Every woman who has been training for more than a year has been through at least one.
A gym era. A distinct phase of your training life defined by the specific version of yourself that showed up to the gym every week convinced she had it figured out.
(She didn't. I certainly didn't. None of us did. That's kind of the point.)
Some eras last months. Some last years. Some you look back on with genuine affection. Some you'd rather pretend never happened. All of them got you here, which means all of them were worth something, even the embarrassing ones.
Here's the full taxonomy. See yourself in at least one. Probably more.
The Cardio Era
You came for the treadmill. You stayed for the treadmill. You left when you were done with the treadmill, passed the weight floor on the way out, and made absolutely zero eye contact with any of it. None of our business.
The cardio era is usually the entry point, the first gym chapter for most women. It feels accessible in a way the weight floor doesn't. There are no questions about form or programming or how many plates is too many plates. You just go. You move. You burn. You feel like you've done something.
And you have. The cardio era built the habit. It got you in the door. It laid the foundation for every era that came after it.
What it says about you: You were looking for a place to start. Honestly? Smart.
The "That Girl" Era
The 5am alarm. The matching set. The green smoothie. The incline treadmill walk filmed from the side at a very specific angle. The color-coded planner. The habit tracker. The general energy of someone who had definitely Googled "how to become a morning person" more than once.
The "that girl" era peaked around 2021–2022 and left a complicated legacy. On one hand: it got a generation of women interested in training their bodies with real intention. On the other: the identity got tangled up in performance, not athletic performance, social performance. Looking like someone who had their life together was sometimes more important than actually having it together. We all know the difference.
Most women who went through this era look back with a very specific combination of affection and relief.
What it says about you: You're aspirational and you care about how things look. Neither of those are bad qualities. They just needed a better outlet than a treadmill at 5am.
The Weight Loss Era
The era defined by the number. The one where every session was measured in calories burned, every meal logged, every week assessed by what the scale said on Sunday morning.
This one deserves to be named carefully because for a lot of women, this era was genuinely painful, and framing it as just a "phase" does a disservice to how consuming it can be. If you're still in it, that's worth paying attention to.
What's true is that many women move through it and come out the other side with a completely different relationship to their body, to food, and to training. The goal shifts from shrinking to building. From burning to fuelling. From punishing to enjoying. That shift, when it happens, tends to feel like putting something down that was very heavy.
What it says about you: You were searching for control in the way the culture told you to. You deserved better information.
The Lifting Era
Something clicked. Maybe it was the first time you hip thrusted more than you thought you could. Maybe it was a PR that made you feel genuinely powerful in a way no amount of incline treadmill walking ever had. Maybe someone handed you a program and said just try it and you did, fully expecting to hate it, and then you absolutely didn't.
The lifting era is defined by one major shift: from subtraction to addition. You stop trying to take stuff (calories, weight, size) away, and start building things instead. Muscle. Strength. Numbers on a barbell. A kind of confidence that has nothing to do with how you look and everything to do with what you can actually do.
This is also the era where most women stop caring what they look like in the gym. Partly because they feel too good to care. Mostly because they're too busy thinking about their next set.
What it says about you: You found the thing. Don't let anyone talk you out of it.
The "I Just Want to Feel Good" Era
No program. No PR tracker. No agenda beyond showing up and feeling good about it. You move because it feels good. You rest because you want to. You're not optimizing anything and honestly that's the most optimized you've ever been.
This one gets underestimated. Dismissed as the absence of ambition when it's actually the presence of something rarer: perspective. The women in this era have usually been through most of the others. They've set the goals, hit the targets, tracked the macros, done the thing. Somewhere the gym is just part of a life they actually like, not the thing their whole sense of self-worth is riding on.
It looks like not trying very hard. It is, in fact, the goal.
What it says about you: You've done the work. On the weights and on yourself. Both count.
The Overlap Era
Most of us are living in some version of overlap, a little bit lifting era, a little bit "I just want to feel good," occasionally visited by the ghost of "that girl" when motivation is low and we've been on Instagram for too long.
That's fine. Eras aren't linear. They bleed into each other and circle back and sometimes you regress for a season and the treadmill calls your name again and that's also fine. She'll always be there when you need her.
The point isn't to identify which era you're in and stay there forever. The point is to notice where you are and whether it's actually working for you.
If it is: keep going. You're doing great. 🖤 If it isn't: you already know what needs to change.
Same time next week?
xx Alura
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