Morgan Kline grew up being active — she was a dancer and three-sport athlete in high school, playing soccer, volleyball, and basketball. It was when she started college that her routines ground to a halt.
“When you’re no longer part of a team anymore, and you’re not playing collegiate athletics, you have to find your place again,” Kline, 38, told Business Insider. While she tried working out at the campus rec center and a few Les Mills pre-choreographed group fitness classes, nothing stuck. Then, her relationship to her body started to change.
“A lot of my body image issues really bubbled in college,” she said.
Just a few years after graduating, Kline cofounded Burn Boot Camp, a fitness franchise, with her husband, Devan in 2012.
She said she no longer works out solely for appearances, which “can get really exhausting” as a motivator. Burn Boot Camp studios don’t include mirrors. While gym-goers may use them to check their form throughout class, Kline believes trainers should be the ones to give feedback on safe movements, and personally finds mirrors to be too distracting.
Now, her workouts are “about doing hard things every single day, making fitness a priority, and setting healthy examples for your children,” Kline said. “It’s so when I am a grandma, I can still pick up my grandkids. Those are the things that I’m training for now.”
Kline, who strength-trains about 4 to 5 times a week, shared a few habits she’s followed for over a decade that helped her consistently build muscle.
2 simple compound workouts target many muscle groups
Compound exercises target multiple muscle groups at once. Kline has two favorites: deadlifts and pull-ups, which she consistently works on at the gym.
Deadlifts strengthen her glutes, hamstrings, back, and core. ” I can translate that so much into my everyday life,” she said. As a mother of three kids — ages 10, 8, and 6 — she said deadlifts help make it easier to “lift them up, or lift up things at the house that I don’t need my husband for.”
As for pull-ups, she finds them valuable because they’re especially harder for women to do, as women typically carry less upper-body mass. “That’s something that I’m constantly trying to work on,” she said, as pull-ups build up muscles in her arms, shoulders, lats, and core.
She keeps her protein-rich diet simple
When it comes to nutrition, Kline knows that protein is a “hot topic” right now. However, she doesn’t overthink her intake or buy into ultraprocessed protein products.
“I try not to obsess about it,” she said. ” As long as every meal that I have — breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack or two — can center around getting good, whole-food protein in, and coupling that with carbs and fats, that’s just how I have really led my nutrition for the last 10 to 15 years.”
One of her go-to meals is chicken or ground beef with sweet potatoes, rice, and vegetables to round out the meal with carbohydrates, fiber, and other nutrients. She also loves eggs and chicken sausage in the morning and uses plant-based protein powder in her smoothies.
Ultimately, she said her routines, which she’s kept for years, free her up to think about other things besides how her body looks. “I would be lying if I said I don’t have goals — we all want to look good because when we look good, we feel good,” she said.
It’s just that she doesn’t want to focus on that all the time. “You’re constantly looking in the mirror and looking for value, whereas I’ve shifted my mindset to look for value in other ways in my life.”
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