Gillian Ward is doing chin ups in her workout gear. In a new social media post the bodybuilder shows off her strength and strong body wearing a two-piece exercise set during her gym session. “From this morning,” she wrote in the caption, doing 30 chin ups, “at the end of a hard workout,” she wrote across the Instagram clip. How does she approach diet, fitness, and self-care? Here is everything you need to know about her lifestyle habits.
Gillian uses “unconventional” training methods. “I know that I’m training for a bodybuilding competition and there are many people shaking their heads at this and saying, that’s not how you train for bodybuilding. What really is bodybuilding? To me bodybuilding is the development of every nook, cranny, and corner of the physique and the mind, especially when it comes to discipline,” she writes in a post. “Sure, this is not conventional ‘hypertrophy’ training, but no one can argue that movement of the body in unconventional ways has no value to physical development. What I’m really saying is that there is no one way. There is no singular best approach.”
Gillian doesn’t plan on retiring from exercise. “Today. Every day. (Except for rest days of course),” she captioned a post. “Yesterday someone asked me when I’m going to stop doing all of this. They suggested that I was getting ‘too old’ to continue to push myself- that it was time to relax and ‘ease off’. This is what keeps me young. I do what I love and I love what I do. My passion burns like a brightly lit torch illuminating the path ahead. It cannot be extinguished by hate, adversity, doubt, or distraction.”
Gillian maintains that “with consistency there is progress,” in a post. “Hard to see it in the moments, the hours and the days, but then the weeks start to add up and it becomes clear. It’s not about any one moment, any one meal, any one workout. It’s about the sum of all the littles. Every moment is a unique opportunity to make a choice- to stay the course even when it’s hard, to stay the course even when it feels like you are stuck or going backwards. Choose consistency. Trust the process!”
Gillian relies mostly on strength training to build muscle. “The primary reason that I strength train is not to have muscles or to hit certain numbers. I lift so that I can do all of the other things in life that bring me joy for as long as possible. I strength train to improve my quality of life for decades to come. I strength train to avoid being ‘trapped’ in my body. I strength train so that my body can express the creativity of my mind,” she writes.
Gillian has bad days, but doesn’t let them impact her long-term success. “It’s been a rough week. Real life stressors have made it difficult to focus & keep my head in the game. The scale went up instead of down. I felt like I was going backwards. Not every week is a perfect week. Things don’t always move in a linear fashion in the right direction,” she writes in a post. “This week I relied on habit & planning, not willpower. I stuck to my plan with my diet & training because those are the habits that I have created. These habits brought comfort during a very stressful time. It’s hard to put in the work when you don’t see the immediate results of your efforts but that is the most important time to do so. Trust the process. Trust yourself. I can’t control all outcomes, but I do have control over my effort and my attitude 💜