Discovering Balance: What Feeling Healthy Means to Me

Fitness Guide (Part 2)

“All progress takes place outside the comfort zone.”
Michael John Bobak

Last week we focused on how to achieve a weight-loss fitness goal. This week we will touch on another common fitness goal: gaining lean muscle.

I’m going to discuss what kinds of exercises you can incorporate into your gym-time to help you feel your best, meet your goals, and relieve some of the initial stress from figuring out where to begin. I have especially been looking forward to writing this post because gaining lean muscle is my current personal fitness goal. This means that the tips provided below are the lessons I’ve learned recently. I can’t wait to share them with you.

Disclaimer: I am not a professional or personal trainer by any means. These are just some tips I’ve discovered along the way!

“I would feel my best if I started gaining lean muscle.”

Tip #1: Start Small & Ease Your Way

We all have to start somewhere and with weight-lifting specifically, it’s best to start small. I remember feeling incredibly embarrassed during my first upper-body workout because I was visibly STRUGGLING with the tiniest weights. Before to this workout session, I really had no reason to ever lift anything above my head…ever. What I’m basically trying to say is that I had zero upper-body strength whatsoever.

To put things into perspective: I started lifting with a range of 8-12lbs. free-weights on most exercises. Now, 1 year later, my range has only gone up to 10-20lbs. I say this because even though my weight range didn’t increase an excessive amount from last year, I still have gained a noticeable amount of upper-body muscle throughout this year.

It’s important to not force yourself to increase your weight until you feel truly ready. This leads me to my next tip.

Tip#2: Push Yourself, but Not too Much

It’s great to feel “pain” in the gym because that means we’re actually doing something! However, “no pain, no game” is not equivalent to “lift as much as you can until you eventually get an injury”.

Injuries suck and they are SO easy to get when weight-lifting if you aren’t careful. While it’s important to push yourself in the gym, this should be done in a healthy way that doesn’t make your body feel sharp pain instead of soreness after your workout.

The way that I gauge whether or not I’m pushing myself enough/doing too much is by testing to see how I feel during the last 1-2 reps of each set. The first 8-9 reps should feel doable, whereas the last 1-2 reps should be a little bit of a struggle but not forced. The burning sensation in those last few reps should be felt in the targeted muscle and you shouldn’t have to change your form to make those last reps happen. This method ensures that you are pushing yourself to where your muscles are breaking apart but not to the point of straining. (aka gaining muscle vs. injury)

Tip #3: Perfect Your Form

Form quite literally makes or breaks you in the gym. One wrong move and BOOM…your back is broken. *That was a little dramatic, but you get the point* Having the right form not only prevents injury but also makes sure you’re targeting the right muscle.

Last week I asked my friend Allie Pesche to help me with my squat form because I’ve been having pain in my lower back and knees. I’ve also only felt the burning sensation in my quads when doing squats, even when trying to target my glutes. After a full year of intensely exercising, I discovered that I have been doing squats wrong this entire time.

Once Allie corrected my form, I had the best lower-body workout I’ve had in months. I left the gym feeling sore in the places I wanted without having back and knee pain.

Form is an investment. Start out strong by watching videos and doing the research before starting your weight-lifting journey. Your body and overall progress will thank you later.

Tip #4: Minimal Cardio

Even though lifting will be your primary focus when developing muscle, it is still important to include cardio into your routine. I personally like to do 10-15 minutes of cardio after I lift. This helps me stay lean and keep my heart healthy and endurance up.

P.S. HIIT workouts (mentioned in the last post) are my favorite kind of cardio because they include weighted and core exercises!

Tip #5: Rest

I cannot stress this enough: your body NEEDS rest. You are not going to meet your fitness goal by working out for hours and hours every day of the week.

Think about it like this: you know that occasional feeling you get when studying where nothing seems to stick in your brain? Maybe you’re tired or hungry, or maybe you’ve just simply reached your mental capacity. Regardless, you know that you need a break because otherwise, you’re just wasting your time at this point. After eating your snack or taking a brain break, you get back to studying and magically the material is clicking again.

How does this scenario apply to fitness? Your rest days are your body’s brain breaks. If you do not allow your body time to heal, it will not perform to its full potential for you in the gym. Allow yourself a minimum of 1-2 rest days a week, and each day alternate targeted muscle groups so that you aren’t overworking one part of the body.

Listen to your body–it will tell you what it needs.

Tip #6: Proper Diet

Sometime around April of 2019, I started to question why I wasn’t gaining muscle. It had been almost 4 months of consistently working out and I had minimal definition. It finally occurred to me that my slow progress was because I wasn’t eating enough.

Before I knew any better, I associated upping my caloric intake with gaining fat which freaked me out. Now I know that to grow lean muscle, I need to eat protein to heal the muscles I break apart during my work out. Additionally, I Iearned to incorporate healthy carbs into my diet so that I had more energy during my workouts and throughout the day.

The truth is, you will gain weight when gaining muscle. Read that again. But dont worry, muscle is more dense than fat. This means that a pound of muscle will actually take up less room in your body than a pound of fat.

My advice to you is to not look at the scale, and instead analyze your progress based on how you feel. Because feeling healthy is the whole point, right?

Having the proper diet is an important aspect of both weight-loss and muscle gain. Next week, I’ll be dedicating an entire post to discovering how to eat in a way that aligns with your personal fitness goal.

Fitness Guide (Part 1)

“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.”
Zig Ziglar

My last post discussed how to identify your health and fitness goals based on what feeling healthy means to you. Now that you know what you’re working towards, you might be thinking…okay, now what?

The fitness world is extremely daunting. As someone who has been intensely working out for almost a full year, I still get nervous when I’m about to try a new exercise or machine. Not only that but selecting a workout is especially overwhelming because of how crucial it is to choose the right exercises that align with your goals.

To help provide a little guidance and relieve some of the initial stress, I’m going to discuss what kinds of exercises you can incorporate into your gym-time to help you feel your best! My content will be split into two posts so that I can go in-depth on how to achieve two of the most common fitness goals.

Disclaimer: I am not a professional or personal trainer by any means. These are just some tips I’ve discovered along the way!

“I would feel healthier if I lost some weight.”

CARDIO! CARDIO! CARDIO! To lose weight, you need to be in a caloric deficit. This means that you need to be consuming fewering calories than you would normally need. Your diet is a major component of this(we’ll discuss this later!), but cardio is a great way to burn off some of those calories you don’t want! If you’re like me, you probably despise cardio but LOVE how you feel when you get through it. Luckily, I’ve discovered a few ways to make cardio tolerable.

1. Break it up

I realized pretty early on that I enjoyed my cardio routine more when I did three 15-minute increments of different cardio machines. For example, I would do 15 minutes on the stair master, 15 minutes on the treadmill, and then 15 minutes on the rowing machine. This method helped me get through my cardio workout because it: 1.) allowed me to work on different parts on my body, 2.) provided a small break in between walking to different machines, and 3.) made my workout go by faster!

2. HIIT Workouts

Another way to do cardio is HIIT (High Intensity-Interval Training) workouts. HIIT workouts are great because they provide a lot of variety to your cardio. The key concept to these workouts is to perform at your highest intensity within a 30-40 second interval and then take a 30-40 second rest immediately following. This type of interval training lasts for the entire workout.

As I mentioned, I personally struggle with endurance. These workouts have allowed me to push myself while still getting that much-needed break in-between the hard hits of intense cardio. I can work out longer and more intensely than if I were just running or biking for 30 minutes straight. Additionally, researchers have found that HIIT workouts actually burn around 25–30% more calories than the other forms of cardio, which is exactly what we want when we’re trying to lose weight!

Although cardio is very important to include in your main workout plan, it doesn’t have to be your only form of exercise. I encourage you to add in a few strength-training and core exercises into your overall or HIIT workout. Not only will you still burn calories while doing these exercises, but you’ll feel strong! (See the picture on the far right for an example of a HIIT workout that incorporates strength and core excercises into the workout)

“Where do I find my workouts?”

Believe it or not, I find all of my workouts on Instagram. There are hundreds of thousands of fitness accounts that post different kinds of workout multiple times throughout the week. Some of my favorites are @kimfrench87, @nattbfit, and @ashleigh_jordan. You can plan ahead for your workout by saving their posts and simply going to your “saved” tab on your Instagram page.

Youtube is another great workout resource. All you have to do is type in the kind of workout you’re looking for and you will immediately be able to find a video that works for you. I personally follow the workout videos posted by @blogilates, @fitnessblender, and @ChloeTing.

Finally, workout programs can be found or purchased online by typing into the Google search engine. For example, I searched “weight loss workout program” and found both free and purchasable programs for all body types and experience levels. This is a great option if you know you would like a strict plan to follow.

I want to reiterate that I am not an expert. In fact, my original experience trying to lose weight was unhealthy and not effective in the long run. I was starving myself while doing minimal cardio. Once I did research and incorporated the information described in this post into my workout, I started to see the results that I wanted. I encourage you to do further research on your own so that you feel fully informed on what fitness has to offer you!

As the quote at the beginning says, “you don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great”. You can do this!

Stayed tuned for next weeks post on how to achieve lean muscle.

Run Your Own Race

“Compare yourself to yourself and say, “How can I be better? How can I be the real me?”
Carson Kressley

Identifying YOUR Goals

Whoever said that comparison is the thief of joy was absolutely right.

It’s contradictory that in a culture that praises authenticity, we often use social media to post an altered highlight reel of our lives. Even worse, applications like Facetune, FaceApp, and VSCO filters allow us to morph ourselves into the unrealistic beauty standards our society praises. If you’re like me, despite being aware of these false portrayals, you most likely tend to subconsciously scroll through your newsfeed and compare yourself to what others are posting…even when you don’t want to. When I first started my fitness journey, comparison was my first major obstacle that I had to overcome to be where I am now.

I knew absolutely nothing about exercise or eating right before I got started in January of 2019. As I mentioned in my first post, I determined that my goal was to feel healthy and strong. However, I was overwhelmingly intimidated by the weight lifting area at Markin. I didn’t want to look stupid, weak, and ultimately like I didn’t belong. I was a beginner among a crowd of seemingly professional athletes. It paralyzed me, but thankfully my determination didn’t waver.

I decided that my best move would be to hire a personal trainer. I reached out to my friend Chris and he agreed to work with me. He taught me proper form, motivated me to push my limits, and truly was my security in an environment that terrified me. Chris and I worked out together twice a week for almost two months until I felt comfortable enough to go on my own. Hiring Chris was one of the best decisions I made at the beginning of my fitness journey because he helped me overcome my first comparison obstacle and kept me focused on my end goal.

Comparison can follow you into your own home.

Growing up I constantly compared myself to my younger sister. Not only is she extremely athletic, but she has the stereotypical model body: long, toned legs and thin. I’ve always had wider hips, even at my skinniest, so compared to her I felt like I was cheated by my genetic makeup. I truthfully continue to struggle with feeling confident around her because she is perfect to me. However, my new lifestyle has taught me to appreciate my body and all that it does for me.

I’ve discovered that the progress that I make towards my fitness goals has given me a new perspective on myself. It showed me that I simply will never have her body type but I’m okay with that because I’ve learned to love my body at every stage.

This newfound self-love is recent for me. I’m anxious to see how it will influence my life.

I also want to touch on the tendency to compare our progress and fitness goals to others. The biggest thing that I have learned throughout my entire process is that we know what’s best for us.

I advocate for “healthy” living. Which to me means doing whatever makes you feel good about yourself. Personally, that’s a fitness regime that focuses on lean muscle. However, for others, it’s major cardio and endurance. Or choosing a particular diet. Whatever choice you make should lead you to your health/fitness goal that is personalized to you. Everyone is different, especially in body type and metabolism, so comparing yourself to others and what they’re doing is pointless.

My advice to you is to not listen to what others say or have made you feel and instead really take time to consider what would make YOU feel great! Because at the end of the day, that’s all that matters.

Who and Why?

Push your limits.

That’s how you really grow.

Growing up in a society that praises unrealistic body expectations and beauty standards impacted my life more than I had ever realized. I knew, even from a young age, that to be “accepted” and seen as pretty, I needed to be thin. I lived by the phrase “if you can pinch an inch, you need to lose weight” because that’s what I was told. It wasn’t until I became a mature adult woman that I realized I was underweight for the majority of my childhood. This realization shocked me; not because I never knew how thin I was, but because neither did anyone else. Our obliviousness is a prime example of how societal pressures can blind us from reality.

Even though our society has evolved by becoming more accepting of all body types, I continue to obsess over the weight that I gain. However, I have increasingly grown tired of allowing my confidence to depend on a number on the scale.

In January of 2019, I decided that I wanted to challenge myself to live a true healthy and fit lifestyle. No diets. Forget the scale. I wanted to focus on how I feel. I hired a personal trainer and chose fitness goals that focused on strength and endurance. Meanwhile, I educated myself on the appropriate amount and types of food that I needed to gain lean muscle. This method of healthy living was new to me because I had only ever had experience with diets and heavy cardio.

After a full year of remaining consistent with my new lifestyle, I can truthfully say that I feel physically and mentally stronger. I still struggle with body image and allowing myself to gain the extra weight even when it’s just muscle. However, I have learned so much about myself and how to achieve a healthy lifestyle that doesn’t focus on losing as much weight as I possibly can.

The positive impact my fitness journey has had on my life in the past year is what inspired me to select this topic for my blog: Discovering Balance: What Feeling Healthy Means to Me. I plan to include a variety of information ranging from fitness tips, nutritional advice, and body image testimonies that I’ve picked up on throughout this past year, along with updates on my own personal health journey.

I’m thankful to be gaining more confidence every day–I wish the same for all of you. 🙂