Mary Spencer's Blog

It was 2009. My husband and I were running our fitness boot camps and had just had our first child. I knew I didn’t want to travel anymore to speak with a new baby at home, and decided to focus on online training and coaching instead. I loved helping clients effect change in their lives and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to marry what I loved best, with the flexibility and schedule I was looking for. I added in clients who wanted a deeper dive in nutrition and behavior and was excited to get to work. At first I loved it. Clients adopted the changes we discussed and were making progress and I felt like a rock star. It felt great to know that I was helping them reach their goals and creating a program that worked. They told friends. I took on more clients. And then I hit a road bump. A client wasn’t following any of my nutrition strategies — despite planning around every barrier and talking about things she could try each week. I sent reminders. I followed up. When we would g...

Name: Lori Brodie Age: 46 Location: Amelia Island, Florida What was your first thought when you learned about the Coaching & Training Women Academy and the GGS-1 Certification? My first thought was YES!!! I have been following GGS for a long time and have the Modern Woman’s Guide to Strength Training . I knew the GGS certification would be amazing and real. I remember rearranging my workout and work schedule the day it went on sale so I can be sure to be one of the first to enroll. (I would be curious to know if it was the first — probably one of the first ten or so I would guess.) What do you do? I am a board-certified mental health registered nurse. I have master’s degrees in psychology and nursing education, and am working on my Doctorate of Nursing Practice. Currently, I teach for two different nursing schools, teaching Mental Health Nursing, Developmental Psychology, and Critical Thinking. I love teaching our future nurses! Until recently, I was also working as a pe...

With sexual harassment and assault all over the headlines in Hollywood, sports, politics, and fitness, I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic and having lots of conversations about it lately. In a recent Instagram story, I asked women in my community what things they do daily in an attempt to stay safe, and avoid sexual harassment and assault. Within 24 hours, I had 259 answers from women. Let that sink in for a second: hundreds of women reached out to me with all the ways they alter their lives trying to avoid experiencing harassment and assault.  I’ll share some of the most common answers below. This is not surprising considering that 81 percent of women in the U.S. experience sexual harassment [1], and at least 33 percent of women globally will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime [2]. Note: While our article focuses on the experiences of women and uses the language of men as aggressors and women as victims, other marginalized populations at high risk for sexual violen...

Effectively coaching and training women is about more than understanding the anatomical and physiological differences between men and women. It’s also about understanding the psychological and emotional differences, including what women are conditioned to believe and say about their bodies and how it relates to their worthiness. With a community of over 600,000 women from more than 70 countries around the world, we have been able to glean really powerful insight from our community members about their experiences working with a coach or trainer, and how these experiences have impacted them personally, as well as the effect these have had on their relationship with that professional. In 2017, we surveyed the Girls Gone Strong community and asked women about negative experiences they’ve had with their coach or trainer — here’s what we’ve found. Of the women we surveyed: 97 percent eventually fired their trainer. 16 percent left that gym all together to avoid seeing their trainer aga...

If you’ve ever had an issue, experienced intense feelings, or otherwise felt human at some point in your life, you’ve probably wondered, “ Should I go talk to someone? ” For many of us, the follow up to that initial thought is something like: “But what would talking to someone actually do ?” “How is seeing a therapist going to help anything ?” “What’s the point of paying someone to just sit there and listen to my problems?” If one of those latter thoughts convinced you to just let it be, and then the issues, feelings, and human-ness of your situation continued to cause you trouble, you may have escalated reasons not to go talk to someone with one of the following thoughts: “I’m just being lazy.” “I can handle this myself.” I need to stop feeling sorry for myself. “All I have to do is just cut it out. Suck it up. Get focused. Then everything will be fine.” Here are some answers to your questions about therapy. And hopefully some reasons to change your thinking, and get yours...

What does it mean to “find your voice,” and more importantly, how does someone actually do that? How do you put beliefs and values into words and then take it a step further and have the courage to express them publicly? If you have ever found the concept of “finding your voice” difficult, I understand. For a long time, I didn’t share a lot of my experiences or truth online. The main thing holding me back was fear. I was terrified to share my views on fitness (and the need for more inclusivity), race, and feminism because the last thing I wanted to be labeled as was another “angry black woman.” As a recovering perfectionist, I found the idea even more difficult because I really wanted people to like me. Over time, I grew increasingly discontent because I found myself saying all the things I thought I should be saying and less and less of what I wanted to be saying. Although I wanted people to like me, I realized that people could only like the real me if I showed them who I re...

Name: Steph Ondrusek Age: 30 Location: Philadelphia, PA What does being a Girl Gone Strong mean to you?  Being a Girl Gone Strong means embracing possibility. It means knowing that each one of us has a purpose in the world, waiting for us to find it. It means showing up as you are and allowing others the space to do the same. It means acknowledging that we may have different experiences of the world, but there is room for all of us to listen, learn, and grow together, with all of us becoming stronger and more whole as a result. How long have you been strength training, and how did you get started? It depends on what you count as strength training! I started competitive swimming when I was six, and we started lifting weights to supplement when I was fourteen. I wasn’t allowed to do much then, because I trained with an older age group. I wasn’t technically “supposed to” be in the weight room at that age, so it was mostly dumbbells, medicine balls, and bodyweight training...