The Skill You Didn’t Outgrow
I’m wrapping up the Show Up Method this week, and at the same time I’ve started offering a weekly class for stiff, painful lower backs. The two landed on top of each other on purpose, I think. Because finishing one while starting the other made something click that I’ve been circling for years.
How important finding a real, concrete solution to my back pain has actually been.
Struggling to show up has always been about more than back pain. But I can’t ignore the pattern anymore. Almost every time I’ve struggled to show up, I can look back and find pain or stiffness sitting right there next to it. And I think I finally understand the mechanism. By the time I’m struggling to show up, I’ve usually already been slipping for a while — which means the little bit of strength I had in the right places, the strength that kept my back stable, has quietly been disappearing. So by the time my head is telling me I can’t show up, my body’s already been telling me the same thing for a while. One feeds the other.
For almost 15 years I had everything but this piece. The missing link I could not put together — and God knows I tried — was why my back would still bother me. And when it did, I went into pure panic mode. Because back then a flare meant lost progress, and lost progress meant waiting it out, and “doing less” used to mean “doing nothing” — so why do anything at all.
That panic still tries to fire, even now. A sensation that just mimics the old feeling sets off this little flare in the back of my mind. Oh god. I don’t want my back to go out. I don’t want to go back there. My nervous system doesn’t always sort it out instantly. The alarm goes off first.
So this is the morning so many women are living. You brace before your feet hit the floor. Some part of you is already waiting for it to hurt. And bracing turns into avoiding — because who wants to willingly return to pain?
Slowing down felt like starting over. It wasn’t.
Here’s what I had backwards for years.
When my back hurt, what I usually did was muster even more push-through. More do-whatever-it-takes. Which is just more all-or-nothing, more perfectionism, wearing a different outfit. And there’s no room in there to actually figure out how to help your body so you don’t burn out or stop because it hurts too much.
What finally worked was the opposite. I slowed down and rebuilt the foundation — the unglamorous core and stiff-back work nobody posts about. And I’ll be honest about the trap, because I sat right inside it: slowing down to rebuild felt like starting over.
That voice is loudest not when you’re starting out, but when you’ve been able to do a lot, consistently, for a long time. When you know what you’re capable of. That’s when a smaller step feels like an insult. Why even waste your time. You’re too good for that. You can do so much more than this.
And it backfires every single time. Because you’re never too good to slow down and take a smaller step. The foundation is always worth protecting. The small steps that seem beneath you are the steps you built everything on.
We tend to lose the skill of showing up as we get more experienced — like we’ve outgrown it. But you don’t outgrow it. It grows with you. And circling back to the foundation isn’t going backward. It isn’t starting over. It’s continuing.
This is exactly where pain stops being a sentence and becomes information. Pain is information you can use. Stiffness is telling you something. You just have to learn how to read it.
And once I did, I stopped bracing before my feet hit the floor. Even if my back feels tight or painful again, I know with certainty what to do that actually works. I can’t tell you what a relief that is. That one hurdle, gone.
Where it leads
Because here’s the part I’m actually excited about.
I know what’s coming after I keep showing up without the back pain holding me back — and I’m low-key excited to see it. Right now my muscles are waking up. That good, burning kind of activation. I won’t lie and say it feels amazing in the moment — it doesn’t. But when I’m done, it does. I’m reaching for heavier weights. Pushing a little harder. The other day it was dumbbell squats, and I felt them deep in my core — which I know came from all the core work in my ab class. It’s all connected. It’s all building.
That’s where the foundation leads. Not a quick before-and-after. A body I’m rebuilding from the ground up, on something that won’t crack the same way this time — so I actually get to keep it.
But it starts with the stiffness. It always starts there.
Come with me
And maybe — this is the thought I keep landing on — maybe some of the women struggling to show up are struggling for the same reason I was, and they don’t even know it. Maybe they’ve connected movement to pain somewhere underneath, quietly, without ever saying it out loud. Maybe showing up feels impossible because some part of them is bracing for it to hurt.
If that’s you, come stand next to me on Thursday.
I run a free Stiff Back Class — Thursdays at 9 AM ET, 45 minutes, on Google Meet. No signup hoops. Come as you are, stiff morning and all. We do the actual foundation work — the work that taught my back to stop running my life.
When you’re ready for a next step, the Show Up Method is there too — my 21 days of learning how to come back on the hard days, $97, no rush. But Thursday’s the easy yes. Start there.
Can’t make Thursday? Grab the free 5-Minute Plan at fitbygp.com/start-here and take the smallest version today.
There’s nothing to restart. You just continue.
— Gwen
Strong. Steady. Sustainable.