Four years ago when we opened our doors to Kelly Personal Training in Austin I was new to Austin and did not know a soul. It was a scary being opened for business without a single customer.
Business was slow at first but it gradually picked up, and word of mouth helped the business to grow to include ten trainers. I like to thank my long time clients for those initial referrals, and the trainers for their dedication to their work.
There are hundreds of diet books out there - high carb diets, low carb die
ts, low fat diets, plus diets named after soups, beaches, and doctors. The originators offer data to back up their programs, and they are all purported to work. If you follow their programs most diets will work.
It is rare for a woman to do a single chin-up. It is rarer still for a tall woman to do a chin-up. Years ago I began working out a 5'9" woman who could do three chin-ups. Her routine had been to do three chin-ups followed by several demanding negative reps every Friday at 5:00 for more than a year. She worked hard but she never improved. She was not remotely close to conpleting a fourth repetition.
This woman would do a whole body strength training workout once or twice week and use the aerobic equipment other days.
Her trainer resigned and I began training her. On the first Friday she insisted on doing chin-ups. It told her she had nothing to lose by taking a week off from that one exercise. She reluctantly acquiesced. She came in the next Friday with a negative mindset, fully expecting to be weaker. She did four chin-ups. She was amazed. When I asked her to forgo chin-ups the week after that she complied.
From this study Resistance Exercise Reverses Aging in Human Skeletal Muscle:
"Healthy older adults show evidence of mitochondrial impairment and muscle weakness, but that this can be partially reversed at the phenotypic level, and substantially reversed at the transcriptome level, following six months of resistance exercise training.”
In a recent study 16 young men performed 2 weeks of supervised high intensity training (HIT) comprising of a total of 15 min of exercise (6 sessions; 4–6 × 30-s cycle sprints per session). The subject performed about 250 kcal of work each week compared with the 2000 to 3000 kcal
a week consumed during a typical aerobic training program. The results were surprising.
The conclusion from this study, High-intensity resistance training improves glycemic control in older patients with type 2 diabetes.:
One client reported that she was able to play with her grandchildren for three hours crawling around on the floor. Before she strength training she could not last that long.From the article The Best Exercise for Diabetics:
Number sixteen in a series about what clients have to say about their workouts.
Barbi was an avid runner. She began
strength training eight weeks ago. Barbi had this to say, “I have had more results in eight weeks than in three years working out with another trainer”.
With strength training in order to produce a change the body has to perform more work than it is used to handling. Then, given adequate time to recover and adequate nutrition, the body adapts as a form of self-protection by becoming stronger.
It has long been assumed that if you don’t head back to the gym a few days after you last session your positive results will begin to dwindle. Take a couple weeks off from 
running and you will find that that will usually be that case. Take a week or two off from weight training and you might find that you come back stronger.
