Forty Years in the Making

"Most people see injury as a setback. I’ve learned it can be your greatest teacher."

ABOUT THIS EPISODE:
In this first episode of Making Muscle Memories, I share the story behind my work—and how a lifetime of injuries shaped the way I approach strength, pain, and movement today.

After more than 40 years in the fitness industry, I’ve learned that injuries aren’t setbacks… they’re teachers.

From early joint issues and a broken pelvis at 16, to chronic pain and multiple surgeries, I’ve experienced firsthand what it feels like to struggle in a body that doesn’t cooperate. Those experiences led me to develop a different approach to training—one that focuses on building strength through precision, control, and muscle function.

In this episode, you’ll learn:
• Why injuries can be the key to understanding your body
• How weakness—not tightness—often drives pain
• The foundation of my 5-step Isometric Method
• Why most traditional fitness approaches fail as we age
• How to begin rebuilding strength in a way that supports your joints

This podcast is for adults over 50 who want to train smarter, reduce pain, and feel confident in their bodies again.

Timestamps:
00:00 – Intro
00:51 – Why I'm doing this
01:44 – My background
04:05 – Injuries are our best teacher
10:36 – The Isometric Method
13:36 – Aging gracefully

If you’re ready to build strength in a way that supports your joints, reduces pain, and helps you stay active as you age…

You can explore my full training platform, FIS OnDemand, at www.fisondemand.com

WHO IS LAUREN EIRK?
Lauren is a 40-year fitness veteran, MAT-Rx Full-Body Specialist,  specialist,  Certified Yoga Therapist  C-IAYT, and Certified Yoga Instructor E-RYT 500.   She is the founder of FIS OnDemand™, The 5-Step Isometric Method™, and Fitness Integrated Science. She focuses on joint longevity for adults 50+ through science-backed resistance training to help you pinpoint your weak areas, correct strength imbalances, reduce pain and inflammation, and restore mobility.

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Transcript

Speaker 0:02

After 40 years of working in the fitness industry, I have learned that real strength doesn't come from just exercise alone. It comes from experience. Every challenge, every setback, and every recovery creates an imprint of who we are. My name is Lauren Eirk, and I'm the founder of the Isometric Method as well as the creator of Fitness Integrated Science on Demand. Through my podcast, Making Muscle Memories, I will share with you some of the science as well as the stories that have shaped my work. I want to help you to train smarter, age stronger, and help you to build strength that lasts a lifetime. We are all building muscle memories. One rep, one story, one experience at a time. Welcome to the Making Muscle Memories Podcast. I'm Lauren Eirk, and I am your host, and this is episode one. Hi, friends. I want to welcome you to my first episode of the Making Muscle Memories podcast. I am a little bit nervous about this episode. I think anybody that starts something, it's like the starting episode is always the most difficult one because this sort of sets the trajectory of what I'm going to be talking about, hopefully, for a long time. I have in my life learned to love a couple of podcasts that are out there. I love Andrew Huberman, Andy Galpin. I've also loved some of the entertaining ones, of course, the Joe Rogans and the Mel Robinsons of the world. But I've decided that it's really important for me to do something that really gets my own voice out there. So I want to tell you a little bit about myself. I would imagine a lot of these things are going to come out over various episodes. So I don't want to tell you too much. I don't want to bore you, but I want to give you a little bit of background so that you can see, you know, what my perspective is as you listen to some of the stories as well as some of the science that has shaped my work in 40 plus years in the fitness industry. I started off teaching when I was actually 16 years old. I had a meager beginnings with having a lot of issues with my joints from birth that propelled me into ballet for 14 years and found myself as a group fitness instructor at age 16, which was a mess. As you can imagine, I didn't know what I was doing, unlike anybody else, kind of like me, this first day doing this podcast. But at any rate, when I was 16 and getting in front of a bunch of people, I realized right away just how different every person is. And I felt, as I always have felt throughout my career, a little bit of imposter syndrome because I always think to myself, what qualification do I have to talk to anybody? Well, now, fast forward, I am now creating this podcast at age 56. You can think about all the years that I have been doing this and have been trying to learn about and participate in fitness. I have been a manager, I have been a group fitness instructor, I've been a personal trainer, I have been a business owner, I've written programs, I've certified instructors, I have gotten several certifications myself, and I have learned from some of the greatest minds that I consider in the fitness industry that have definitely shaped my methodologies. I really feel like this podcast is going to be not only educational for people, but hopefully funny and enjoyable because I think that for a lot of people, fitness has just sort of become this thing that we know we have to do, but it just isn't fun, right? Some people you you talk about fitness and they're like, yay, I want to do this. And some people are just like, oh, I know I gotta get myself in back in shape, and I just hate every minute of it. So I hope that by listening to this podcast, you will renew your sort of feeling of energy and want to participate in exercise. Now, what I want to really hone in on for the topic in this podcast is the idea that injuries are our best teacher. Now, any of you that know me, and um I certainly have met a lot of great people over the years, you know that um over the years I've I've learned that my biggest specialty and the people that come to me seem to be the ones that are dealing with the biggest issues in their body. Maybe they've been dealing with a chronic issue, maybe they've suffered from an acute injury that just happened, or whether this is this old injury that they thought that they maybe overcame and resolved, but now it keeps creeping back up again. And I think that the reason that I have gravitated towards this work is because of my own personal experience. At age 16, when I very first started teaching, I had already suffered from being born with my hips internally rotated and forced into ballet for 14 years. So I was already having knee issues at a very young age. Now, this knee issue that I started with pervaded into a lot of other things. For instance, I had a car accident when I was 16 years old. Now, this is on the way to school, and it's kind of not funny, but it's unfortunate. My brother and I were late for school. Actually, I was late for school. My brother was getting his hair fixed or something. We jumped in the car and I took off running in my car, took off driving, and a car plowed into me because I didn't stop fully at a stop sign. That broke my pelvis. And so here I was, a senior in high school with a broken pelvis. They actually pronounced me dead at school, can you believe that? And I found myself learning how to walk again, even though my passion at the time was in fitness. And there's a story my parents always said that I had this big blue puffy coat, and I'd be hobbing along the neighborhood because I was bound and determined that I was going to overcome this and get back to my exercise. Um, this began a trajectory of what I realized was going to start one injury after another. Now, I don't know if it was the born of the hips turning in, the knee issues that I was having at age 13, or if it was that broken pelvis at age 16. But by the time I was in my early 20s, I was already dealing with planar fasciitis and chronic shin pain, as well as hip pain. Now, I didn't, you know, think anything of it. I was one of those kind of people that if something hurt, I would switch my activities. And I was doing all that high-impact aerobics and running in place, and I thought if I put ankle weights on that I would, you know, burn calories. And full disclosure, at that time I had a full-on eating disorder, which I think a lot of young girls suffer from due to body dysmorphia. But I started really diving into this book that I had at home, and I'll forget this is sports injuries. And I can remember my parents gave it to me for my birthday, and I just dove into that thing, and I was just chapter after chapter, memorizing it because so many of the things I could relate to. Well, as I started teaching professionally in college, I was teaching in seven different gyms, and I was teaching like 30 classes a week. I was now dealing with all kinds of aches and pains. And I can remember some mornings waking up and slipping my orthotics on so that I could walk to the bathroom so that I could get through my day. And some days I would teach as many as eight classes. Now I definitely cut my teeth. I learned how to teach in a lot of different facilities, hospitals, schools, gyms, yoga centers, you name it. That definitely made me a good teacher. But always dealing with an injury always made me feel like, is there something wrong with me? Like, why am I always injured? And I'm supposed to be this person that's in front of people, but yet my body always hurts. Well, what I became to realize as I got older is that this is not uncommon for a lot of fitness instructors, is because we push ourselves to the nth degree. Probably a lot of us are halfway sick, but uh in the head. That's probably why we got into this industry in the first place. But the idea that, you know, I was going to be resilient and I wasn't ever going to suffer a setback was kind of rudimentary. Um, the first really big surgery that I had, I was actually a group fitness instructor. I was presenting across the country, and I had this knee issue, and it's probably dialed into my 13-year-old knee. But I had a yoga instructor adjust me, torum meniscus, because I had really tight hips, and I'm gonna talk to you a lot about yoga and yoga teacher training because I have so many stories about that. But at any rate, having that first knee injury was one of the most, aside from the car accident, was one of the most humbling experiences of my life. And I really thought to myself, I will never get better. And I remember going to physical therapists and my doctor, and they would say to me, you know, do these exercises or rest or you know, put your foot up or or or you know, try to ice it and all these things. And I just wanted to get back to work. I wanted to get back to teaching. And here I am laid up with a meniscal surgery as well as some orthopedic surgery. They had to basically uh shave off the back of my kneecap. I had some arthritis. So I was dealing with a lot of pain. And my tee was like huge, it was big around. I couldn't climb down the steps, I couldn't sit on the floor, I couldn't do my yoga, I couldn't work out, it was driving me nuts. And the big thing is I was off of work and I had pain. And this was actually what I didn't realize, one of the greatest teachers that I could have ever had. The first thing that I did is I emailed a yoga teacher that I'd been studying with for several decades. Now, this guy's name, maybe you've heard him before, he's David Swenson. And I typed David and I said, Listen, I can't do my ashtanga. I was in, you know, first, sex, first, and second series at the time, and I was so devastated because I didn't think that I'd ever get back to it. And I was waiting for him to respond. You know what he said to me? He said, Not to worry, there are many other yoga poses that you will be able to do. You'll figure it out. And I thought to myself, I am so angry, I can't believe you didn't give me the answer. But in reality, he did give me an answer. He set me on a trajectory for trying to figure out how to rehabilitate the human body. And this is where I came up with what I call the isometric method. To me, yoga, uh moving, not actually going from point A to point B, just learning how to engage and squeeze your muscles, I learned how to do this at a very young age because I found that this was the only thing that could help me from getting pain and having injury. It actually became apparent to me that really the way that I was going to get better is that I had to address my muscular weaknesses. And I realized that if I just go back into the same way that I had always been training, which was always just trying to go as hard as I possibly could, that I was never going to last in this industry. Now, when I created the five-step cycle of the isometric method, this is sort of a reflection on what I learned in my 20s. The first thing that we have to do if we have an injury is we have to learn how to know when our muscles are weak, and muscles can become weak. I'm an MAT specialist, muscle activation techniques, and I've learned that muscles can become weak from stress, from trauma, from overuse, underuse, mineral deficiency, dehydration, even aging. So if we can address these through isometric strength training, which I'm going to talk with you a lot more about on this podcast, through learning how to engage, isolate, and squeeze those muscles, over time I can move into integrating some of those isometrics with multiple joints. And this to me looks a lot like yoga holding a squat, holding a lunge, holding a plank, holding a boat pose, holding a hobra pose, whatever the case may be. This is the precursor to actually moving, which I think a lot of people want to just move so quickly after they get injured. Once we learn how to control and squeeze our muscles, we can better learn how to move safely from point A to point B instead of just throwing pasta at the wall and just thinking that if I get through, I don't know, an hour's worth of cardio that somehow I have accomplished something. I want to move with purpose and move in a way that's not going to hurt my body. And through working with body weight training, this allows us to move into resistance training. And there's a whole science to resistance training that I definitely want to dive into because I love muscles and lifting weights and keeping my muscles strong. I started lifting weights at the age of 13 and I've never stopped. This has been upcomes something that I have stayed excited about for my entire life. And through progressive strength training, through controlled, slower forms of strength training, we can learn to optimize our muscle health, which is the fifth step of the isometric method. And this is when I can talk with you a lot about endurance training, instability, and also all kinds of other things that we can do to really make our muscles contract more efficiently on demand. Now, the whole thing about aging, and certainly because of the fact that I am middle-aged, I'm assuming that a lot of you that are listening to this podcast right now, you are interested in how do I age better? How do I age with grace? How do I prolong the health of my joints? There's a whole science that goes into this. And your injuries, your setbacks, the things that you've been through in your life, they are gonna become your best teachers. And I think one of the best things that we can do is learn about who we are and learn about what activities really match not only our body, but also our level of enjoyment. Now, in this podcast, what you're gonna see is you're gonna see me talk to you about a lot of my own personal setbacks that I'm hoping that a lot of you can relate to. But I'm also gonna bring some targeted guests onto my podcast that I'm gonna talk with you about some of their work, some of their setbacks, and what they've seen with their clients. I'm also going to be bringing on some of my clients that are currently on my platform, FIS On Demand, as well as people that I've worked with, because I think they have some of the most interesting stories about their transformation of how they were able to heal their body with this progressive style of resistance training. Not only that, I do want to educate you about some of the unique ideas that I have in this marketplace. Now, all of this science, I want to make this podcast fun. You're going to hear some funny stories that I'm going to tell you about. I'm also going to give you a little bit of a deep dive about me personally, my cats, my animals, my pets, my faith, and also some of the things that I enjoy doing the most. So I hope that you will uh come along with me on this journey as we go through the muscle memories together and really learn about our body's own resilience and ability to heal. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you next time.