What happens when fitness stops being punishment and becomes a way of coming home to yourself? In this conversation, Kristin Walker sits down with longtime friend, fitness coach, podcaster and mental health advocate Aline Duriaud for a wide-ranging conversation about late-identified neurodivergence, menopause, strength training, Muay Thai, mental health, coercive control, unmasking, and the extraordinary experience of finally understanding the operating system you've been living inside all along. Aline talks candidly about receiving an ADHD diagnosis in midlife and more recently beginning to understand herself through an autistic lens. She and Kristin explore the grief that can accompany late identification, but also the enormous possibility that opens when years of therapy, self-knowledge and lived experience suddenly have a new organizing framework. They also talk about bodies.Aline shares how she moved into fitness professionally in her late 40s, becoming a certified personal trainer and later pursuing specialist training in menopause and mobility. What began as a desire to become physically strong during an extraordinarily difficult period of her life eventually led her into bodybuilding, coaching, mobility work and, in her 50s, Muay Thai. The conversation gets into something rarely discussed in conventional fitness culture: movement as nervous-system regulation. For neurodivergent women especially, physical training can offer a place to put enormous mental energy, reconnect with a body that may have felt unsafe or disconnected, learn complex systems through movement, and experience strength without turning exercise into another form of punishment. Aline also speaks openly about her own experiences with coercive control, difficult coaching relationships, mental health treatment, DBT, burnout and the danger of handing too much authority to someone simply because they call themselves a coach. The result is a thoughtful discussion about agency, boundaries and finding forms of movement—and relationships—that actually fit the person you are.And then there is Muay Thai. Aline describes what it is like to become a beginner again in her 50s, learning an intricate combat sport with an ADHD coach who sometimes explains body mechanics using kebabs, baseball bats and imaginary iron testicles. Somehow, it works. Because perhaps the point isn't perfect discipline. Perhaps the point is discovering the kind of movement that makes you want to return to your body. About Aline DuriaudAline Duriaud is a London-based certified personal trainer, fitness coach, mental health advocate and founder of Rise Strong Fitness Collective, where her work centers particularly on helping women over 40 build strength, mobility, confidence and sustainable relationships with movement. Her professional study includes personal training, strength and resistance training, menopause-focused coaching, mobility for strength and injury prevention, body composition and functional training. Her own evolving practice also includes bodybuilding and Muay Thai. Aline is the host of Flex and Flow with Aline, a podcast exploring the intersection of fitness and mental health through conversations with coaches, athletes, mental health professionals and people whose lives have been changed by movement. She also created Beyond the Borderline, a peer-focused mental health podcast that has accumulated more than 80,000 downloads.Her newest writing explores menopause, neurodivergence, fitness and her experience of learning Muay Thai in her 50s. Find AlineSubstack — Menopause & Muay Thai https://substack.com/@menopauseandmuaythai Instagram — Aline Duriaud https://www.instagram.com/aline.duriaud Rise Strong Fitness Collective https://www.instagram.com/risestrongfitnesslondon/ Flex and Flow with Aline — Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/flex-and-flow-with-aline/id1788533409 Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/mental-health-news-radio--3082057/support.
