Tina McInnes Coaching

06/14/2026

All exercise is good for your health. But not all exercise leads to specific results like gaining muscle and strength, especially in midlife.

Training is exercise with purpose. It is structured and progressive.
Knowing that is the first step toward ensuring that your precious time and energy are spent in a productive way.

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↗️ Share it with a woman you know who is trying to gain strength in midlife.

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06/13/2026

Working hard but not seeing results?

It may be because you are exercising, but not actually training.

Exercise is movement. It can be healthy, enjoyable, and absolutely worthwhile.

Training is excerise with a purpose.

Training follows a plan. It repeats key exercises. It progresses over time. It gives your body a clear reason to adapt.

A hard workout can make you tired without making you stronger.

If your workouts are disconnected, constantly changing, or built mostly around novelty, your body may never get a clear enough signal to build strength, muscle, or capacity.

This is the first post in my summer series on what actually works in women’s strength training.

Because strength is not built by doing random hard things.

It is built by training with purpose.

Like this post if it helped clarify the difference between exercise and training.

Follow for the rest of the series.

Share this with a woman who is working hard but not seeing the results she expected.

06/11/2026

It's going to be raining Sunday morning. Perfect time to head into the gym and learn some stuff.

Who's joining me?https://ottawa.klimat.ca/fitness

06/03/2026

THIS! This. This and This some more.

05/09/2026

Many women are capable of moving impressive loads in bilateral, symmetrical, closed kinetic chain exercises like squats and deadlifts, particularly when range of motion is shortened and stability demands are low.

But then you ask them to perform a split squat, step up, or lunge and suddenly things look very different.

Why?

Because unilateral work exposes frontal plane instability and weaknesses that bilateral lifting can often compensate around or hide.

Exercises performed with both feet planted on the floor allow us to rely heavily on symmetry, rigidity, and global force production. But single leg and split stance work demand something more: the ability to stabilize and control force through the foot, pelvis, and trunk while resisting movement side-to-side.

That requires adequate strength and coordination from muscles like:

glute medius and glute minimus
deep hip external rotators
adductors
lateral trunk stabilizers
intrinsic foot musculature
These muscles matter enormously for knee control, pelvic stability, balance, gait, running, climbing stairs, and ultimately the quality and longevity of your heavier lifting too.

This is why single leg work belongs in almost every strength program.

05/01/2026

Common misconception: women—especially in perimenopause—need to “lift heavy sh*t.”
No. Lift appropriately challenging and build the capacity to go heavier over time.

04/16/2026

Most women are not failing because they lack effort. They are applying effort in the absence of the conditions that make it productive.

A training foundation has psychological and phsyiological components.

Psychologically, it is consistency over time. Months and years of learning how to show up regularly enough to build a base level of capacity.

Physiologically, it is pain-free movement proficiency. The ability to control position, access full range of motion, and load patterns without compensation.

It is readiness for structure. The point at which following a progressive training plan becomes meaningful rather than overwhelming.

And it is the patience to allow progression to unfold over time, rather than trying to accelerate it through intensity.

What often happens instead is that these steps are skipped. Intensity is introduced early, under the assumption that harder work will produce faster results.

It doesn’t.

Intensity is not what builds capacity. It is what expresses it.

When it is layered onto something solid, it becomes precise, targeted, and productive. When it is not, it becomes unsustainable. It does not build in a progressive way, and it increases the likelihood of both psychological disengagement and physical injury.

This is where training starts to work against you.

In the next post, I’ll show you what this looks like in practice.

03/08/2026

The major takeaway is at minute 17:30

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02/18/2026