The chrysalis school of strength training

Strength training for the female body

You were built DIFFERENTLY

Your body was divinely created. Every aspect of you, perfect.

Your body is a planet unto itself--a harmonious self sustaining ecosystem born to create. A miraculous animal of attunement, in constant communication with itself as well as the world around it--the moon, the tides, seasons, literally with all of creation. Faster than you could fathom, your body is communicating , adjusting and sharing resources to create a thriving environment to hold your spirit.

And yet...

For the most part how we engage with our bodies goes something like this:

We want to be smaller, younger, we wish our hair were different, we wish we had smaller boobs, bigger boobs, we want to be more toned, have smaller thighs, bigger butts, littler calves, a flat stomach.

I know this because in working privately with hundreds of women, I have had them list off to me all the parts of them that they hate.

And I get it. I really do.

I did not start out as a devotee of the human body. My journey here was long and painful. I had an eating disorder for years.

I was vegan, vegetarian, keto, I was paleo, I did juice fasts, I ran, did pilates, cardio kickboxing, crossfit, barre, orange theory, hot yoga, arial yoga, power yoga, took bellydance, fucking Zumba, hip-hop dance, I kickboxed, did SLT, I took every class I heard about, thinking that at some point one of them would give me the body that I wanted

and then somehow my life would transform and be perfect.

Ha ha. You can probably guess this, but none of these things worked.

Because they were all external.

They were all cheap fixes I was trying to put on top of the gaping bloody wound that was my complete lack of connection to my body--and thus my life source.

One day I woke up and weighed myself. (lol I did this everyday) but on this day the number was particularly high and I was tired. I was so tired of the cycle of trying and failing. I was tired of hating myself, tired of the despair.

This was SUCH an important place to get to. It was the first time that I didn't have a back-up plan. I wasn't livivng in some fantasy of how I was finally going to get thin once and for all. I just looked at the circumstances that were my life and thought to myself, "Anything is better than this"

I threw away my scale. I scrapped my eating plans and anything that had to do with food or exercise obsession. I cleared all outside noise so that I could hear my body.

I had been teaching pilates for ten years and had my own studio. I had been doing crossfit and knew my body loved lifting weight but the environment was not for me. I bought a weight bench, a squat rack, a barbell and some plates and I applied everything I knew from my my training and experience working with my own and other peoples bodies.

I was my first guinea pig. I experimented with what brought me the most power and ease in my body. What made everything I did in my actual life feel effortless and easy. I started to zero in on the importance of balanced glute strength for posture, gait and biomechanics. I added a mobility component and unilateral strengthening. I started focusing on posterior chain strength, I focused on building strength in eccentric ranges.

And when I found what worked, I stayed and refined. Then I experimented on my clients. Some of my clients were hard sells.

They were scared of weights--they'd had injuries and surgeries and were convinced that lifting weight would be hard on their joints.

I convinced them to give it three months

What happened is why I have the confidence to sell this program to you today.

Things that we had been working on managing for YEARS were completely resolved.

Their joints now had the padding and support of newly burgeoning muscle.

Aches and creaks dissapeared, movement became lubricated and juicy.

Most women learned to leave their bodies early. To brace and grip and bury. To push past their bodies' own signals in order to perform, please, or survive.

Traditional strength training teaches power as something you impose on your body rather than something that moves through it. You can get strong this way--but it will cost you. It is false strength built on abandonment. It creates bodies that are brittle, rigid, depleted and numb.

The female body was not meant to be hard.

It is a life creating organism--built to contract and expand.

True strength is the ability to expand fully and contract fully.

The body LOVES to be strong. We have been fed a story of frailty and fear, but we were not meant to be weak and sedentary. Not moving is the least loving thing you can do for your body. We were built to do big things. To chase animals and carry them, climb mountains with our children on our backs, climb trees, carry water, chop wood.

To support us in living big beautiful adventurous lives.

Add Subtext text. Click "Edit Text" to update the font, size and more.
To change and reuse text themes, go to Site Styles.

This is not fitness to fix you.

This is not about discipline, atonement or control.

I don't teach pushing, grinding and betterment, I teach grounding, circulation and expression

Not external goals to be checked off,

but inhabitation.

How to come back to life inside your human body

This strength training isn't about some exterior idea of improvement. It's about building capacity.

The capacity to:

hold sensation without dissasociating

meet intensity without collapsing or gripping

let energy move inside of your body without tamping it down

This is active, embodied work.

It requires responsbility, participation, awareness, and discernment.

You will lift weight.

You will build muscle.

You will train progressively.

But you will do it in a way that restores trust in your body rather than obliterating it.

JOIN SUBSCRIPTION

Add Subtext text. Click "Edit Text" to update the font, size and more.
To change and reuse text themes, go to Site Styles.

How it works

Ongoing, video-based strength training hosted inside a private membership

Monthly programming cycles

Exercise variations for different equipment and experience levels

What the training looks like

Recordings of 3 full body strength sessions per week
Anatomical cues for alignment and common compensations
Emphasis on hips, glutes, posterior chain and upper back
Progressive overload built upon unshakeable foundation
Deep ranges and slow eccentrics to build capacity
Exercises remain consistent for each monthly cycle so your body can adapt, integrate and strengthen in a way that you can build upon and trust.

MOBILITY

Each monthly cycle includes 2-3 mobility practices drawn from Pilates and Functional Range Conditioning principles.

These support:

*joint health and tissue hydration

*ranges of motion that your body knows and owns

*strength at end ranges

Foundations: how the work is held

To support autonomy and longevity, Chrysalis School includes a foundations library designed to orient you to the work as well as give you tools to start.

Inside you'll find: