We recently connected with Pooja Church and have shared our conversation below.

Pooja, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We love heartwarming stories – do you have a heartwarming story from your career to share?

I’ve had the opportunity to coach the most amazing, bad ass women that run teams, businesses, make life/death decisions, all while managing their households, raising their children and deciding to own and earn the body of their dreams.

Every woman has both a gut-wrenching and heart-warming story… it’s not just one or the other in my business, it’s always both and there is a beautiful duality to it.

My client, L, stands out here. From running her life into the ground literally and physically, to thriving – she’s running a team as a high-level executive, trains 3x a week and eats to fuel her body – she now has the body composition of her dreams and feels confident to handle whatever life throws her way.

L had to go through a journey to get here… she was running 10-15 miles a week, under-eating and had no weight training experience so she felt like she was always recovering from an injury. She would wake up stiff and anxious.

It wasn’t a 90 day shred – it took us 18 months to build and adapt the fitness lifestyle behaviors she needed. She shared with me that the work we do together, her investing in herself and in my program, changed her life. L has had multiple promotions and a confidence that is undeniable.

Fitness performance and physique to women aged 35+ isn’t just about being healthy and looking “toned”, it will literally enhance every aspect of our lives – from our relationships, to our careers, to how we carry ourselves.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My name is Pooja Church, and I’m the founder of Performance with Pooja — a boutique body recomposition coaching business for women over 40. I help women build muscle, lose fat, and feel like the most powerful version of themselves without living at the gym or white-knuckling their way through another diet. In other words, I help moms over 40 feel and look hotter than ever ;) .

I came to this work through a path most people wouldn’t predict. I have a chemical engineering degree and an MBA in marketing and consulting. I spent years in corporate environments solving complex problems — and when I eventually turned that same analytical lens on fitness, I realized how much of the industry was failing women like me. The advice was generic. The programming was lazy, geared towards general population and not for women. And the messaging was always about shrinking yourself instead of building something.

So I got certified through the National Strength and Conditioning Association — the CSCS, which is the gold standard in strength and conditioning — and through Girls Gone Strong as a Pre- and Postnatal Specialist. I combined that with everything I’d learned about systems thinking, behavior change, and strategic problem-solving, and I built a coaching method that actually respects the intelligence of the women I work with.

My signature program is built on what I call the 5-Point Performance System. It’s not just a workout plan — it’s a full lifestyle framework. We address recovery (sleep, stress, and learning how to have more fun), nutrition through what I call Capsule Meals (a structured approach to eating that cuts the noise and keeps you fueled), daily movement and mobility, periodized strength training programmed to your goals and history, and mindset work that connects what you do in the gym to who you’re becoming outside of it. The best results don’t come from training harder. They come from living a fitness lifestyle — and that’s what I teach.

I also have a specialty that’s pretty unique in this space. I’m one year post-op from a tummy tuck with muscle repair, hernia repair, and breast augmentation — and that personal experience led me to build a niche around helping women who are considering or recovering from body contouring surgery. Most surgeons will tell you what to do before and after the procedure, but they’re not programming your training, managing your nutrition, or coaching you through the mental side of a body that’s changing fast. That’s where I come in. I created the Snatched Protocol — a phased system that takes women from surgical preparation all the way through reclaiming their strength and identity on the other side.

What sets me apart is that I don’t coach from a textbook. I coach from lived experience, real credentials, and a deep respect for the women I work with. My clients are high-performers — they’re running businesses, raising kids, managing households, navigating perimenopause, and making bold decisions about their bodies. They don’t need someone to judge them or hand them a cookie-cutter plan. They need a coach who gets it, who can meet them where they are, and who can build something that adapts as their life changes.

I take on a small number of clients at a time because the work is personal, and I take confidentiality seriously. You won’t see me posting client before-and-afters to go viral. That’s not my brand. My brand is built on trust, results, and the belief that you can be a woman who wants to look amazing in whatever she wears and also wants to keep up with her kids, crush it at work, and feel deeply connected to her partner. Those things aren’t in conflict — and I’m proof of that.

The thing I’m most proud of is the way my clients start to see themselves differently. Not because of a number on a scale — I’m not a weight loss coach — but because they finally understand what their body is capable of when someone programs for it properly and coaches them like the intelligent, capable women they are. My core message is simple: stop training to sweat and start doing things that actually move the needle forward. That applies to fitness, and honestly, it applies to everything.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

The biggest lesson I had to unlearn was that more effort equals more results.

I come from a chemical engineering and MBA background. Those environments reward grinding. You study harder, you work longer, you outperform through sheer volume — and for a long time, that’s exactly how I approached fitness too. More cardio. More sweat. More restriction. More time in the gym. I wore exhaustion like a badge of honor because that’s what I’d been conditioned to believe success looked like.

And it worked — until it didn’t. I was training constantly, eating less than I should have been, running on stress and caffeine, and looking in the mirror wondering why my body wasn’t reflecting the effort I was putting in. I was doing everything the fitness industry told me to do, and I was stuck. Worse than stuck — I was tired, inflamed, and frustrated.

The turning point came when I started studying strength and conditioning at a higher level, working toward my CSCS. That’s when the science finally caught up with what my body had been trying to tell me. I didn’t need more volume. I needed smarter programming. I needed to eat enough to actually fuel muscle growth. I needed to recover like recovery was part of the plan, I needed to stop chasing the sweat and start chasing the stimulus.

That unlearning process was humbling. I had to let go of the identity I’d built around being the hardest worker in the room and replace it with something less glamorous but far more effective: being the most strategic. Fewer days in the gym, but with intentional programming. More food, not less. Sleep and stress management (actually planning in FUN) treated as performance tools, not luxuries. It felt counterintuitive at first, I felt almost lazy. But my body responded in ways years of grinding never produced.

That experience is exactly why my core message is “stop training to sweat.” Because I lived on the other side of that equation for years, and I know how many women are still trapped there — working their cute butts off and wondering why nothing’s changing. The answer usually isn’t more. It’s better. And that’s a lesson most people have to unlearn before they can actually move forward.

Putting training and knowledge aside, what else do you think really matters in terms of succeeding in your field?

Seeing failure as an opportunity but not really as a motivational poster kind of way.

When I launched my coaching business, I didn’t come out of the gate with a perfectly dialed-in offer and a waitlist. I fumbled pricing. I attracted clients who weren’t the right fit. I built programs that were too complex because I was trying to prove how much I knew instead of meeting people where they were. I created content that I thought was brilliant and watched it land to absolute crickets. Every single one of those moments stung.

I treat failure like data (thank you, engineering brain). When something doesn’t work, I don’t spiral into “maybe I’m not cut out for this.” I go into diagnostic mode. I KNOW I CAN CHANGE LIVES. What was the variable that was off? Was it the messaging? The audience? The timing? The offer itself? I strip it down, find the broken piece, and rebuild. That’s not a personality trait I was born with, it’s really a skill I built through years of solving problems in environments where being wrong wasn’t emotional, it was just information that pointed you toward the right answer.

The coaches I see struggling the most in this industry aren’t the ones who lack knowledge or certifications. They’re the ones who take a failed launch or a quiet month personally and either freeze or pivot to something completely different before they’ve even figured out what went wrong. They’re reacting instead of analyzing. And in a business where you’re also the brand, that emotional spiral can take you out fast if you don’t have a framework for processing it.

I think that failure builds credibility with your clients. My clients are women over 40 who have “failed” at fitness a dozen times before they found me. They’ve done the crash diets, the six-week challenges, the programs that fell apart the moment life got busy. When I can sit across from them and say “I’ve been there too, and here’s what I learned from it,” that’s not a coaching script. That’s trust. And trust is the thing that actually gets someone to stay long enough for the work to produce results.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @poojachurch
• Facebook: Pooja Church
• Linkedin: Pooja Church
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@poojachurch