“Maybe I just can’t do this anymore.”

That’s what Ashley told herself after years of pain, frustration, and workouts that left her feeling more broken than strong.

She came from CrossFit. She coached. She knew what hard work looked like.

But when her body started fighting back — shoulders, hips, back — she had to find another way.

This is the story of how she rebuilt her strength, let go of what it used to look like, and found something better than burnout: capability.

If you’re feeling pulled between enjoying the holidays and taking care of your health, I get it. We’re wired to avoid loss much more strongly than we chase small wins, and that makes this time of year feel higher stakes than it really is. But that instinct is also what keeps people stuck. It’s the same mindset that turns December into a slide and makes restarting in January feel harder than it ever needed to be.

Dan John (world-famous strength coach,) has a saying: “Any program works for about six weeks.” And he’s right. New things create progress. Novelty wakes the system up. Plus, when we start something new, we tend to put real effort into it. That combination alone can take you pretty far… at least for a while.

But eventually the program stops working the way it did at first.
You’re putting in the same effort, sometimes even more, and getting less progress in return.

Most people assume this means they need to add more. More days. More reps. More weight. More time. But that’s rarely the real issue.

There’s one component that changes the entire game.
When you have it, you shift from adding small improvements to multiplying your results.
When you don’t, you can spend months or even years spinning your wheels, convinced you just need to push harder or wait longer.

Ever notice how easy it is to “wait for the right time”?

Erin did too. She said she’d start training once work slowed down… once her knee felt better… once things “settled.”
But months passed, and nothing changed—except her frustration.

She wasn’t lazy. She was logical—at least that’s what her brain told her.
That’s how psychological traps work.
They convince us that waiting is safe, that staying the same is smart, that not deciding buys us time.

But it’s all an illusion.
Loss aversion, status quo bias, and omission bias keep us stuck—telling us it’s better to do nothing than risk doing something imperfectly.

So ask yourself:
👉 What’s one thing you’ve been “waiting” to start… that’s really just fear wearing a disguise?