The death of personal training or the rebirth of something new?

I have to be totally honest. I really don't like many many things about my industry. I think many high level experts and/or big fitness businesses might be confused about their alignment: the pursuit of profit or the pursuit of helping people. They don't always co-exist. I also find my industry intensely misogynistic. The fitness gurus getting most of the clout are often the most elite minded, the most judgmental and the least open minded about the variety of ways people can find transformation. AKA if it's not their way, it can't be right.

I'm not saying every influential person in my industry is that way. I'm just not finding that I want to be identified with the mainstream. I like to learn from people who not only know their stuff, but live life with a goal to increase their capacity for compassion and with the knowledge that the more we learn, the more we find out we DON'T know.

So what are people's options if they are looking for a more evolved approached to movement and health with more socially progressive, compassionate people. Often times, we can find this type of supportive vibe at Yoga or Pilates studios. But where do people find help getting stronger by lifting weights or doing traditional resistance training? Certainly not big gyms that pressure sell you as soon as you walk through the door. And any environment oozing testosterone is a sure fire miss.

I think this is where the personal training industry is dying a slow death. Regular people don't want to go to harsh, judgmental, rigid and obsessive compulsive personal trainers who are primarily jocks. How can these people without outside interests relate to people juggling so many different things? If you're lucky, you will find a balanced personal trainer. But if you're not lucky, like so many new clients I meet, you will run into someone who just can't understand your challenges. If they can do it, why can't you?

Because change doesn't happen that way. Where do I think the personal training industry is going to go? I'm not sure, but I know I want to create a path that includes compassion while maintaining personal accountability, that focuses on relational coaching, and explores that opportunity to heal through movement on a very deep level, not just look better in jeans, or be able to lift more and more weight, run further and further, feeding a compulsion to always be reaching instead of allowing ourselves to just be and rest sometimes. Something we do so poorly as a culture, to just be content whenever we can!

I like my little bubble at the studio and I love that I share space with two very balanced trainers who bring in regular clients who struggle like we all do.

Why We Need to Get Over Public Nudity

Here's an excerpt from my most recent iVillage Canada column.

Last weekend I was quoted in an article for the Globe and Mail titled, “Why I have ‘tude about being nude”. The author sourced me as someone with an opinion about the change in the nudity at Body Blitz spa, a women’s only water spa in Toronto. I’ve been going there on and off since 2005, but when I visited the spa a few weeks ago, I noticed a sharp decrease in the number of people who went nude. Nudity used to be the norm at Body Blitz.

After reading some of the 370 comments online and hearing all the discussion that ensued within my own community, I’ve accepted that everyone has their own theory about the current attitude about nudity. I think it's more of a Malcolm Gladwell "Tipping Point" phenomenon, so many things are coming together to change a cultural norm.

Read more to find out what major factors I believe have contributed to issues with being nude at an all women's spa. Plus I even provide some tips for easing into going in the buff.

Internal alignment leads to external alignment

Last week I took a Tuesday off work and gave myself permission to have a 'me' day, not an easy thing for a traditionally busy sometimes frantic person like me. Since moving my studio at the end of April, I've had breathing space both for my physical, mental and spiritual self. I've been working like mad for the past six years to pay my bills at work and at home. And now without the extreme pressure hanging over my head, I went to a yoga class in the middle of the day at Octopus Garden Yoga in Toronto. Scott Davis, a gifted healer and yoga teacher, was leading the class.

Scott's class was the best lesson I've ever experienced in breathing through movement and physical effort. We focused on maximizing each breath for almost 90 minutes. Scott's mantra was to bring our attention to our breath and internal alignment and our external alignment in postures would flow from that.

INTERNAL ALIGNMENT WILL BRING EXTERNAL ALIGNMENT!

What joy to my ears. I focus on helping people find alignment in their bodies and know I have so much to learn about how to accomplish this. This extends beyond better posture and muscular balance. This extends right down to aligning with how our bodies feel on any given day. Maybe we planned a high intensity workout but find ourselves dreading the idea of pushing our limits when we approach a workout. Aligning internally means RESPECTING what our bodies need so that they can get back to their happy place, where we aren't further draining our empty reserves comparable to swimming up stream against a strong current that will take us if we learn to flow with it. Training properly has so much more to do with given our bodies exactly what they need from exactly where we are at on any given day.

I hear some trainers cuffaw the idea that training for better alignment is overrated. I guess they aren't working with the same population I do. Most regular folks have something going on that needs to be taken into consideration when designing a personal approach for helping someone become healthier in a meaningful way. It could be feeling emotionally depleted, or maybe being hunched over because of desk work or defeated by the challenges in life or coming out of an illness or having negative past experiences with working out or even depression or anxiety. The list goes on and on. Training for alignment is so much more than balancing our bodies out on a muscular level.

I cringe at macho or superficial approaches to training. Like engaging in a high intensity workout when our muscles already ache or thinking that rest is overrated when it comes to building strength. People in the fitness industry are known for over training their bodies getting caught up in the more is always better mentality. Or doing exercises with improper form for that sake of pushing more reps out or lifting more weight or working out despite an injury just to make things worse.

I just don't get how it serves regular folks just trying to feel and look better. Because internal alignment will always lead to external alignment.

Alignment occurs on so many levels from what Scott taught with breath.
To alignment with what type of workout our bodies need on a specific day.
To alignment with a training paradigm that gets our bodies back to their anatomically correct position.
To aligning with an approach to health that restores vitality, not to look a certain way. The physical changes will always appear when we listen and align.
To aligning with what is truly most important to us in the way we work and be with those we love.
To aligning with larger principles of how we would like to contribute to the world around us.
Right up to aligning with spiritual principles that are about love and compassion.

It starts quite simply doesn't it. It's a path I've seen work with many people. It's the domino effect that will inevitably lead to better big picture alignment.

I feel so passionate about getting better at living in the here and now being true to how I would like to align with the universe.

I've never written anything using the word align so many times.

Next time you go to workout, think less about how you want to look or how you can prove something to yourself about how tough you are and think more about what your body needs. As Olivia Newton John once said, "Let me hear your body talk".

Zombie apocalypse and the unmoving human race

There's been lots of talk about zombies in the media this week. But all you have to do is ride on the subway during rush hour to see a sea of zombies commuting back and forth to jobs they most likely hate. We all know that sitting all day and not exercising isn't good for us. We also know that chronic illness like diabetes and heart disease and obesity is on the ever constant rise. So why do we need yet another study to give us yet another reason to get off our butts and leave them behind. To me, it's a plea by health researchers that it's time to wake up to the fact the way most people live is just plain bad for us. But being caught up in the consumer machine where we think working more will solve our financial problems and where employers treat people like machines that can keep on going no matter how unhealthy or worn out they get. The fact that as a population we are getting fatter and fatter and moving less and less and getting very preventable lifestyle induced diseases should point to the fact that there's an underlying sickness in our society. So the the New York Times Well Blog covered yet another study that shows that inactivity is really bad for us especially when we sit all day like zombies in front of computer screens.

They wanted to determine whether this physical languor would affect the body’s ability to control blood sugar levels. “It’s increasingly clear that blood sugar spikes, especially after a meal, are bad for you,” says John P. Thyfault, an associate professor of nutrition and exercise physiology at the University of Missouri, who conducted the study with his graduate student Catherine R. Mikus and others. “Spikes and swings in blood sugar after meals have been linked to the development of heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.”

They used volunteers for the study that are normally very active and asked that the volunteers cut back on their activity levels dramatically. Then they watched what happened to their blood sugar levels while sitting all day.

And there were changes. During the three days of inactivity, volunteers’ blood sugar levels spiked significantly after meals, with the peaks increasing by about 26 percent compared with when the volunteers were exercising and moving more. What’s more, the peaks grew slightly with each successive day.

This change in blood sugar control after meals “occurred well before we could see any changes in fitness or adiposity,” or fat buildup, due to the reduced activity, Dr. Thyfault says. So the blood sugar swings would seem to be a result, directly, of the volunteers not moving much.

Which is both distressing and encouraging news. “People immediately think, ‘So what happens if I get hurt or really busy, or for some other reason just can’t work out for awhile?’” Dr. Thyfault says. “The answer seems to be that it shouldn’t be a big problem.” Studies in both humans and animals have found that blood sugar regulation quickly returns to normal once activity resumes.

Do we really need another study to encourage us to move? Are studies even going to have an impact on how much people move anyway? Not really. Instead, individuals need to look at the sickness that has infiltrated their lives and led to them not moving and becoming sedentary. There's no data out there that can impact an individual's choices, not until the individual wakes up to the fact they are caught up in a system that keeps them not only sedentary, but also numbed out to the fact that our priorities as a race are totally out of whack.