The Costs of Chasing Performance and Body Composition at the Same Time
Feel like you’re supposed to hit a big athletic goal and get leaner while you do it? You’re not alone. It’s one of the most common (and most damaging) expectations placed on women over 40 who are training seriously, whether that’s for a marathon, a powerlifting meet, or just getting stronger in the gym. The good news? Once you understand why performance and aesthetics don’t actually move together, you can stop fighting your own physiology and start training in a way that actually gets you to your goal.
In this piece, we’re pulling from a conversation with ultra runner and strength, running, and durability coach Alison Heilig of Miles to Go Athletics. We dig into why women feel pressure to “have it all,” what actually happens in the body during serious training, and how the industry’s language quietly reinforces all of it.
The Pressure to “Have It All At the Same Time”
It’s tempting to believe that if you train hard enough and eat “clean” enough, you can hit a big performance goal and end up leaner at the same time. Whether you’re training for your first half marathon or your tenth powerlifting meet, the real goal of serious training is adaptation, and adaptation has real physical costs that work against purposeful attempts at fat loss.
Chasing both at once usually means diluting your results at best, and setting yourself up for injury or burnout at worst. If you’re in a weight class sport, changes in body composition to make weight need a specific strategy to do them well and preserve performance. Just not eating isn’t an option.
Let’s break down why this happens and what to do instead.
1. Performance Adaptations Often Require Gaining, Not Losing
Training for endurance or strength asks your body to build capacity: more muscle glycogen storage, more fluid retention, more muscle tissue. Those adaptations show up on the scale as added weight, not less.
Muscle glycogen pulls water in with it, so an athlete who’s properly fueled for a marathon or an ultra will often weigh more on race day than they did earlier in training, not less. The same logic applies to lifters: building muscle mass means adding that tissue, not reducing it. Fighting this by restricting during a serious training block usually means showing up under-fueled on the day it matters most.
Signs you might be working against your own training:
- Expecting to feel “light and springy” on race day instead of well-fueled.
- Feeling discouraged when the scale doesn’t move (or moves up) during a strength or endurance block.
- Comparing your physique to an athlete’s “after” photo without realizing it wasn’t taken during their performance training at all.
2. Under-Fueling Has Real, Measurable Consequences
Chronic under-eating relative to training demands can lead to Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (REDs), a condition that affects hormones, bone density, mood, and performance, regardless of whether someone is still getting a period.
The symptoms of RED-S and the symptoms of perimenopause can sometimes overlap, which makes it easy to misattribute one for the other. Without a full picture of both fueling and hormonal status, it’s easy to keep training and eating in a way that quietly works against you.
What this can look like:
- Stress fractures or other bone injuries showing up without an obvious training-related cause.
- Mood changes, brain fog, and fatigue that don’t resolve with more sleep alone.
- Believing “it’s just hormones” without also examining whether intake is actually matching training output.
How to approach this more safely:
- Treat fueling as a core part of your training plan, not an afterthought or a variable to manipulate downward.
- If you’re in a demanding training block, expect to eat more, not less, and expect some added body weight as part of that.
- Get curious about symptoms rather than assuming they only have one possible cause.
3. The Industry Talks About Bodies Differently Depending on Gender
Marketing language for men’s fitness (“get jacked,” “get shredded,” “get diesel”) tends to emphasize strength and capability. Marketing language for women’s fitness (“get toned,” “get sculpted”) tends to emphasize appearance and restraint, even when the actual training goal is identical: building muscle.
This isn’t a small semantic difference. It reflects an underlying assumption that women’s fitness pursuits need to come with an aesthetic justification, while men’s don’t. That assumption shapes what women believe they’re allowed to want from their training, and it can quietly reattach an aesthetic expectation to a goal that was originally just about performan
Where this shows up:
- A performance goal like “run a half marathon” or “deadlift 200 pounds” getting achieved, but still feeling unsatisfying because an unspoken aesthetic expectation wasn’t met.
- Coaches marketing an aesthetic outcome up front, then explaining the real physiological trade-offs only after a client signs up.
- A near-total absence of language telling men they should look “toned,” compared to how often that language is used with women.
How to push back on this:
- When you set a training goal, write it down as a performance goal specifically (a time, a weight, a distance), not a body composition goal, and notice if an unspoken aesthetic expectation is riding along with it.
- If a coach or program promises a performance outcome and a specific physique simultaneously, ask directly how those two things are supposed to coexist during the same training block.
- Remind yourself that wanting to be strong, fast, or capable doesn’t require an aesthetic justification. It’s a goal on its own.
Putting It All Together
Performance and a smaller body are not the same pursuit, and trying to chase both at once usually means shortchanging one or both. Real athletic progress, whether that’s an ultra, a marathon, or a heavier deadlift, tends to come with more fuel on board, more capacity in your muscles, and often more weight on the scale, not less. Recognizing that trade-off, and giving yourself permission to actually train for performance without an aesthetic string attached, is often the thing that finally lets women over 40 make progress that sticks.
About Fuel Your Strength Podcast Guest Alison Heilig
Alison Heilig is a strength, endurance, and durability coach, author of The Durable Runner, and founder of Miles To Go Athletics – home of performance and durability training for midlife women who run and lift. She created the Age Athletically™ Method on a simple premise: your strength and endurance don’t have to be retired in midlife. With the right training, fueling, and recovery skills, your performance and durability can compound over decades – instead of burning down chasing smaller. A veteran of 20 marathons and 9 ultramarathons who is still very much in the game – lifting big and chasing big finish lines – Alison has spent more than a decade coaching women who have no intention of watering down their training or parking themselves on the sidelines just because they’re another year older.
Connect with Alison here: