Geanina Popent — getting older isn’t a reason to stop. It’s a reason to get stronger.
Known as Nina. Resistance training and body composition expert, and bikini athlete at Hammer Fitness in Scarborough, coaching women one-on-one to build lean muscle, get measurably stronger, and feel capable in their own bodies — without extreme diets or confusing workouts.
Geanina “Nina” Popent — resistance training and body composition expert
canfitpro Personal Training · Precision Nutrition · ECS Certified (Elite Coaching System) · MED Method · Bikini athlete
Geanina Popent — Nina to her clients — is a fitness professional, resistance training and body composition expert, and a bikini athlete at Hammer Fitness. For the past three years she has coached women through personalised one-on-one training focused on building strength, increasing lean muscle, improving body composition, and developing confidence that lasts.
Her approach combines intelligent strength training, practical nutrition, consistency and sustainable habits — without extreme diets, confusing workouts or short-term fixes. Every programme is built around the client's goals, lifestyle, experience and changing needs.
Whether a client wants to feel stronger, change her shape, move with more confidence or protect her long-term health, Nina provides the structure, guidance and accountability to make meaningful progress.
Her goal is simple
To help every client become stronger, healthier and more confident at every stage of life.
That sounds modest until you consider what most women in their forties and fifties are told: eat less, do more cardio, accept that this is what getting older looks like. Nina's work starts from the opposite premise — that strength is trainable at any age, and that the women who keep it are the ones who train for it deliberately.
Muscle mass and bone density both decline with age, and resistance training is the primary lever against both. Osteoporosis Canada identifies strength and balance training as central to protecting bone health — which is why Nina's programmes are built on lifting, not on doing more of what already isn't working.
You deserve to feel capable, confident and proud of what your body can do.
A national-level bikini athlete
She does not coach the process from the outside. She lives it.
Nina competes as a national-level bikini athlete, which means the things she asks of a client are things she has done herself, recently, under a deadline — the training blocks, the tracked food, the weeks where the scale disagrees with the work, and the discipline of holding a standard for months at a time.
That matters more than it sounds for the women she coaches. Most of her clients are not preparing for a stage and never will be. But the person writing their programme understands, from the inside, exactly how much effort produces how much change — and therefore where the line is between training that is productive and training that is simply punishing.
She prepares under Amer Kamra, on the same floor and the same system her own clients train on.
Right: Nina with Amer Kamra after a win. She preps under him on the same floor her own clients train on.
What working with Nina actually looks like
Three years of one-on-one coaching at Hammer Fitness — the support to train safely, effectively and confidently.
- A programme tailored to your goals, fitness level and lifestyle
- Personalised instruction during every single session
- Strength training designed to build muscle and real-world capability
- Practical nutrition guidance that works in everyday life
- Support with consistency, accountability and long-term progress
- A welcoming, focused environment where you can feel comfortable rather than watched
You don't need to be fit before you begin. You need to be ready to take the next step.
Who Nina specialises in
Women 40+ who want to train properly rather than train harder.
Build lean muscle
The tissue that decides how you look, how much you can do, and how well your body handles the next twenty years. Built through progressive resistance training, not through cardio and restriction.
Increase strength
Measured in the log, not in how hard a session felt. Getting stronger is the clearest evidence that a programme is working and the surest protection against losing capability with age.
Improve body composition
Changing the ratio rather than chasing the scale. More muscle, less fat, and a shape that holds — which is a different goal from simply weighing less.
Feel confident in your body
Confidence follows competence. Clients get it from knowing what they are doing under a bar, seeing numbers move, and no longer feeling lost in a gym.
Support healthy aging
Training with an eye on the decades ahead: joints, bone density, balance, and the physical independence most people only think about once it starts slipping.
Sustainable habits
Fitness and nutrition routines that survive a job, a family and a calendar. Consistency built through personalised accountability rather than willpower.
Body composition, not bodyweight
The specialty. And the reason most women’s results stop making sense.
A scale weighs everything at once — muscle, fat, water, food, glycogen, whatever was in the glass an hour ago. It cannot tell you which of those changed. That one limitation is behind most of the frustration Nina sees in a first consultation.
Here is what it costs in practice. A woman spends four months eating very little and doing a lot of cardio. The scale drops twelve pounds. She has lost nine pounds of muscle and three of fat. Her clothes fit slightly differently, she is weaker, she is colder, she is hungrier, and the moment she eats normally again the weight returns — onto a body that now has less muscle than when she started. The number moved. The composition got worse.
Body composition is the ratio, not the total. More muscle, less fat, at whatever bodyweight that produces. It is the difference between a woman who is lighter and a woman who is leaner, stronger and visibly different in the same dress size.
For women over 40 it stops being a preference and becomes the whole job, because muscle is the tissue that leaves on its own if nothing is done to keep it. The World Health Organization recommends muscle-strengthening activity at least twice a week for adults, and for older adults adds balance and strength work specifically to preserve function. Losing weight without protecting that tissue accelerates the exact problem most women think they are solving.
“Toning” is not a thing you do. It is muscle you already built, with less fat on top of it.
So Nina coaches to the ratio, and measures it properly. Strength in the log, week over week. Measurements at the same sites. Photographs in the same light. How clothes fit. Bodyweight is one input among several — never the verdict on a month’s work.
That changes what the plan looks like. Protein goes up rather than down. Calories are set to a deficit a person can hold, not the lowest one she can survive. Cardio is dosed rather than piled on. And the resistance training is the part that is genuinely non-negotiable, because it is the only thing on the list that tells the body to keep the muscle.
Private floor training
Nina coaches one-on-one on the private floor at Hammer Fitness, Unit 7 — 21 Progress Ave in Scarborough. Every session is designed around the client's goals, experience, abilities and needs.
That focused environment is the point. It lets a client learn proper technique, train at the right level, and make steady progress without feeling intimidated or overlooked — which is the single most common reason women stop going to a commercial gym.
New to strength training, returning after time away, or already training and ready to push further: Nina meets clients where they are and builds from there. Sessions are one-on-one, by appointment, on a floor with no drop-ins and no classes. Open 5am to 11pm, seven days a week.
Women Nina has coached
Strength up, composition changed, and habits that held.
Client results may include increased strength and fitness, greater confidence in the gym and in daily life, improved muscle tone and body composition, better consistency with training and nutrition, and documented progress photos and measurements. See more client transformations at Hammer Fitness.
What her clients say
Messages from women Nina coaches. Click any one to read it full size.
On the floor
The method behind the programme
Nina's programmes run on the MED Method — the minimum effective dose training system created by Amer Kamra and taught to every coach at Hammer Fitness.
The idea is straightforward and unfashionable: most training volume is set by what a person can tolerate rather than by what actually produces adaptation. MED finds the smallest dose that produces the change, executed properly and progressed in a log.
For women over 40 this matters more, not less. Recovery capacity is the real constraint, and a programme that buries someone in fatigue produces worse results than one that doses the work precisely. The Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology sets muscle-strengthening work at a minimum of twice weekly for adults — the useful question is how much above that baseline any individual actually needs, and that is what Nina's programming answers.
For women over 40 this matters more, not less — but not for the reason it is usually given. It is not that a woman past forty should train lightly. It is that recovery capacity becomes the variable that decides the dose, and a programme written without reference to it produces fatigue that looks like effort and returns nothing.
So the question Nina answers for each client is not “how much can she handle?” It is “what is the least that still changes something?” Usually that is fewer sessions than expected, fewer sets than expected, and far more attention paid to what happens inside each one.
What it looks like week to week: two to four sessions, not six. Working sets that are genuinely hard, taken close enough to matter, with the loads and reps written down. Progression decided by the log rather than by how motivated someone felt on Monday. When something stalls, one variable moves — not five.
The test is simple and it is unforgiving. If the numbers in the log are moving and the client is recovering between sessions, the dose is right. If she is sore, tired and flat and the log has not moved in a month, she is not under-training. She is doing too much of the wrong thing, and adding more will make it worse.
That is also why the plan survives a real life. A programme built on the smallest effective dose has somewhere to go when progress slows, and nothing to collapse back from when a work trip, a bad week or a family emergency takes the schedule apart.
Common questions
Is it Geanina or Nina?
Both. Her name is Geanina Popent; everyone at the gym calls her Nina.
Does she only coach women over 40?
Women 40+ are her specialty, not her only clients. Her programmes suit any woman who wants structured strength training and practical nutrition instead of extremes.
Do I need to be fit before I start?
No. She coaches beginners, women returning after years away, and women already training who want to go further. The programme starts from where you are.
Will I have to diet?
Not in the way most people mean. Practical nutrition guidance for everyday life, built into habits that hold — no extreme diets and no short-term fixes.
What happens in a session?
One-on-one coaching on the private floor with personalised instruction throughout — technique, loading and progression, with the programme adjusted as you change.
How do I start?
Book a free consultation. The first conversation covers your history, what you have tried, and what is realistic. Call 416 298-7997.
Meet our colleagues at Hammer Fitness Scarborough
Every coach on this floor is trained in the same method.
Train with Nina.
Book a free consultation at Hammer Fitness in Scarborough. She will go through your history, what you have already tried, and what is realistic on the time you have — then build from there.
