Long Haul Energy.™
The physiology behind your life, leadership and longevity.
Hi, I’m Nina Midtgaard.
I’m an Exercise Physiologist (MSc) specializing in energy restoration and postmenopausal recalibration for influential women leaders in their second 50.
For more than thirty years, the place where our body and our life meet and intersect has been an all-consuming passion of mine.
I cannot remember a day during those years when I have not spent extensive time happily immersed in learning about the body, reading about it, contemplating it, exploring it, observing it, working with it and thinking deeply about how it responds to the life we ask it to live.
For me, there is nothing boring about a living body.
In Influence Has A Body, I am excited to share with you insights gathered over thirty years of studying how we can support and align our physiology to fuel the lives we want to live—especially in midlife, when our body suddenly throws us a curve ball.
The body is at once remarkably simple and endlessly complex.
It is always communicating, adjusting, protecting, compensating, repairing and attempting to bring us back towards balance—even when we are too rushed to notice, too disconnected to listen or asking far more of it than we are giving back.
Its work is largely thankless and mostly invisible.
Yet day and night, without applause or recognition, the body continues doing everything within its power to keep us alive and functioning.
It mobilizes when we need to act. It conserves when resources are scarce. It repairs when conditions allow. It adapts to what we repeatedly ask of it.
And when something is no longer sustainable, it communicates—first quietly and, if we are unable to listen, quite insistently. If ignored for long enough, it eventually forces us to stop.
The intelligence we discount.
For much of my life, I thought of the body as many of us have been taught to think of it: a collection of separate systems, measurements and symptoms; something either healthy or unhealthy; something so complicated that only experts could possibly understand it.
What I discovered instead was a beautiful living, caring intelligence.
An intelligence continuously sensing, responding, prioritizing and using the resources available to protect, preserve and sustain our life.
What can appear to us as the body failing may sometimes be the body working under profound constraint—without sufficient energy, nourishment, recovery or safety; overwhelmed by inflammation, injury, environmental exposure, inherited vulnerability or accumulated strain.
The body’s intelligence cannot do work for which it does not have the necessary resources.
My work begins in the body’s internal environment.
What we experience externally—our energy, clarity, strength, recovery, body composition and capacity—reflects, in part, the conditions within.
Over time, I have come to understand energy as the currency of the living body.
Everything our body does—to think, move, lead, respond, protect, repair and remain alive—depends upon its ability to create energy and make that energy available.
My work is therefore not about extracting more performance from an already depleted body.
It is about leaving no stone unturned in helping the body obtain, create, renew and make available the energy it needs to do its work well.
This is why I do not begin by asking:
“What is wrong with this body?”
I begin by asking:
What is this body trying to do—and what does it need in order to do it more effectively?
To me this is what the self-care system is about… it is about the art and science of changing the conditions in which the body produces energy, repairs and adapts.”
For more than thirty years, I have explored how to help leaders understand and support their bodies—and create the conditions required for energy, meaningful challenge, recovery, repair and sustained human capacity.
Since 2009, that exploration has increasingly focused on energy capacity and the conditions required for sustained high performance.
Care for your body is not separate from excellence. It is part of the physiology that makes excellence possible.
Today, that lifelong exploration has become Long Haul Energy™—my body of work devoted to building, restoring and protecting the energy and recovery capacity behind a woman’s life, leadership and longevity.
Influence Has A Body™ is where I will continue exploring, developing and sharing that work.
One of the ideas at its heart is a new physiology for your second fifty.
Because everything a woman wants to lead, create, change, protect, love or contribute needs energy. And I have for many years now seen our body as an energy producing factory.
Her influence has a body.
Why subscribe?
The life you want to live deserves a body you can count on—for the long haul.
Go deeper as a founding member
I’m building a paid library of essays, guided practices, food and energy resources, and self-care protocols for our second fifty. Founding members will have access to each piece as it is published.
I’ll also invite members to live gatherings where I can share what I’m developing, hear your questions and learn what you most want help understanding. You are equally welcome to join simply to listen.
During this opening period, I’m inviting each new paid member to a personal 20-minute meet-and-greet. It’s a chance for us to get to know one another and, if you’re interested, explore whether my private work might be a fit.
Your most influential years may still be ahead of you.
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