Holly Torrez has a brain tumor.

Not had. Has. Right now, it's in three locations. The total mass is roughly the size of a golf ball. There's significant inflammation on her frontal lobe, the part of your brain that governs emotion, vision, balance, and sleep. She wakes up with a migraine every single day. She deals with seizures so regularly she calls them "brain blips." She has glaucoma in her right eye at 35 years old. There are days when she loses sensation in the right side of her body entirely.

She competed at the Cincinnati Pro Am the day before this conversation.

That is the context for everything that follows. elitefts head coach Tom Sheppard sat down with Holly for the Rebuild Series to talk training, autoregulation, sobriety, and what it actually means to keep showing up when the cost of getting it wrong isn't soreness, it's seizures and days lost. What came out of that conversation is one of the more honest discussions about resilience I've seen in this space. Not the motivational poster kind. The real kind, the kind that comes from being stripped completely bare and choosing to rebuild anyway.

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Holly was an MMA fighter. A good one. She was competing at a high level when Invicta FC and Bellator both showed up to watch one of her bouts. Both promoters offered her a contract after the fight. She had a path to going pro. That was the dream.

She got knocked out by a spinning backfist from Jessica Middleton. Her coaches told her she couldn't come back to training until she got an MRI. She went in expecting a concussion protocol and a note to get back on the mat.

What she got was a neurologist asking whether she had ever blacked out under stress. She said yes, all the time, her whole life. That's when everything shifted. The MRI found a tumor near the pineal gland. Looking back, she had been having seizures since childhood. Nobody caught it. Doctors had cycled through explanations, hypoglycemia, anxiety, sleep deprivation. Nobody took a picture of her brain until there was a reason to.

The neurologist told her no more blows to the head. No more fighting. The contracts disappeared before she ever had a chance to hold them.

Her response was to forge a doctor's note and go back to practice. She picked up a double concussion and spent a week in the hospital. She tells this story without self-pity. That's just how it went.

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What came next was a decade of detours, surgeries, and rebuilding. She transitioned to bodybuilding. Did five shows as a figure competitor. It wasn't for her. She stayed with it anyway, still chasing the goal of reaching a pro level at something.

Then in 2018, the tumor progressed. Surgery wasn't optional anymore. They used MRI laser ablation, drilled a small burr hole, inserted a tube, and lasered out the tumor, which was wrapped around a blood vessel. No complications. Seventy-two hours in the hospital.

The aftermath was a different story. She had not told people how serious things were. She downplayed it, told friends and family it was benign. When she came home, she was alone. Lesions developed on her brain post-surgery. She could not walk. She was crawling to the bathroom. That went on for ten weeks.

A second surgery addressed the lesions. Then came vestibular therapy and speech therapy. Forty-three documented concussions on paper by that point.

Act accordingly. That's not a motivational slogan. For Holly, it's the operating principle that keeps her alive and competing.

October 2018 she opened Resilience Training. She did not plan it. Seven clients didn't want to lose their coach. Someone told her a gym was closing. Her clients pooled money. The owner agreed to lease her his equipment. She had a 418 credit score and roughly $2,000. Overnight, she had a gym. She had no idea what she was doing. People believed in her anyway.

Powerlifters started showing up. One of them spent three hours in her single power rack doing Zercher squats with blood coming from his nose and arms. She thought it was insane. Then more came in asking to deadlift. She said sure. The next week one of them loaded six plates and she stood there in disbelief. Two months after seeing her first real powerlifter train, she had signed up for her first meet.

She did the Sunflower State Games in 2020. She has been competing ever since.

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This is where the episode gets into territory that matters for every lifter reading this, not just athletes managing chronic illness.

Tom asked Holly how she assesses her readiness to train. Her answer was methodical. She has been doing a daily body scan and pre-training journal entry since her high school basketball coach taught her the practice. Head to toe, every day, before anything else. Not how she feels emotionally. How she is functioning.

For Holly, that assessment has specific stakes. If she pushes too hard on the wrong day, she has a seizure and loses the next two to three days. Intra-abdominal pressure from heavy bracing directly increases intracranial pressure. That is not an abstraction. That is a predictable, concrete consequence.

Tom pushed on this: does the severity of the cost make it easier to trust the process of backing off? Does knowing exactly what happens when you override the signals make the discipline easier?

Her answer was yes. And that's the lesson for everyone else.

Most lifters ignore the body's signals because the cost of doing so is manageable. A little extra soreness. A slower recovery. Nothing that can't be buried under pre-workout and stubbornness. So the signals keep getting ignored. The feedback loop never closes.

Holly doesn't have that option. Her feedback loop closes fast and hard. Because of that, she has developed a level of body awareness that most lifters never reach, not because they couldn't, but because they never had to.

You don't need a 911 to take your own body seriously.

Your performance under pressure is the floor you've built through repetition, not some hidden gear you unlock when it matters. Every warm-up treated like a max. Every setup executed the same way. No exceptions.

Holly brought this principle into how she coaches the barbell. When powerlifters first introduced her to the lifts, the first thing they told her was: pay attention to this, because if you do it incorrectly, you could die. She thought it was morbid. Then she realized it was just honest. She passes that same frame to her athletes now. A 400-pound bar does not care how strong you are. Treat every lift with the same focus whether you have plates on the bar or not.

When a brain blip hits mid-session, Holly doesn't have to think about what comes next. Her body knows the steps. She has built that through repetition, partly because she came from a fighting background where hesitation means you lose, and partly because she cannot afford to guess.

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Six months before this episode was recorded, Holly got sober. Alcohol and pain pills. She had been managing brain tumors, seizures, daily migraines, two brain surgeries, a business, single parenthood, and years of accumulated physical and personal trauma, with a fifth of vodka and a two-pack on the drive home.

In July, she tried to take her life.

In October and November, she accidentally overdosed on a medication meant to help her stop drinking. Thirteen and a half hours over a toilet. A hospital waiting room. A nurse with doe eyes telling her they were not going to lose her tonight. She lost 18 pounds in five days.

That was the line. She didn't know what the turning point was, exactly, she had been circling it since April. The overdose just stripped everything else away. She was done with the cycles. Done with the mask. Done with exhausting herself hiding something that was slowly killing her.

She went into counseling. She built a morning routine. Body scan, gratitude, journaling, breathing, the same attentiveness she brings to pre-training preparation, applied to the whole day. Midday check-in. Nighttime wind-down. Same structure, different context.

She went from twenty prescription medications a day to five. Nearly $2,000 a month in pharmaceutical costs, gone.

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Holly is not asking for sympathy. She shared this story because she knows the tools that work for someone managing daily seizures and a brain tumor also work for people managing sore knees, work stress, and bad sleep. The principles are the same.

Body scan before training. Same cues, same setup, every rep. Adjust based on what's actually there, not what you wish was there. Build a morning routine that centers your nervous system before the day takes over. Know the difference between productive discomfort and a warning signal that deserves respect.

None of that requires a brain tumor. It just requires honesty.

The strength community talks a lot about mental toughness. Push through. Grind harder. No days off. That conversation has its place. But the lifters who last are the ones who know when to push and when to pull back. The ones who have built enough self-awareness to read the difference. The ones who treat themselves like the most valuable equipment in the building.

Because they are.

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