Sunday, July 10, 2011

Find Your Love Affair

I have a love affair with fitness. I love to sweat. I love hearing the music blast through my headphones and the clink of weights hitting the rack. I love feeling my heart racing out of my chest. I love when I can't catch my breath. I love feeling so sore the next day that I am brutally aware of every muscle in my body. If my butt is sore enough to make sitting down painful, I am going to have a fabulous day.
I am also a freak.

But, I truly believe that every person can find a love affair with fitness. You may not love the same things I love. Try not to judge me when I tell you about mine and I promise not to judge you when you find your love affair in Strip Aerobics.
My advice to you is to try new things to discover your love affair. Try something that sounds appealing to you or try something that sounds absolutely not your style. You may end up in love with Bikram yoga (a specific series of yoga poses in 105 degree classroom) even though you normally hate sweating, or you may fall in love with Zumba even though you have no rhythm. You do not need to be good at something to give it a whirl. Scan the lists of classes at gyms close to you. Look for community classes in your area. There are almost always first timers specials. If you really want to take advantage, sample classes at different yoga studios and gyms always invoking whatever their new member special is (there are places that give you the first two weeks for the price of one class!) Tell an instructor that you are new so you make sure to do things correctly and not get injured in your fitness experiments. Also try new things more than once; the first class is spent trying to figure out what to do and doesn't allow you to get in the flow. Many Bikram followers believe it takes 10 straight days of the practice for your brain to appreciate it the way that your body benefits from it. So do not give up after the first day. If you are intrigued enough to try again, get your booty out there for another round. I do believe you will find your love. When you do, working out shifts from being a chore to being the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning.

“An hour of basketball feels like 15 minutes.  An hour on a treadmill feels like a weekend in traffic school.”  ~ David Walters


Find your "basketball" and make your workout fly-by. My hope for you is that you find what you are looking for in fitness and you continue to love it the way I love it for the rest of your life.

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Fight the Fear

I find that fitness and life are interwoven in a way that you cannot fully understand until you see how improved fitness can improve your life with your very own eyes. I'm not talking simply about tighter abs making you feel better about wearing a bikini (although certainly that aspect has a positive effect on confidence boosts). I am talking about a deeper kind of confidence that comes from challenging yourself beyond your current capabilities and challenging the very things you are afraid of. I deeply fear failure. Running helped me see that my body can do much more than my brain initially allows.
I grew up a non-runner. In elementary school, I was always the last one to finish the warm up laps at tennis camp; in middle school I was the one responsible for making the whole team run extra sprints at basketball practice because of my lagging pace; and in high school, I was the only person to not make the walk-on track team and was told by the coach that he was sure "I would find something else I was good at." Bottom line, not being able to run was a point of disappointment for me for many years. 

In college, I changed my major many times, never feeling fully satisfied with my choices. In total fear of choosing the wrong thing and being stuck in a career and a life that I didn't want. It wasn't until my senior year of college when suddenly everything started to fall into place. I started modeling more which I realized didn't feel like work at all. I then took my focus in school off of "finding a career" and opened it to "finding something I was passionate about". What I realized was that my unsought passions of  modeling and acting had a stronghold on me. I had never really thought of pursuing my love of these careers because I felt like I was under-qualified. I was supposed to find "something else I was good at" and I did not have the natural talent to pursue these fields. Plus, all I could think about was how much better everyone else was at acting and some of them could even sing and dance too--how could I compete with that? This fear of "not being good enough" was powerful enough for me to deny my own passions. I realized this very fear was paralyzing me from doing what I loved to do. Because I never want to be paralyzed by my own fear of failure, I decided to pursue these fields by blindly moving from my life in Boston to a brand new adventure in LA. Deciding you are going to follow your dreams is a terrifying reality to face. Where would I ever start?
I looked at my life and all the things I would need to accomplish to make this change possible. The most important part of everything I viewed was to start believing in myself to work through life's obstacles

Being the fitness minded person that I am, I found a parallel between my fear of acting and my inability to run. I had merely accepted the truth about "not being a runner" rather than trying to do something about it. As far as I could tell, my legs were fully functional, so why had I believed for so many years that I couldn't do something about becoming a runner? In January, I challenged myself to run a 1/2 marathon in June.  At the time, I could not even run for 15 minutes without catching my breath.  But low and behold, I followed a training schedule. I started slow, I worked my way up. I researched and read and studied everything I could about runners. Six months after I set that goal I can now proudly tell you I completed my goal. I ran a 1/2 marathon after spending a lifetime thinking I couldn't run. The only thing getting in my way of running was MY FEAR of not being good enough. MY FEAR of not being the best. You don't have to be the best at everything you do. You do not have to be able to do everything. But, if fear is keeping you from following your passions then you need to challenge yourself to FIGHT THE FEAR. 


You are not born as the person you are meant to be. You must work through the obstacles of life to fight for the person you can be. Often it's true that the harder the obstacle, the greater the triumph. You can train yourself to overcome the obstacles of life by challenging yourself in fitness. For me, once I learned to run, all of a sudden moving cross country to follow my dream feels much less daunting. At first 13.1 miles seemed impossible. But each week of training the miles increased and they even got easier! The day of the race the only remnants of my past fears were the butterflies in my stomach. But there was not one second of those 13.1 miles that I thought I would not finish, I knew I could do it as long as I kept putting one foot in front of the other. My head is still held high as I take on my next challenge. I will follow my dream to Hollywood and if the intimidation ever tries to get the best of me I will just keep moving one foot in front of the other.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

train SMART

When it comes to fitness training the best way to stay motivated while tracking progress is to set goals. There is a simple formula that can take goals from the things you forget about along the way to the things that propel you to success. These goal are called SMART goals and are taught in not only in fitness, but also in business and the like. Thats because this formula is easy to use and effective! The formula is this, make every goal SMART, that stands for: Specific, Measurable Attainable, Realistic and Timely. In practice that can go as follows:

Specific- SET YOUR GOAL! Make your goal specific to what you want out of your fitness routine, set the exact number of pounds you want to lose or the number of miles you want to be able to run or that you will work out everyday for a period of time or do a 30-day yoga challenge. Set a goal that is meaningful to you and will make a difference in how you feel about your health and fitness level.
Measurable- How are you going to know that you meet your goal? If you are losing weight, weigh in and write down your info before and then track your progress in a weekly or biweekly weigh in (never weigh everyday, your weight will not be significantly changing on a day-to-day basis and weighing in can be discouraging or just needlessly obsessive). If you are running in a race see how far or fast you can go on your first run and then you can see how you improve as you get closer to race day.
Attainable- Does this goal challenge you? Find a goal that stretches you out of your comfort level but is still possible to achieve. 
Realistic- Can you accomplish this goal? Are you willing and able to do the work that is required to achieve it? Make sure to make a goal realistic for you!  Sign up for a 5K if you have never run before or sign up for a 1/2 marathon if you are trying to increase your current routine. Sign-up for 30 days of unlimited yoga. Challenge a friend to do 5 workouts a week with you. If you are going for weight loss, generally about 2 pounds a week is a realistic weight loss goal (although higher body fat clients can lose more than that per week and still be healthy).
Timely- When do you want to achieve your goal? Set a date that you will check in, 2 weeks, a month, the date of an event. *Extra motivation to sign up for a run, biking race or a sprint triathlon as a time constraint to achieve your goal in time to compete.

Once you find your SMART goal, put it into action. Write down your goal in a journal, set reminders on your calendar, put post-its on your mirror and pictures on your refrigerator. The more you keep your goal in mind the more likely you are to succeed. By actively using this formula, you can have success in getting what you want out of your fitness challenges.