I want to tell you a story I don't often tell in full, because it explains more about how I coach than almost anything I could say about training theory.
Where it started
I was born with excessive femoral anteversion. In plain terms, my thigh bones were twisted inwards more than usual, which turned my knees and feet in and changed how my whole leg lined up. By the time it mattered, the fix was a femoral osteotomy, a surgery where the bone is cut, rotated and fixed in a new position. I had three operations across the ages of 11, 12 and 13.
The first opened up one femur, rotated it, and fixed it with a plate and screws. The second, on the other leg, was the hardest of the three. The third took the hardware back out. Between and after them, I spent months at a time in a wheelchair, unable to properly weight-bear on either leg.
I'd started circus at 8, so this landed right in the years I was meant to be building on it. I kept preparing for our shows while I recovered, learning the lines, the movement and the outline of the piece without being able to practise my own part. One year I made it back onto the aerial apparatus for the show. The next, I couldn't train enough to do it.
Fifteen, and a door closing
At 15, my knees started dislocating, several times over the years that followed. My acrobatics teacher told me I probably shouldn't take the risk anymore, and my surgeon confirmed it. I was frustrated, and I had every right to be. I wasn't ready to give up something I loved.
I didn't stop moving. I took small dance classes in my hometown and, on the advice of a sports physio who told me resistance training would protect me later in life, I started lifting weights at 16. That advice turned out to be some of the best I've ever been given.
It took until 2018 for a consultant to put a name to the dislocations: trochlear dysplasia, a variation in the shape of the groove the kneecap sits and slides in. His view was that I had probably always had some degree of it, and that rotating my femur during the osteotomy may have changed how my knee and lower leg lined up, which made the problem more likely to show itself.
And then my spine
Separately, I have spondylolisthesis in my lower spine, where one vertebra has slipped slightly forward over the one below it. It's unrelated to the surgeries, but it has been its own challenge. It makes going back to heavier lifting a careful process, and when it flares, it's debilitating. As a fitness professional, a flare can put me out of work for two or three days, sometimes two weeks. That's a hard thing to plan a business around, and a humbling thing to plan training around.
Always away
There's a side of this I rarely talk about. I never felt properly integrated at school, because I was always away: first with the circus, then with surgery. I missed the ordinary social life most teenagers build without noticing, and I was bullied for being different. That made recovery harder in ways no physio could treat. Being physically stuck is one thing. Feeling like you don't belong anywhere while you're stuck is another.
Circus was the one place where being different made sense. Losing it, at the age when I needed it most, is part of why the identity side of recovery took so much longer than the physical side.
The identity of not doing it anymore
The physical recovery had an endpoint. Rebuilding trust in myself didn't have one nearly as clear. I didn't know who I was without circus, and even once I could physically return, I didn't trust my body enough to believe I could. When I did eventually go back, it came with a real dose of impostor syndrome: a sense that I didn't belong in that world, that everyone else had kept training while I'd stood still, and that I had to prove I still deserved to be there.
What that period taught me
It taught me patience I didn't choose but had to build anyway. It taught me that recovery is neither linear nor fast, and that there's a strong temptation, especially if your identity is built on performance, to treat recovery as an inconvenience to get through so you can go back to who you were.
I didn't have that luxury, not as an 11-year-old in a wheelchair, and not as a teenager being told the sport I loved might not be mine anymore. It taught me to trust a body that wasn't behaving the way I expected, and to find small, honest markers of progress instead of measuring myself against where I used to be. Rebuilding isn't a failure state. It's what happens sometimes, and the people who come through it well are the ones who stop fighting that reality and start working with it.
Why I'm thinking about this again now
I'm in a version of it again, with a different cause. Perimenopause has changed my body in ways that echo that earlier experience more than I expected: a body that no longer responds the way it used to, an identity partly built on physical performance now renegotiating what performance means, and a timeline that refuses to be rushed.
This isn't only a personal impression. Research on ageing describes something called anabolic resistance: with age, muscle builds less in response to the same dose of protein, and inactivity can make that worse [1]. The same research points to resistance training and well-planned protein intake as ways to counter it. In other words, the body needs more deliberate support to get the adaptation it once got easily. That's not a motivation problem or a discipline problem. It's physiology, and it deserves to be named as such, rather than quietly absorbed as personal failure.
What social media doesn't show you
Social media shows the highlight reel: the trick landed, the clean line, the moment that looks effortless. It almost never shows the years of quiet work underneath, and that's especially true for anyone training through a body that's changing. When all you see is the highlight, it's easy to believe struggling means you're doing something wrong. The plateaus and the seasons where progress isn't visible from the outside are the work, and they deserve to be seen as clearly as the wins.
How this shapes how I coach
This isn't the first time I've had to rebuild through a body that changed on me, and it won't be the last. Recovering from those surgeries taught me that resilience isn't forcing your way back to where you were. It's reading where you are now, and building forward from there with patience instead of resentment.
That's why I care so much about not rushing people, not shaming plateaus, and not treating a slower season as a lesser one. I've been on both sides of that lesson, and I know which one works. If you're in your own version of this right now, it doesn't make you behind. It makes you in the middle of something that has an arc, the same way mine did.
If you're rebuilding right now
If you want someone in your corner who understands what it's like to train through injury, a changing body, or a life that doesn't fit the usual mould, I've reopened a small number of 1:1 coaching spaces, online and a few in person in London. We start with where you are, not where you think you should be.
If you'd rather start on your own terms, the Aerial Performance Lab gives you structured training built around where you are, and you can try it free first. My free Smart Aerialist tools, from the Session Logger to the Training Balance Wheel, are there too if you want a gentle first step.
Try the Aerial Performance Lab
References
[1] Aragon, A.A., Tipton, K.D., & Schoenfeld, B.J. (2023). Age-related muscle anabolic resistance: inevitable or preventable? Nutrition Reviews, 81(4), 441-454. https://doi.org/10.1093/nutrit/nuac062
