baby self,” Elizabeth recalls. “I could fit into my old jeans, my weight was back to normal, everything felt fine.” Then came the skipping rope station. “I was clumsy, I couldn’t clear the rope, and I was concentrating so hard. When I finally got going, I realised I’d wet myself, and it was just a mortifying experience.”
Urinary leakage is a common consequence of pregnancy and childbirth, as the strain of carrying a child can weaken the pelvic floor muscles. When faced with increased abdominal pressure – from activities like laughing, coughing, running, or, as Elizabeth discovered, skipping – involuntary leakage can occur. While discussions around bodily functions are more open today, a decade ago, Elizabeth felt a profound sense of humiliation. “I got through the rest of the class, went home, and burst into tears. Then I started Googling to try and figure out what had happened.”
This deeply personal incident sparked a revelation: Elizabeth realised she wanted to become a personal trainer. “The realisation that there is so much I don’t know about my body made me think there must be millions of other women in the world in the same position,” she explains. “Women whose experience of fitness, like me, was: move, sweat, push yourself hard. That was not an approach that served me in that particular moment. I felt really cheated by it, actually.”
At 34, Elizabeth made the bold decision to leave her legal career and embark on years of rigorous training to become a personal trainer. Her studies opened her eyes to the realities of muscle mass loss, declining strength and power, and reduced bone density, and crucially, how to mitigate these changes. Simultaneously, she began implementing a new training philosophy for herself, focusing on performing the same movements consistently and progressively increasing the weight. “I often wasn’t breaking into a sweat while doing those sessions, but I was getting stronger, and this was the first time I felt that my goal was to build muscle and get nice and dense bones that are going to be less likely to fracture in older age.”
On a whim in 2023, she posted a provocative statement on Instagram, rejecting the typical summer body messaging. Instead, she declared: “F**k no, I’m training for my old lady body.”
Training for Your “Old Lady Body”: A New Fitness Paradigm
“Training for your ‘old lady body’ decentralises the question of aesthetics and, instead, gets women to ask themselves what they want to be able to do decades into the future,” Elizabeth elaborates. “It’s not about what you want to look like six weeks from now. It’s about what you have to do to keep living independently in old age, and doing the things that fill your soul with joy.”
This empowering mindset has resonated deeply, leading to a substantial social media following. Elizabeth now shares essential workout plans tailored for all ages and abilities, and has authored a book, Training For Your Old Lady. This journey has transformed her not only physically but also mentally. “Since I started focusing purely on taking care of myself and trying to be better incrementally, I truly don’t care about what I look like. Why would the loose skin on my abdomen from having three babies matter – I’m actually doing things that feel bigger.”
Elizabeth’s Key Principles for Future-Proof Fitness
Elizabeth outlines five fundamental pillars of her training philosophy, applicable across every stage of life:
- Cardiovascular Health: Crucial for overall well-being and particularly important for heart health, which is the leading cause of death for women.
- Strength: Essential for maintaining muscle mass and metabolic function.
- Muscle Power: The ability to exert force quickly, vital for everyday activities and injury prevention.
- Pelvic Floor Health: Often overlooked, these muscles play a critical role in continence and core stability.
- Mobility: The range of motion in your joints, essential for fluid movement and preventing stiffness.
She stresses that while these fundamentals remain constant, the methods of building them evolve with life’s seasons. The key, she advises, is not to prescribe rigid exercise regimes for specific life stages but to embrace “auto-regulation.”
Auto-Regulation: Listening to Your Body
“Often, fitness culture yells at us that we’ve all got the same 24 hours in a day, go hard or go home, and so on,” Elizabeth observes. “But I teach all my clients to adjust their training based on how they’re feeling on any given day.” For instance, if a night of poor sleep due to perimenopausal symptoms has left you fatigued, auto-regulation might suggest a gentle walk instead of a high-intensity workout, with the planned session moved to a day when you feel more energetic. “Basically, it doesn’t matter if you skip a day. I’m training for my old lady body, so it doesn’t matter if that happens on a Thursday instead of a Wednesday.”
Progressive Overload: The Engine of Adaptation
Resistance training is non-negotiable, and Elizabeth highlights progressive overload as its vital companion. “This means that you repeat the same movements for a period of time, I would say at least eight weeks, and you build the challenge over that time,” she explains. Your starting point should be accessible, but the objective is to gradually increase the demands on your body over weeks and months. “That’s how your body adapts.” Strength is paramount, especially as peak muscle mass is typically reached in our thirties, followed by a natural decline. This loss is further accelerated for women by declining estrogen levels during menopause.
While the idea of repetitive movements might seem monotonous, Elizabeth views this as a flaw in much of current fitness culture. “I think a lot of women’s fitness is just doing a bunch of random sh*t.” She clarifies that this isn’t to dismiss other forms of exercise, but rather, “if your goal is building strength, then there’s got to be an element of repetition and progression. A big part of strength is learning the technique, drilling those neuromuscular connections, and then the progressive overload is really the magic. That’s how you get your body to keep adapting, getting stronger.”
Bone Strength: Impact, Not Just Intensity
Just as muscle mass diminishes, bone density also begins to decline around age 35, with menopause accelerating this process. Building bone density through exercise is therefore crucial for maintaining independence and preventing fractures in later life.
“One in two women over the age of 50 will experience an osteoporotic fracture. That’s a coin toss, it’s not a niche injury. Plus, 20 to 33 per cent of patients die within one year of a hip fracture,” Elizabeth states, citing statistics that underscore the severity of the issue. “Those statistics were so eye-opening for me. It makes you wonder why all these magazines are telling us how to get rid of our bingo wings. Why is nobody telling us how to build lovely, dense bones that aren’t going to fracture?”
A combination of balance work, strength training, and power exercises can protect against falls. However, achieving bone strength doesn’t necessitate lifting excessively heavy weights.
“We know that bones do need a lot of force in order to adapt, but we also know that bones respond really well to impact,” Elizabeth explains. “So if lifting heavy isn’t for you and jumping is accessible, then jump training can be really effective.” The key lies in applying sufficient force and introducing an element of unpredictability. Bones can become desensitised to repetitive stimuli, meaning activities like running might not be as beneficial for bone density as one might assume. “It needs to be multi-directional: lateral jumps, skater jumps, bounce forward, hops in different directions. The bigger the impact, the more stimulus that’s going to put through the skeleton, therefore more of a cue for our bones to adapt.” Again, this approach must be guided by auto-regulation, starting at an appropriate level and gradually increasing intensity.
Cardio: Still a Non-Negotiable
While the emphasis on strength training is undeniable, Elizabeth maintains that “cardiovascular fitness has to be an important part of the conversation, too. A lot of us have such a scarred relationship with it from the 90s and 2000s, but it is absolutely still important, particularly for heart health. Heart disease is the biggest killer of women. We can’t shirk cardio.” The key is to find an enjoyable form of cardio that you’ll consistently engage with, rather than viewing it as a chore.
The Pelvic Floor: An Enduring Neglect
“A lot of us, myself included, only really approach these muscles reactively,” Elizabeth admits, but she is determined to shift this narrative. “It wasn’t nice to be learning about my pelvic floor muscles at a time when I’d already had that leaking incident. I would have found it a lot more of a comfortable experience if this had been part of the conversation throughout my pregnancy, even prior to pregnancy.”
She urges all women to learn how to perform a pelvic floor squeeze, regardless of whether they are experiencing symptoms. Elizabeth herself incorporates daily endurance holds and quick squeezes into her shower routine. “Sarcopenia isn’t choosy, and they are muscles like any other. Add in the menopause transition when estrogen, which is protective of those muscles, is going to decline. That can lead to many women having leaks or symptoms as they go through the perimenopause transition.”
Training For Your Old Lady Body: An honest, no bullsht guide to help women (re)frame exercise* by Elizabeth Davies is published by LEAP and is available now.
