Case study 01
Helen’s reset.
Perimenopause, two kids, twelve weeks back.
“I contacted Training Space late one night when I was feeling frustrated with my lack of progress. I’d been working out for three months straight and saw no progress. Every morning when I woke up, I felt like a truck hit me. I did a bunch of research and realized I was going through perimenopause.”
Helen was already a runner. Two, three, sometimes seven days a week. Two kids, the youngest finally old enough that she had time to train hard again. The harder she trained, the worse she felt.
She’d worked it out before she emailed me. Perimenopause. She didn’t need a diagnosis. She needed someone to tell her that the protocol she’d been running for fifteen years (more cardio, less food) was the exact protocol that made it worse. Her body at 42 wasn’t the body at 32, and it wasn’t going to respond like one.
What I built
A system she could install in twelve weeks and run for the next twenty years.
Training Space
Your week
Helen
Week 7 of 12
Wednesday, October 23
Today
You've done 4 things. One left.
Strength workout
this morning
Hit your protein target
across the day
No coffee after 11am
today
Log how you're feeling
tonight
In bed by 10pm
tonight
How you're doing
You've shown up 47 out of your last 49 sessions.
That's the system installing itself. It's working because you're working.
This week
Heads up
Your bedtime's been slipping on Fridays. Let's set a 9:30pm alarm.
Good news
You've slept through the night 14 nights in a row. First time in 8 months.
Helen got her own Training Space OS. The first version of her system, designed around her week, hers to keep.
Three full-body lifts a week. A protein floor of 100g across four meals. A bedtime window, magnesium glycinate at night, no caffeine after 11. A weekly check-in so we could see what was working and what needed adjusting.
The real work isn’t the workouts. It’s getting the system installed: finding where she was skipping, working out why, and fixing it before it became the new normal. The dashboard reads her week, not her session, and adjusts the plan from there.
What changed
Twelve weeks in, the system was running on its own.
Training Space
Your week
Helen
Week 12 of 12
Twelve weeks in.
The system is yours now.
Showed up 47 of 49 sessions
96%
What you built
Four new habits, now part of your week.
Strength training
From never lifting to three sessions a week.
Sleep
From broken 2-4 hr stretches to clean 6-7 hr blocks.
Protein
From about 50g a day to a steady 100g across four meals.
Caffeine
From all-day coffee to a hard stop at 11am.
What's different now
How your life looks outside the gym.
3 more hours of sleep
every night, on average
Steady energy all day
7am to 11pm, no afternoon crash
She wakes up rested
no more truck-hit mornings
Back to her pre-kid weight
without ever counting calories
What's next
Ready for the next chapter.
The habits are locked. Now we tune them. Phase two is where we start optimizing the specifics.
Her sleep went from broken stretches of two to four hours to clean blocks of six or seven. Blood sugar held through the day. She could pick up her 5-year-old without throwing her back out. Awake at 7 am, down at 11, no afternoon crash.
She got back to her pre-kid weight from a decade earlier. That wasn’t the goal. It was what fell out of the system once the inputs were right.
The piece that doesn’t show up on the report card: she stopped feeling broken.
If you’re like Helen
You don’t need to try harder. You need a different system.
If you’re a woman in your 40s who’s been doing everything right and getting nothing back, you need a system designed for the body you have now, not the one you had at 32. That’s what system design is. A few sessions to map you. Then a build that’s yours to keep.
Book a system design call →Helen’s review was posted publicly on Yelp in December 2023. The OS rendered here is the system I built her, documented after the fact in the language and structure I now use for every client. The methodology is mine. The screens are how it would render as software, which is what I’m building next.