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What if the goal isn’t simply to lift heavier—but to build a body that is actually prepared to handle the load?

Strength training has become one of the most talked-about strategies for women’s health, especially as women think about muscle mass, bone health, body composition, blood sugar, hormones, and longevity. But as Lindsay Bomgren explains in this episode of The BeingBrigid Show, there is an important distinction between knowing that strength training is good for you and knowing how to introduce it in a way your body can actually sustain.

Brigid sits down with Lindsay, a certified personal trainer, mom of three, and founder of Nourish Move Love, for a candid conversation about strength training, pelvic floor health, blood sugar balance, nutrition, inflammation, recovery, hormones, and the importance of creating sustainable systems instead of constantly trying to do more.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode:

• Why the real question isn’t “should you lift heavy” but “is your body conditioned to handle it”
• How pelvic floor dysfunction shows up in strength training, and how to manage intra-abdominal pressure
• Why sleep deprivation makes you more likely to sustain an injury
• How Lindsey’s health crash (and recovery) changed the way she trains and eats
• Why progesterone and hormone shifts affect anxiety, sleep, and recovery
• How strength training and blood sugar balance work together, and why lifting weights alone isn’t enough
• Why a plan beats “one-off” workouts and recipes for actually seeing results
• What it really takes behind the scenes for Lindsey to run a team, a 1M-subscriber channel, and a family of five
• Why asking for help isn’t a failure, it’s a strategy

Timestamps:

• [01:01] Introducing Lindsey Bomgren and why “lift heavy” is the wrong question
• [04:31] Pelvic floor conditioning and Lindsey’s postpartum story
• [09:23] Working with a pelvic floor specialist and managing your breath
• [10:22] Hitting rock bottom and rebuilding a year later
• [12:18] Sleep, injury risk, and starting progesterone
• [16:28] The Blood Sugar Reset and Lindsey’s key takeaways
• [18:47] Strength training, muscle, and insulin resistance
• [22:33] Food as medicine and plant diversity
• [25:09] Why a plan beats one-off workouts and recipes
• [27:10] Launching the Nourish Move Love app
• [42:46] How Lindsey really “does it all”
• [45:13] Margin, boundaries, and burnout recovery
• [48:15] Hiring help and letting go of guilt

https://youtu.be/qCScEobJCd0

Why “Lift Heavy” Isn’t the Whole Conversation

Lindsay loves lifting heavy—but she believes the more important question for women is whether their bodies are conditioned to handle a heavy load.

Strength is built over time. For someone who is postpartum, navigating perimenopause, returning to exercise after years away, or simply starting a strength training routine for the first time, jumping immediately into the heaviest weights may not be the right place to begin.

Lindsay explains that strength can be developed across a wide range of repetitions. Rather than focusing exclusively on a specific rep range, she recommends paying attention to how challenging a set feels and how many repetitions you realistically have left in reserve. The larger takeaway is that progressive strength training should be a process. Your starting point matters.

Pelvic Floor Health and Strength Training

For many women, the conversation around strength training also needs to include the pelvic floor. Brigid and Lindsay discuss how pelvic floor dysfunction, incontinence, hemorrhoids, and other pelvic floor concerns can affect a woman’s ability to tolerate heavier loads. They also talk about the importance of learning to manage intra-abdominal pressure and coordinating breathing with movement.

Lindsay shares her own experience working with a pelvic floor physical therapist after having her second baby and how learning to manage pressure and breathing transformed her experience. During strength exercises, she emphasizes the importance of exhaling during the hardest portion of the movement rather than holding the breath and bearing down.

For women dealing with pelvic floor symptoms, working with an appropriately qualified pelvic floor physical therapist can be an important part of understanding what their body needs before progressing their training.

What Lindsay’s Health Wake-Up Call Taught Her About Recovery

One of the most vulnerable parts of this conversation is Lindsay’s story of what was happening beneath the surface of a life that looked healthy from the outside. When she and Brigid first met, Lindsay had been pushing herself extremely hard—working too much, filming too many workouts, experiencing significant stress, and not sleeping enough. She shares that she had severe iron deficiency and a hemoglobin of four and had received iron infusions.

She also experienced a significant knee injury while her youngest child was six months old. Looking back, Lindsay describes this period as a wake-up call. Rather than simply trying to work harder, she began focusing on sleep, nutrition, recovery, stress reduction, asking for help, and creating more sustainable boundaries.

For Lindsay, getting seven to eight hours of sleep became a major priority. The lesson is particularly relevant for women who are balancing motherhood, careers, entrepreneurship, exercise, and family responsibilities: training harder isn’t necessarily the answer when your body is already carrying a significant amount of stress.

Hormones, Sleep, and the Importance of Recovery

Lindsay describes improvements she experienced in areas including sleep quality, anxiety, period symptoms, cycle regularity, and recovery after beginning 100 milligrams of progesterone.

Brigid and Lindsay also discuss how women’s hormone levels naturally fluctuate throughout different stages of life and why the transition into perimenopause and menopause can change the way women experience stress, recovery, sleep, and exercise.

Rather than viewing women’s health through the lens of one isolated symptom, the conversation emphasizes looking at the broader picture—including sleep, stress, nutrition, movement, hormones, and recovery.

Blood Sugar, Strength Training, and Women’s Nutrition

Muscle plays an important role in glucose utilization, which is one reason building and maintaining muscle is relevant when women are thinking about blood sugar and metabolic health. But, as Brigid explains, strength training alone doesn’t automatically resolve every aspect of insulin resistance or blood sugar dysregulation. Nutrition matters, too.

During the Blood Sugar Reset, Lindsay discovered that she had been eating a relatively repetitive diet centered around protein, vegetables, and carbohydrates while missing opportunities to increase variety and micronutrient intake.

She began incorporating foods such as beans, lentils, chia seeds, cauliflower rice, smoothies, and a wider variety of plant foods. This shift helped reinforce an important principle of functional nutrition: food provides far more than calories and macronutrients. Micronutrients, phytonutrients, polyphenols, and dietary variety can all be part of a holistic approach to women’s nutrition.

Why Food Variety Matters for Gut Health and Inflammation

The Blood Sugar Reset also opened Lindsay’s eyes to the importance of dietary variety. Instead of eating the same meals repeatedly because they are convenient and familiar, she began intentionally adding a broader range of plant foods and ingredients.

Brigid discusses the connection between plant diversity, gut health, short-chain fatty acids, and inflammation, emphasizing that nutrition can be about much more than simply counting calories or tracking macros. This is one of the core ideas behind using food as medicine: building meals that are both practical and nutrient-dense enough to support the body’s broader needs.

And importantly, Lindsay explains why this has to be sustainable. A nutrition strategy isn’t particularly useful if it requires a busy mom to spend hours every day preparing complicated meals.

Why One Workout or One Recipe Isn’t Enough

One recipe can be delicious. One workout can be effective. But one isolated action rarely creates the same impact as a sustainable system that you can repeat consistently over time.

Lindsay compares this to fitness. Her YouTube workouts can be a great starting point for someone who simply needs to move more. But women who want to build muscle and see progressive strength gains may benefit from following a structured program that intentionally sequences workouts and targets different muscle groups.

The same principle applies to nutrition. Instead of constantly searching for the next healthy recipe, a plan can remove decision fatigue and make healthy eating easier to execute. For busy women, consistency often comes from reducing the number of decisions required—not from finding more motivation.

The Muscle Groups Women Often Undertrain

Lindsay also highlights several muscle groups that she believes women often overlook in their training. These include the posterior chain—the back side of the body—as well as the calves, hips, serratus anterior, and chest.

The posterior chain includes muscles such as the lats, glutes, and hamstrings. Lindsay is particularly passionate about pull-ups because they efficiently train several major muscle groups while also challenging grip strength.

She also emphasizes hip strength and mobility, particularly because hip discomfort is common among the women she works with. Rather than thinking about mobility as simply stretching, she encourages women to think about strengthening the muscles around the hip as well.

Why Power, Speed, Agility, and Balance Matter for Longevity

Strength training gets a lot of attention when the conversation turns to healthy aging, but Lindsay argues that women should also consider power, speed, agility, and balance. These physical qualities can become increasingly important as we age because maintaining independence isn’t only about how much muscle we have. It’s also about being able to react, stabilize ourselves, move quickly, maintain balance, and perform everyday activities.

Jumping, sprinting, agility work, grip-strength exercises, and other forms of athletic training can be incorporated into a well-rounded fitness routine in ways that are appropriate for an individual’s current ability and conditioning. The goal isn’t to train like a professional athlete. It’s to build a body that can continue to move confidently through different stages of life.

Stop Measuring Progress Only by the Scale

Brigid shares that one of her personal goals is to lose another 10 pounds postpartum, while also acknowledging that the scale isn’t the primary measure of health or success.

For women focusing on body composition, the conversation can become much more nuanced than simply trying to weigh less. Muscle mass, strength, energy, mood, recovery, performance, bone health, and how you feel in your body can all be meaningful markers of progress.

Lindsay encourages women to create specific progress goals alongside aesthetic goals—whether that’s doing a first pull-up, increasing push-ups, improving running speed, gaining muscle, or accomplishing another measurable physical milestone.

The Real Secret to “Doing It All”: Getting Help

Perhaps the most unexpected part of the episode has nothing to do with workouts or nutrition. Lindsay talks openly about realizing that she couldn’t sustainably be a mother, wife, business owner, leader, content creator, and health advocate while doing every household task herself.

After reaching a breaking point, she began creating more margin in her life. That included asking for help from her husband, her team, and eventually hiring a house manager to help with household responsibilities.

For Lindsay, this wasn’t about doing less with her life. It was about creating enough support to show up well for the people and responsibilities that mattered most. It’s an important reminder for high-achieving women: sustainability isn’t always about becoming better at managing more. Sometimes it means building the support system that allows you to stop carrying everything alone.

A Sustainable Approach to Women’s Health

At its core, this conversation is about sustainability. Sustainable strength training. Sustainable nutrition. Sustainable blood sugar support. Sustainable hormone health. Sustainable business ownership. Sustainable motherhood.

Whether you’re navigating postpartum recovery, perimenopause, menopause, changing body composition, blood sugar concerns, or simply trying to feel stronger and more energized, the goal isn’t to find the one perfect workout, supplement, recipe, or health hack.

It’s to build a system that works with your actual life. Because the things that create meaningful changes in women’s health aren’t usually the things we do once. They’re the things we can continue doing consistently for years.

Resources & Links:

+ Watch the full episode on YouTube

+ Nourish Move Love Website

+ Nourish Move Love Instagram

+ Nourish Move Love YouTube

+ Nourish Move Love App Download

+ Sign up for the Fall Blood Sugar Reset 

+ Join The Being Collective

+ Brigid’s Website

+ Brigid’s Instagram