10 Business Lessons from Fitness: What 10 Years as a Lifter Taught Me About Business
I met my husband, Woody, in 2014. At the time, I had just finished a few half marathons, and my shin splints were at an all-time high, so I took a break from running and went all in on the only way I knew how to work out—group fitness. I loved TRX classes, bootcamp classes, cardio kickboxing—you name it. And there were some fun elements, for sure. But right after meeting Woody, he started taking me to the gym with him. I’d follow his program, adding all the weight to the bar for him and taking it off for me. Anyone who lifts with their spouse will appreciate this struggle and commitment to the partner lifting session. And I fell in love. Yes, with him for sure, but also with lifting. I hung up my running shoes, canceled my group fitness class membership, and never looked back. This shift in my health and fitness has become a cornerstone of what keeps me sane, happy, and balanced. And this month (January 2025), I hit my 10-year mark as a lifter. I’ve been a lifter longer than I’ve been an entrepreneur, and I’ve been reflecting on how much this foundational element in my life has impacted my success, perspective, grit, and approach to business.
So here it is: my 10 biggest business lessons that I learned first from my 10 years of lifting.
1. You Need a Blueprint to Be Successful
Winging it doesn’t help. A clear framework ensures consistent progress and success.
In fitness, this is the program you follow. It tells you what you should do, when, and how much to get consistent, reliable results. A good program is worth its weight in gold when it comes to lifting. In business, this is the equivalent of your business systems that you follow day in and day out to get repeatable, consistent results. If you show up and wing it every day… sure, you’ll have some success, but it won’t even touch what’s possible with a good blueprint to follow. After running a marketing agency for 6 years and knowing how much marketing and visibility matter in your business success, we’ve packaged our marketing strategy and operations into a blueprint for you to follow and leverage in our ‘Own It! Marketing System’—I’d love to show it to you if you’d like to book a demo!
2. Someone is Always ‘Better’ and It Doesn’t Matter
Focus on being your best competitor, rather than comparing yourself to others. You are your competition.
When it comes to lifting, someone’s always fitter, stronger, or better than you. It’s just the truth. And the faster you get past the comparison game, the more you realize you’re only competing with yourself. I loved starting my lifting journey with Woody because he was already two decades into lifting and a pretty big guy compared to my female frame. So, comparing myself to him was just a thing. But the more I got into it, the more I spent time learning on my own, and the more my Instagram feed got flooded with fitness models I could never measure up to. But there was a tipping point around year 3 when this stopped holding me back and became liberating. If there’s always someone better, further along, stronger, more attractive—then there’s no pressure to be anything better than I was yesterday. Same goes for business: comparison is a killer, but this mentality in my lifting journey helped me apply the same mindset to business.
3. Focus on Performance, Not Appearances
Prioritize measurable outcomes and meaningful progress over vanity metrics that don't reflect real success.
Vanity metrics are useless in all areas of life, but our ego makes it easy to prioritize them over what really matters. In fitness, if you only focus on how you look, often it’s at the expense of your health, which eventually catches up to you and takes your looks, too. Same with business: it’s cool to have a big Instagram following or a high revenue number, but how’s your engagement and your profit? Focus on the performance and you’ll get the appearance. If you focus on the appearance, you’ll lose both. This is true in fitness and in business.
4. Being Uncomfortable Creates Growth
Stepping outside your comfort zone is where real transformation happens, whether in lifting or business.
I love that lifting made me feel comfortable being super uncomfortable. The only thing that works is a concept called progressive overload, which means making micro adjustments to challenge your body a little more than before, over and over. If you show up and never push yourself past your current level, you’ll never improve past your current level. I learned that in lifting very quickly, and it applies directly to business. One of my favorite tools to combat this is awareness through KPIs. When I lift, I track all my lifts, reps, and sets in an app so I can see my progress over time and know not to always default to what I know I can lift. Same in business: awareness comes from tracking Key Performance Indicators, as well as your habits and time spent. That way, you know where to improve and push and where you’re coasting or hiding behind something comfortable.
5. What You Avoid is Your Biggest Opportunity
Facing challenges head-on often leads to the most significant breakthroughs.
Similar to #4, typically, your greatest area of growth comes from the thing you are avoiding—probably because it’s uncomfortable, unfamiliar, or you don’t like it. I hit this many times in my fitness journey. I had back surgery at 21, so I avoided deadlifts for a long time, then when I brought them into my program (focusing on form above everything else), my overall strength exploded. After a few years of bilateral training, I needed to focus on unilateral training to bring up imbalances in my body. Just this year, I had to spend some time working on mobility, particularly in my hips, which was super boring, but I needed to do it to reach new squat goals. Same is true for business: typically, the thing slowing you down is the thing you’re avoiding. For me, I’ve been the cobbler with no shoes, so to speak. I’ve been so focused on marketing for my clients that I never prioritized my own marketing and visibility, which is my biggest limiter right now. We have this incredible platform, the Own It! Marketing System, and I need more awareness and visibility to promote it. That’s my 2025 goal.
6. Consistency Beats Perfection
Regular effort and persistence will always yield better results than waiting for the perfect moment.
I think we all get nervous that if we can’t do it right or perfect, we can’t do it at all. But in lifting and in business, you usually have to get in the game and put in the reps before you can perfect the skill. But, if you never get under the bar, you’ll never be able to perfect it. And the more reps you put in, the more you realize perfection is an illusion. Some days you’re tired, some days you forgot to drink enough water, some days you just don’t feel like it. And the workout is imperfect, you’re imperfect. But you’re still there. And that’s what gets you where you want to go: showing up imperfectly. Business is the same. We get nervous that we’ll look dumb, do something wrong, etc. For me, I can’t proofread to save my life. I move 100 mph and focus on big-picture impact, not punctuation. So I know I’m going to send out stuff with mistakes sometimes, but you still need to do it regardless. Showing up consistently imperfect will always 100% beat only showing up when it’s perfect. Period.
7. Progress is Not Linear
Growth comes with ups and downs. Embrace setbacks as part of the journey.
Ugh, this one is so annoying and one of the hardest lessons for me to accept. But if you expect linear progress in the gym or in business, you’re setting yourself up for discouragement and disappointment. Sometimes, you have to take a step back (like I did with my unilateral training and mobility work) to keep moving forward. And sometimes, an injury knocks you out of the game for a while—even years. One of my favorite parts of the gym is leaving feeling like a superhero, but when it came to deliberate regression or recovering from an injury, I sometimes left feeling the opposite. They felt like regressions (and were, in fact, regressions), but they had to be done. In business, this is the same. There are good years and bad years, and sometimes you have to take a deliberate step back to fortify something, like your business systems, to sustain greater growth. This is not only okay; it’s part of the process of getting where you want to go. What makes you a real superhero in and out of the gym is showing up even when you don’t get to wear the cape.
8. A Strong Foundation is Key
Building solid fundamentals makes it easier to maintain and scale success over time.
Lifting and fitness are all about sustainable habits and focusing on the foundational elements. The habits are around consistency—showing up to the gym and eating well (and high protein). And it’s about building a strong base of lean body mass. After lifting for 10 years, I have more flexibility in my diet and training than ever in my life because I put in the work to build that foundation. Same for business: it’s all about building a strong foundation to grow from, and this typically comes from non-negotiable habits (much like fitness) in things like marketing and growing your visibility, sales processes, financial management, and leadership. Once you put the foundation of a business in place with those non-negotiables, you’d be surprised at the flexibility you have in 10 years. If you struggle with those non-negotiables, I run an accountability group that can help—reach out to me at jaime@weatherbymedia.com to learn more about it.
9. Mentorship and Community are Essential
Surrounding yourself with the right people accelerates growth and keeps you accountable.
If Woody hadn’t gotten me into the gym and shown me what to do, I don’t know if I’d be writing this blog. I needed a mentor to give me the courage to try something new and guide me around reducing mistakes. With lifting, it’s a lot to learn, and the stakes are higher than other forms of exercise because it’s easier to get hurt. Plus, it’s hard to show up and teach yourself to lift without being embarrassed about looking dumb. Funny, entrepreneurship is the same way. Much like Woody mentoring me in the gym, I’d never have made it this long in business without key people in my life mentoring me along the way. It takes a village for almost everything. Woody couldn’t lift for me, or show up when I didn’t want to, or eat the better meal over the one I wanted, or get up early to fit the gym in before work. He couldn’t do the work for me. Neither could any of my business mentors. Both of these things (business and lifting) are, to a degree, solo sports that are better when you play alongside other people who can give advice, support, and encouragement. And, of course, don’t forget to reach back and pay it forward when suddenly you realize you’re further along than you thought and you could support someone newer to the game.
10. Show Up Even When You Don’t Feel Like It
Success comes from doing the work, especially on the tough days.
Yes, I’ve fallen in love with lifting, but there are days when I want to do anything but go to the gym—and I still go. I think the assumption if you are a “non-fitness” person is that it’s easy for everyone who works out regularly. Not true. We’ve just shown up enough times when we didn’t feel like it, that it’s become part of our identity (much like brushing your teeth) and we’ve honed the discipline of going, whether we feel like it or not. Same is true for business: it’s easy to look at someone who is killing it and think ‘it’s easy for them.’ Well, it’s not. They just show up anyway, whether they feel like it or not. And I think this might be the greatest lesson of all—to engrain something into your identity enough that it just becomes “something you do,” regardless of how motivated you feel to do it.
My favorite part of these two things that have become part of who I am—lifting and business—is the endless, relentless pursuit of personal growth. And I find that these disciplines spill over into all areas of life. So, I’m excited for my next 10 years as a lifter and an entrepreneur, and to see how I’m able to grow and what I can learn in another decade.
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