I train 15–20 hours a week as a dual athlete and reclaimed my body at 44. The body is not a thing I have. It is how the music is carried.
Five to six days a week, ninety minutes to two hours a session. Lifting is not vanity. It is the foundation that lets every other instrument hold its tone. The discipline of the barbell teaches the discipline of the voice.
Read more: strength training for women over 50
Mezzo-soprano. Three to five days a week, two hours at a time. Jazz first, then opera, then bel canto, then Latin fusion: each tradition another muscle in the same body.
3–5 days / week · 2 hrsThis is the dual-athlete reality: strength and voice, week after week. The body is the instrument I perform on and the instrument I transmit through. There is no off-season.
The discipline beneath the musicRebuilt at 44, not in spite of my body but with it. Years of fighting taught me nothing; a single year of working alongside my body gave me strength I never had at twenty.
ReclaimedThe same body. I stopped fighting it and started building.
✦ No shortcuts, no filters. Weights, cycles, and showing up even on the days I did not want to. ✦
See also: my full cycle syncing workouts protocol
For years I trained as though my body were an obstacle, pushing through every day at the same intensity, then wondering why it broke. The change came when I stopped fighting and started listening: learning the rhythm of my own energy and moving with it, not against it.
If you have ever felt it was too late in life to be starting, hear this: the thing standing in the way was never the weight, it was the story in my head. Some days the battery is simply dead, and that is allowed. I learned to begin again as the woman I am now, not the one I keep waiting to become.
The quiet season. I let the well refill before I ask it to give.
The rising season. Strength gathers; I add the load my body is ready to carry.
The full season. Voice and strength meet at their brightest. This is when I perform.
The steady season. I hold what I built, gently, until the cycle turns again.
Documented in full in my field notes.
There is no transformation montage here. Just the log: the same gym, the same yellow walls, week after week. This is what showing up actually looks like.
✦ 15–20 hours a week, documented · 2026 ✦
Maybe you have started a hundred times. One skipped day became another, then another, until you quit, and the quitting felt like proof. It was never proof. The cycle breaks the moment someone walks beside you instead of waiting for you to fail.
I reclaimed my heritage, my body, my voice, my livelihood, not by being shown the way but by walking it. If you are a Native or Indigenous woman over 40 reinventing herself, I am not here to lead you or to fix you. I am here to walk alongside you, one reclamation at a time.
Women who picked up the weights after forty, after fifty, will tell you it changed their lives. I am one of them. I rebuilt at 44, and the strength I carry now is strength I never had at twenty. You are not behind. You are right on time.
✦ Do you run a fitness retreat or a wellness resort? The transformation your guests are looking for, I live in my own body, and I know how to sing to the room where it happens. ✦
Start with your body →