Fitness Takes Time

Nothing happens over night, success isn’t accomplished in a day, and getting healthy by changing our habits and increasing our fitness takes time!  Go easy on yourself mentally and understand that any change is better in the long term if you adjust and adapt over time instead of over night!  If you push too hard and too soon you can end up injured and injuries almost always lead to discouragement.  Listen to your body and take the time to recover from your workouts and adjust to new exercises added to your routine.  You can still get amazing results and still push yourself, just listen to what your body is telling you if it takes you three days to recover from a workout.  It’s telling you to back off a bit, by the way!

A Strong Butt is the Key to a Happy Life

Seriously, no joke, a strong butt is the key to a happy life.  Your rear end (from your glutes to your deep hip muscles) is the engine of your body and your movements, it is what drives your motion and it is what keeps that motion stable and efficient.  Your glutes are part of your core and your core is what stabilizes you.  In this image you can see how your body stacks, each part on top of the other until you are straight and in alignment like the right side of the image.  Now, on the left we have the head, neck, shoulders, torso, glutes/hips, thighs, lower leg, and feet all out of alignment.  Those hips/glutes are pulling those knees and thighs in the wrong direction while not supporting the torso!  Each part works together to make you strong, fit, and efficient and if you have one part not doing its job the other parts are affected.  So, do those squats and lunges so you can drive your movements with efficiency and power and keep yourself stable and balanced!

A Little Yoga Goes a Long Way

If you have the proper support and recovery you can reach your fitness goals more easily.  We work our muscles hard at fitness camp, really hard.  But, we take the time to stretch every day and this stretching is what helps keep injuries away and build proper form along with strength.  The image above illustrates what weak glutes can do but it really highlights what a body out of alignment looks like and that out of whack alignment can come from muscles that are too tight.  Yoga is a great way to stretch our muscles and help our body be in better alignment and recover more quickly and in turn make us more ready for our next workout.    Just 10-15 minutes a day of stretching can be beneficial, the key here is consistency.  If you can throw in an hour of yoga a day, bravo!  But, if your time is tight, it is more beneficial to maintain a 10-15 minute yoga practice every day than it is to go for an hour and a half of Bikram every month!