Stronger Than Last Year

A reminder for anyone who feels discouraged by other people’s progress

Repeat after me:

I don’t care who is doing better than me.

I care that I’m doing better than I was last year.

This is me vs me.

I say some version of this almost weekly in my classes.

Usually after someone glances sideways at the person next to them and quietly says:

“She’s lifting more than me.”

And every time, I want to gently remind them:

Your workout is not a group project.

The woman beside you is not your measuring stick.

Comparison has become so normalized in fitness that many people don’t even realize how deeply it shapes their relationship with movement, food, strength, and their bodies.

We compare our pace.

Our weight loss.

Our consistency.

Our discipline.

Our bodies.

Our energy.

Our lifts.

Our before-and-after photos.

Our chapter one to someone else’s chapter 20.

And then we wonder why health starts to feel miserable.

Comparison is the thief of joy, but it’s also the thief of progress. The moment your focus shifts from your own growth to someone else’s performance, your training stops being about building yourself and starts becoming about proving yourself.

That shift matters.

I see it happen in the gym all the time. Someone is proud of themselves for squatting a weight they once found intimidating, until they notice another person lifting heavier.

Suddenly their accomplishment shrinks in their mind. Their joy disappears and in their heads, their progress “doesn’t count” anymore.

But heavier does not automatically mean better. You have no idea what someone else’s story is.

You don’t know how long they’ve been training.

You don’t know their injury history.

You don’t know how much sleep they got this week.

You don’t know if they’re recovering from burnout, caregiving, chronic stress, perimenopause, illness, grief, or years of feeling disconnected from their body.

And really? It doesn’t matter.

Because your journey was never supposed to look exactly like someone else’s.

The goal is not to become the strongest person in the room; it’s to become stronger than the previous version of you.

The version of you that thought she couldn’t.

The version of you that was afraid to walk into the gym.

The version of you that believed she had “missed her chance.”

The version of you that kept putting herself last.

That’s the comparison that matters.

I think social media has made this concept harder than ever. Fitness online often becomes a highlight reel of peak performance:

PR videos.

Transformation photos.

Perfect meal prep.

Impeccable hair and makeup after working out.

Big lifts.

Flat stomachs.

Morning routines done by 5 a.m.

And while none of those things are inherently bad, constant exposure to curated progress can quietly convince people that they are behind.

But health is not a performance, it’s an ever evolving relationship.

A relationship with your body,

Your habits;

Your self-respect;

Your future;

Your capacity;

Your resilience.

And healthy relationships are not built through shame and comparison.

They are built through consistency.

Patience.

Compassion.

And repeated moments of showing up for yourself, even imperfectly.

Some seasons of health look like lifting heavier weights.

Some seasons look like getting enough sleep.

Some seasons look like going for a ten minute walk because your nervous system is overloaded and that’s all you can manage.

That all counts.

I think many women especially have been conditioned to believe that unless they are optimizing everything, they are failing. But sustainable health is rarely built through extremes, it’s built through repetition.

The woman who trains moderately for ten years will almost always be healthier than the woman who burns herself out chasing perfection for three months at a time.

And yet we rarely celebrate consistency. We celebrate intensity.

Maybe that’s part of the problem.

So here’s your reminder today:

You do not need to earn your worth through performance.

You do not need to be the fittest person in the room to belong there.

You do not need to punish yourself into health.

And you certainly do not need to keep pace with everyone around you.

Your only job is to keep moving forward.

Maybe slowly.