The difference between Frieda Kimanga’s physique last year and the one she carries today is striking. At 40, Ms Kimanga has managed to reshape her body in a way that takes more than simply spending hours in the gym. It is the result of consistency, discipline, and, perhaps most importantly, patience.
This is not to suggest that she was out of shape last year when she spent much of her time weightlifting and strength training. Even an eight-month battle to rehabilitate a nasty knee injury, which forced her to significantly scale back her physical activity, didn’t hamstring her from staying true to the cause, making her latest transformation all the more remarkable.
Today, she looks leaner and more agile, with noticeably less body fat and muscles that are sharply defined. And then there are the abs, peeking through as perhaps the most visible evidence of what she has been working towards since January of this year.
‘I am a mother of three children, by the way. How many mothers do you know who spot abs at this age, even those who are much younger than myself?’ she says, laughing.
She insists her current physique is less about chasing youth but rather about what the body can still do at 40 if you put your mind to it.
Before sustaining the injury when she was knocked by a speeding motorcycle, ironically, while on her way to the gym, Ms Kimanga had spent years weightlifting and strength training, building a muscular physique that came with regularly early morning runs and lifting weights in the evening.
The injury required surgery to fix, accounting for the eight months when she could hardly do as much. The injury had left her unable to walk without support. For eight weeks, she needed help getting into bed and even going to the bathroom. The rehabilitation would stretch much further, with physiotherapy, mobility, and strength conditioning taking significant time for her recovery.
For someone whose lifestyle had become intertwined with movement, being forced to slow down was particularly difficult, both mentally and physiologically draining.
‘I was just working on healing, doing just small exercises,’ she says. ‘But even that small exercise, when you’re not 100 per cent, looks like a mountain because of the pain I had to cope with.’
The enforced inactivity came with another unwelcome consequence, where Ms Kimanga gained 14 kilos, up from 63kg.
She attributes the weight gain during recovery to medication, reduced activity, and increased food intake.
‘I used to run in the morning, and then I would go to the gym in the evening to lift weights,’ she says. ‘So you see, I was very proactive. With recovery, I was doing something for like 30 minutes of very basic light exercise or zero. In fact, I started from zero progressively.’
The weight gain was difficult to reconcile. It was a far cry from the woman who had started her fitness journey in 2018 after a rather brutal reality check by her daughter, who was four then.
‘For me, my fitness journey began one random day when my daughter said to me, ‘Mom, why do you have a big stomach? Are you having another baby?’ Ms Kimanga recalls.
The comment stung. The following day, she looked for a gym. At the time, she weighed 87kg and at 5ft 2, that was obese by every measure. For long, she had argued like most mothers do and had largely accepted the idea that childbirth meant her body would never quite return to its previous form.
‘I thought once you give birth, you’ll never go back to when you’re like a small girl, most mothers argue so. So I think I was comfortable with that misconception.’
The first few weeks at the gym were brutal as her body tried to adjust to the new routine. She remembers crying almost every day and, on her first day of working out years earlier, even fainting. But she kept showing up.
Within six weeks, friends began noticing that she was losing weight. By 2019, a year after starting, she had lost 30kgs weighing 59kg.
No punishing diet, starving
Even then, her approach was not built around punishing diets or starving herself, but she still weighed her food, ate clean and exercised consistently, but allowed herself the occasional indulgence.
‘I don’t go for extreme diets, ooh! I love food so much, so what I did is eat small portions, but as often,’ she says. ‘I don’t believe in fasting to lose weight. I always argue, why not try a challenge? Take six months, put in the work, and lose the weight slowly. Exercise, fuel your body right. Don’t go for those extreme things where you’re not eating or those extremely expensive diets we now see on social media.’
She laughs at the idea of surviving for days without food while expecting the body to perform at its peak.
‘Without food, how will you get the energy to lift weights at the gym or run an average of 50 kilometres in a week?’
It’s that philosophy that became particularly important as she rebuilt her fitness after the knee injury.
Ms Kimanga is now back to running, having resumed about two months ago, and is training for the Standard Chartered half marathon.
And as she gets to understand her body with age, her current weekday runs are shorter, usually four times a week, while Saturdays are reserved for longer distances of between 18km and 21km.
Weightlifting twice
Weight training, however, has been scaled back. Where she once lifted weights almost every day, she now goes to the gym about twice a week, focusing on strength while giving her body room to recover.
‘I don’t want to put a lot of pressure on myself; I’m doing it just for strength, so that I don’t look emaciated from the runs.’
The numbers tell part of the recovery story. From the 77kg she reached during her rehabilitation, she is now back around 67kg, having lost 10kg since the injury.
But even with her current inspiring physique, Ms Kimanga is quick to point out that she has not yet achieved the physique and fitness level she so much desires.
‘I’m not where I was before surgery, but I’m heading there with the intention of getting even better as I chase the goal of my dream body.’
With age, Ms Kimanga also says she has discovered that getting fitter is no longer simply a matter of pushing harder.
When she was in her 20s, she could attack burpees and cardio sessions with seemingly endless energy. Today, the same workouts require considerably more effort, and recovery has become as important as the workout itself.
‘You have to really study your body, and adjust accordingly as you age,’ she says. ‘You have to sleep early. If you don’t go to sleep early and sleep enough, you can’t perform, especially at this age. In my 20s, I would easily go out partying the entire night and still show up at a workout session the next day and crush it with some zeal. With age, you have to choose your struggle.’
For women, she says, there is another layer to contend with as they age with hormonal changes, including perimenopause, altering how the body performs and responds to exercise.
‘With the lifestyle we have, these days women get into perimenopause as early as 35, something that in the past women used to first experience in their early 40s. So it’s now different from when we were younger.’
Yet she refuses to accept 40 as a line beyond which certain physical ambitions should be abandoned. In fact, she says some of the women who inspire her are older than she is. Her fitness clique includes women in their mid-40s and 50s who run and train alongside her.
‘When I see these people putting in the work and get to hear others go lame arguing that ‘I’m 40. I can’t do this or that,’ I go like, ‘Really?”