Today we’d like to introduce you to Lauren Hoffman.
Hi Lauren, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I have always identified as an athlete. From a very young age, I realized that every part of my life felt better when I moved my body. I could think better, I could move emotions, I could focus. My ability to sit still, handle challenging situations, and successfully complete complex tasks was all improved by physical exertion. As a young girl, there were lots of opportunities for movement, goal setting, teamwork, and competition: swim team, sports teams at school, mountain biking, snowboarding, skateboarding, and recess. Before I could drive, I walked or rode my bike everywhere. My lacrosse career continued through college, and then, with graduation, every sport opportunity abruptly ended.
As a young mother, I felt very alone. I didn’t have a team that I could participate in, I was extremely overweight following my pregnancy, I was overwhelmed and exhausted. I didn’t know how to care for my own body, yet was now also responsible for caring for a little baby. I knew I needed to make a change, but didn’t know where to start. So I started to run, and run, and run. I had a jogging stroller, this is how we trained for pre-season, this is how to lose weight and get healthy, right? I spent hours every day running. My results consisted of low back pain, knee pain, and hip pain. I did not lose any weight, and my body felt worse, not better.
I decided I needed help, so I bought a gym membership at a gym close to me that offered childcare. I purchased a few sessions with a personal trainer to teach me a fitness “routine” to help me reach my goals. Every day, I went. I had my routine. I ran on the treadmill for 3 miles. Then, I did a weight circuit on the little machines with light weight and high reps that the trainer had recommended for me. I did the work. I put in the time. I did not see any results.My experience is not uncommon, especially for women. I tried fitness. I tried with all of my time, energy, and money, and it didn’t work. It would have been really easy for me to give up, decide I am powerless over how my body looks and feels, that fitness doesn’t work for me, or accept that this is how my mom-body is now and I just need to learn to love it. But I didn’t love it. I didn’t want it. I loved myself enough to believe what I wanted was possible, and I just had to find the missing link.
This projected me into a multi-decade wellness journey including massive amounts of education, trial-and-error, chronic illness, and deciphering the truth from the false. The health industry is full of incorrect information, profit-driven rhetoric, and dogma. The fitness industry is designed to give the masses a fitness “experience” while mitigating litigation for the facilities. Neither gave me the key to true health and vitality.In 2018, I opened Forged Barbell Strength Academy as a forum for learning and practicing true health and vitality. My journey involved learning what worked for me through years of education, research, and trial-and-error, with very little guidance. I wanted to provide not just guidance, but a space and community to help others decipher the owners manual for their individual bodies while ensuring that the time, energy, and money they spend at the gym is actually aligned with their individual goals so they see the progress they want. No single system works for everyone… so I developed a system that responds to the individual.
The key piece I was missing in my attempts at fitness was strength training: picking up heavy things. Every doctor in America will say that strength training is essential for health, especially for women (not because it is more important for women, but culturally there is less access), and especially as we age (bone density is stimulated by lifting heavy weight). But where does a new mom go to learn how to lift heavy things? Where does a grandmother go to learn how to deadlift without getting hurt? I was intimidated and didn’t feel like I belonged in a traditional strength room in a conventional gym. I couldn’t relate to the people in there or the culture of sweaty muscles and egos. I wanted a place where I could be me. Where I could learn to train, make mistakes, ask questions, and honor my emotions and fear without voyeurism or judgement. I couldn’t find this place… so I created it.
There are some key universal takeaways I have from my 20 years of education, research, and empirical clinical experience. However, every body is different. Barriers to healing are individual. Avoid any information that contains universal language like “everyone should”, “no one should”, “always”, “never”, “best”, etc. There is no single best diet for every human. There is no single best fitness protocol for everyone. The guidance needs to come from within. What works for you? What cultivates vitality? What makes you feel awesome? Build a relationship with your body. Relationships take time, attention, communication, and listening. Relationships require practice and feedback. Pain and symptoms are messages that something is out of balance. It is much easier to have a doctor throw a diagnosis on it, take a medication, and accept illness as an unavoidable path through life. It is much harder to do the work, unpack the messages your body is sending you, identify and clear your barriers to healing, and care for your body as you would a high-performance race car. Here are my few universals:
Eat real food.
Move your body.
Prioritize rest, sleep, and recovery like your life depends on it.
Drink clean water.
Invest in your happiness.
Breathe intentionally.
Take responsibility for every life decision, outcome, reaction, and response.
Align your thought patterns with your goals.
Replace routine with variety.
This list is a great place to start. Pick one that feels the most attainable, or feels the most out of balance. Make incremental changes every day. Put intention and attention into the change. Identify when your thought processes are not in alignment with your progress. When you feel stuck or confused, seek guidance. When you get discouraged, seek community. When there is something you don’t know, seek a mentor or a coach. Remember that what works for others may not work for you. Stay in constant communication with your body about what works. What is cultivating vitality versus creating a burden. We are not powerless over our bodies, emotions, or minds. Every human has amazing capacity for change, growth, healing, and we can manifest the futures we want. It all starts with desire, and a firm belief in possibility.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
If a journey is smooth, it’s probably not worth taking. Whenever we have a dream, we are faced with the universe consistently and continuously asking, “are you sure?”. Struggles along the way are just puzzles to solve. What is your skillset? Where is your time most effectively spent? Who needs to be on your team to fill in the gaps? What are we currently doing that is not aligned with our mission? Without a clear picture of where you want to go, it’s really hard to know how to get there, or where you are wasting time, energy, and resources.
The biggest struggle we have had, other than the logistics of paying our bills and finding coach coverage for classes, is messaging. We are a strength gym different than any other strength gym. We are a community. We are an education center. Everything you have been previously told about fitness, movement, biomechanics, and healthy lifestyle may not be true for you to optimize your own health. The entire industry revolves around the idea that you should listen to the expert over your own body. Most people want to show up to a class and be told what to do rather than consciously connect to their body and movement. People attend fitness classes and do the same thing as everyone else. There generally is very little coaching and correction of movement patterns. The focus tends to be on the “what” of the workout, but there is not much focus on the “how” or “why”.
At Forged Barbell, our programming is individuized based on the client, their goals, and what they need to accomplish them. Not everyone is doing the same thing in any given class. Each client is getting what they need for the next step in their journey, and every journey is different. So, what do we do? We help each member achieve their individual goals. How do we do it? It depends. What does our programming look like? It depends. What do our classes look like? It depends! This is a hard message to market. But every person is different, and we honor each member and their goals individually.
I am a highly-educated and experienced fitness and lifestyle coach, but I do not have a business background, nor a background in carpentry, accounting, human resources, plumbing, commercial cleaning, IT, graphic design, marketing, social media content creation, painting, or repair services. Opening a business has required me to develop skills in all of these areas. Some I do well, and many I do poorly. Ideally, I would be able to hire a team to supplement my skillset, but as of now, this has not been the case. Being all things to all people creates many challenges and a bottleneck in the flow of managing a business. I do the best I can every day, and keep focused on our mission when allocating my priorities. And the mission is always focused on what is in the best interest of our members meeting their goals.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Forged Barbell Strength Academy?
Forged Barbell is a Holistic Strength Academy. Our mission is to help our members meet their goals as efficiently and effectively as possible. Strength does not have the same meaning for everyone, and not everyone is looking to achieve the same type of strength. Everyone does not need the same fitness program to achieve their goals. We need to identify the goal, identify the existing condition, and figure out the path to close the gap between where we are and where we want to go. Definitions of strength include:
the quality or state of being physically strong.
the influence or power possessed by a person, organization, or country.
the degree of intensity of a feeling or belief.
the cogency of an argument or case.
the potency, intensity, or speed of a force or natural agency.
the capacity of an object or substance to withstand great force or pressure.
the emotional or mental qualities necessary in dealing with situations or events that are distressing or difficult.
a good or beneficial quality or attribute of a person or thing.
a person or thing perceived as a source of mental or emotional support.
from a secure or advantageous position.
develop or progress with increasing success
having the inner resources to face challenges and overcome obstacles with courage, perseverance, and resilience
capacity for exertion or endurance
power to resist force
power of resisting attack
legal, logical, or moral force
a strong attribute or inherent asset
degree of potency of effect or of concentration
vigor of expression
one regarded as embodying or affording force or firmness
vigorously forward, from one high point to the next
Most people looking for a gym are interested in developing physical strength, but strength is so much more than weight on a bar. Helping clients clearly define their goals, their primary mission, and what exactly they are wanting to accomplish is the basis for the art of coaching. I design my program around each person, not just find the people who fit my program. Everyone is not going to get the same benefit from doing the same workout. What each member needs as the next most effective stimulus to get them toward their individual goals is unique, and our system honors this bioindividuality. We offer monthly memberships, a wide range of group classes and coached open gym, nutritional therapy, and done-on-one orthopedic assessments and corrective exercise programs. We do breathwork and offer ice baths. We have programs for kids to learn how to move and give them a foundation for any sport. We work with a wide range of rehab and chronic pain clients. We work with people in all stages of life, all abilities, and all fitness levels. We coach the sports of olympic weightlifting, powerlifting, strongman, and steel mace flow. We offer mobility and recovery classes. We help people balance their body and optimize their health so they can show up as the strongest versions of themselves, both in the gym and out. We teach movement first. We build stability and correct imbalances. Then, we focus on developing strength on a stable balanced foundation. We are the space where grandmothers, kids, new moms, and competitive athletes can learn, train, and grow without the meat and muscle culture prevalent in most weight rooms. We meet each member exactly where they are and help them optimize their inner athlete. And as coaches, we are here every step of the way.
In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
The fitness and rehab industries are currently very segregated. Our reductionist approach to medicine, physical therapy, chiropractic, nutrition, massage, and fitness keeps each discipline in its own little silo. My hope is the industry will adopt a more holistic approach over the next 5-10 years to improve efficacy for our clients.
As a Holistic Health Practitioner, each of these modalities, and many more, are integrated into my approach to care, but I am in the minority. As an industry, we need to be better at referring out and building a multidisciplinary team the way we do for our professional athletes. Specialists need to work together, communicate, and bring our clients through a full continuation of care model. This is most obvious with the post-surgical athlete… where the surgeon passes the patient into the care of physical therapy. After a certain number of sessions (generally determined by finances, insurance constraints, or maxing out the knowledge of the therapist), they are released back into the world. They have returned to a base level of function, but not an optimal level of function. The individual needs to seek out the next steps on their own, and this often doesn’t happen. They just accept their base level of function as their new normal.
At Forged Barbell, we are filling in this gap because we believe every human deserves to have optimal performance in their life. The fitness industry, in general, prioritizes the gym and the experience, but not the goals of the athlete. Fitness machines minimize the chance of injury in the gym, which is litigiously beneficial to the gym, but does not train the neurology or stabilizers of the athlete, so does not prevent injury outside of the gym. Fitness classes provide a great fitness experience complete with music, lights, and high-energy encouragement but rarely focus on movement quality or coaching optimal movement patterns. While I don’t see these elements of the fitness industry changing, my hope is that consumers become better educated, hold the industry to a higher standard, and seek out fitness options that prioritize the athlete rather than the facility.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.forged-barbell.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/forgedbarbell
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/forgedbarbell
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@forgedbarbell13
