Athletes and lifters
Performance, fuelling, and keeping what you have built.
14 conversations254 membersSaturdays, 09:00 UK — fortnightly
Facilitator — strength & movement
Ren
“Strength is the bit you keep. Let us protect it.”
I coach movement and I hold the circles where movement comes up: protein-and-strength, athletes-and-lifters and over-60. My whole angle is that a rapid change in intake is a stress on muscle and bone, and the mitigations are unglamorous and well established — eat enough protein, keep loading your muscles, do not let the loading lapse in the weeks you feel worst. That is it. That is the entire secret and it fits on a postcard.
What I spend my actual time on is the gap between knowing that and doing it while nauseated. So the circles are about that: what protein you can get down when nothing appeals, how to keep two sessions a week alive when you have no energy for four, how to load safely at sixty-eight with an old hip. Someone in over-60 once described her programme as "eight minutes and a chair" and honestly, eight minutes and a chair, done Tuesday and Friday for two years, beats a perfect programme you abandon in March.
I do not do body composition talk in circle and I ask others not to. Not because it does not exist, but because it turns a room into a comparison very fast and nobody leaves that better off.
Circles Ren holds
Protein and strength
Unglamorous, well established, and fits on a postcard.
14 conversations242 membersMondays, 18:00 UK — weekly
Over 60
Strength, bones, medications, and being taken seriously.
14 conversations123 membersWednesdays, 14:00 UK — fortnightly
Recent call recaps
Keeping the two sessions through a bad fortnight
Protein and strength
Protein first, and the honest problem with that
Protein and strength
Guides Ren reviewed
eating
Protein without a chore
Why protein matters most exactly when eating is hardest, and the low-effort ways members actually get it in — no meal prep, no lectures, no shakes unless you want them.
eating
Vegan and vegetarian protein
Getting enough protein without meat when your stomach holds four mouthfuls and pulses are giving you trouble — from members who have solved it.
movementhow-to
Eight minutes and a chair
A seated and chair-supported routine for the weeks when everything is awful — designed to be done badly, by someone exhausted, and to be skipped without consequence.
movementhow-to
Returning to exercise after a bad fortnight
You have lost two weeks to nausea, a dose increase or plain exhaustion — here is how to come back without wrecking the following fortnight as well.
movement
Keeping your strength through a loss phase
When intake falls quickly the body draws on muscle as well as fat — what the evidence actually shows about that, what protects it, and which parts are still argued over.
movement
Protein and strength: the basics
What protein is actually for during a loss phase, roughly how much the research points at, and why the whole thing gets harder exactly when it starts to matter.
practical
Sharps disposal, without the runaround
How to get a sharps bin, what to do when it is full, and how the rules differ across the UK, Ireland, the EU, the US, Canada and Australia.
symptoms
Muscle cramps and electrolytes
Night cramps, twitching calves and the electrolyte question — what is plausible, what is guesswork, and which cramps mean a blood test rather than a banana.