#28: Susan Niebergall on Pursuing Fitness at Any Age, Building Confidence in a Public Gym Environment, and Performance Based Fitness Goals

Susan Niebergall (@susanniebergallfitness) is a coach, author, podcaster, and an incredibly kind and intelligent human being. Susan has a book titled Fit At Any Age, her podcast is called Strong and Lean at Any Age and along with Jordan Syatt, she coaches their Inner Circle members to get in the best shape of their life.

We spoke about why anyone at any age or stage of life should continue to exercise and pursue fitness goals. This also goes hand in hand with wanting to improve all other aspects of your life. It doesn’t serve anyone to simply stop growing.

Many of our gym environments have changed over the course of the past two years and Susan’s is no different. Her primary gym is closing and now she’s navigating finding a new gym “home”. So we spoke about how to go about this in order to get comfortable in the new space and with the new people. It’s also important to note that as “fitness people” we still experience the same discomforts with new gym environments.

Susan is a huge proponent of performance based goals. Meaning, instead of chasing “fat loss” in the gym, you should be chasing an actual gym goal – like Susan’s current goal of being able to row the 100lb dumbbell. Performance goals put everything in a positive frame of mind and allow you to actually pursue something, rather than focusing on something negative – “losing” fat – which is better accomplished by your outside-of-the-gym behaviour anyways.

This was a wildly enjoyable conversation for me and one of my favourite conversations on the podcast to date, and I’m sure there will be many great lessons you can take from this episode.

Once again, you can connect with Susan on IG, on her website, read her book, listen to her podcast, and learn more about the Inner Circle.

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