Jess King’s workouts are as intense and high-energy as ever. The trainer, who leads Bike and Tread classes on the Peloton app, is known for combining challenging sequences with heart-pounding house music (she moonlights as a DJ), so you might never guess that her approach to fitness has changed over the past few years. Specifically, she tells Flow Space, she’s pivoted to focusing more on the “bookends” of her routine.
That means “the warm-up, the nourishing, making sure I have enough calories in my body that can be burned,” King explains. “Making sure that I’ve activated the muscle groups in every range of motion before I hit that high intensity workout.”
She also prioritizes recovery, and not just with a five- or 10-minute post-workout stretch. “It’s about unraveling some of the tension and intensity of the day,” King says. That means intentional slow breathing, a hot bath, staying hydrated, and eating balanced meals. “If I do those things, I feel grounded. I feel restored the following day, and then ready to rinse and repeat.”
King’s daily routine looks different than it did a few years ago. She turned 40 last year and is busy at home raising two toddlers. In the midst of this season, she’s also still trying to prioritize her own health and happiness, which includes staying strong. As an expert in this field, King share that for midlife women, building strength comes down to three core tips.
“First and foremost, regulate your nervous system,” King says. One simple way to do that: “simply by breathing,” she explains. “Taking those deep, diaphragmatic breaths. Inhale and exhale completely… Breathe deeply, breathe intentionally, and do it as often as you can remember.” She shares that those deep breaths offer the additional benefit of massaging one of the main lymph glands in your body, which sits in the center of your diaphragm.
King is also committed to taking a daily probiotic. “It’s so easy, it’s so simple, and the impact of it is massive,” says King, who is chief wellness ambassador for the probiotic brand Culturelle. “Taking care of your second brain — your microbiome — is going to influence your digestion, your mood swings, your skin, your brain health, your gut health.”
Finally, King says, being consistent is crucial and, for her, even more important than lifting heavy weights or doing high-intensity workouts. That’s because a consistent practice “is going to yield results that are sustainable over time, as opposed to these quick diet fads and trends.” That’s important, given how strength training is connected to a whole host of benefits, from maintaining bone health to lowering the risk of premature aging, cancer, and heart disease, research has found.
And for King, that consistency factor goes building physical strength or mental fitness, a weightlifting plan or a breathing practice. “This is a way to stay sustainable throughout the rest of our lives.”