My guest this week is Kelly Howard, who leads women into fitness by making it fun and adventuresome. She leads retreats, hiking and kayaking trips – all kinds of things to get women moving outdoors and start living a healthier, happier life.
I love the approach and Kelly’s enthusiasm. She’s a coach, podcaster, and author. Her business website, fitisfreedom.com, promotes "Fitness consistency with a touch of aventure. Together we’re unstoppable. Fit is our superpower."
This kind of positive messaging is really effective, and it made me want to talk with Kelly. In person, she’s just as positive.
Here's a link to her eBook.
I ALSO HAVE A GIFT FOR YOU -- It's my first digital course at 50 percent off until November 1. It's short but transformative -- aimed at getting men off the couch and into healthy habits. More information here. It will be $99.95 starting November 1 but for now is available at half-off, just $49.97. So, check it out and get the mindset you need to start moving.
Resources and Links
Kelly's Fit Is Freedom
Life Priority Supplements -- Affiliate Discount here
Functional Aging Institute -- Use FAIMM50 discount code
Prime Fit Content – Engage the over-50 market
My guest this week is Kelly Howard, who leads women into fitness by making it fun and adventuresome. She leads retreats, hiking and kayaking trips – all kinds of things to get women moving outdoors and start living a healthier, happier life.
I love the approach and Kelly’s enthusiasm. She’s a coach, podcaster, and author. Her business website, fitisfreedom.com, promotes "Fitness consistency with a touch of aventure. Together we’re unstoppable. Fit is our superpower."
This kind of positive messaging is really effective, and it made me want to talk with Kelly. In person, she’s just as positive.
Here's a link to her eBook.
I ALSO HAVE A GIFT FOR YOU -- It's my first digital course at 50 percent off until November 1. It's short but transformative -- aimed at getting men off the couch and into healthy habits. More information here. It will be $99.95 starting November 1 but for now is available at half-off, just $49.97. So, check it out and get the mindset you need to start moving.
Resources and Links
Kelly's Fit Is Freedom
Life Priority Supplements -- Affiliate Discount here
Functional Aging Institute -- Use FAIMM50 discount code
Prime Fit Content – Engage the over-50 market
Hey, before we start this week's episode, I want to tell you about a new course I have developed that is available now and it's at a special 50% off rate now until November 1st. I'm doing a soft launch, I guess you could say. The course is designed to help men over 50 who want to start exercising but feel stuck on the couch and in bad habits and misinformation and ridiculous expectations and all these things that can keep us from making positive change, even though we want to. So if that's you, or if it sounds like a man in your life, then check out my course. It's called Optimal Aging a Simple Start to Fitness. I will leave a link in the show notes and I will also post it on my business page, prime Fit Content. Okay, on with this episode of Optimal Aging to show for Jim and studio owners who want to grow their businesses by serving more people over 50, and now also to show for fitness consumers who want new information and perspective about living their best lives. I'm your host, jay Croft.
Speaker 1:My guest this week is Kelly Howard, who leads women into fitness by making it fun and adventuresome. She leads wilderness retreats, hiking and kayaking trips all kinds of things to get women moving outdoors and start living a healthier, happier life. I love the approach and Kelly's enthusiasm. She's a coach, a podcaster and an author. Her business website is fitisfreedomcom. That's fitisfreedomcom, which I believe is true. Fitness is freedom and Kelly promotes fitness, consistency with a touch of adventure. Together, we're unstoppable. She says fit is our superpower, and this kind of positive messaging is really effective. At least it worked on me. It made me want to talk with Kelly even more than I did before, and in person she's just as positive, and also she's brought a gift for you, which she'll tell us about at the end of our conversation. So stick around for that. And here is my talk with Kelly. Kelly Howard, hi, nice to see you. How's it going?
Speaker 2:It's wonderful. Thank you for having me here.
Speaker 1:I am so excited. We've been chatting for a few minutes before I hit the record button and I think I have a new best friend already. This is great stuff. I'm excited to share this with the listeners because I love your positive approach and your focus on the idea that fitness is freedom and adventure. You told me that you were just on your way through Atlanta, where I live. You live in Houston and you were in the Smokies. What were you doing up there?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, thank you first, jay. Thank you so much for having me and everybody listening. Thanks for tuning in. This is always fun. So I was up in the Smokies for two reasons. One reason is that I just can't stay away from there. It's my heart home. So I'm always going over there and doing kayaking. But at this particular time I had a retreat for I think it was 10 women. We were over there and we were doing a hiking, a little bit of kayaking, a little bit of rafting retreat in the mountains. I love using adventure as kind of that carrot to get fit and get active, because when you go out there and you get in the woods and you play and you have fun, like life changes and you never go back to the person you were before and you have so much fun getting to the point that you need to get to to be able to do all those things.
Speaker 1:Why is that? What about being outdoors and doing things that we don't normally do gets us thinking in a different way.
Speaker 2:So many of us, at this point in life, have spent so much time working Right.
Speaker 2:It's just kind of like blinders on. Get the stuff done and maybe we're working or taking care of people. We're not really going back to when we were kids and incorporating all the play that kept us moving, that made life light, and to me, if it's not fun, it's probably not worth doing. So doing those things, like having that outdoor activity, is such a big pull. The other piece of it is too.
Speaker 2:A lot of people think that maybe they can't keep up, maybe they're going to hold people back and deep down it's something they would love to do, but they always say no because they're afraid they're going to slow people down. And my job is to be like no way you can't slow us down. You bring so much to the peace. I learned this when I used to do long distance cycling. So I'm not a great cyclist, I'm not a fast cyclist. I'm a long distance cyclist but not a fast one.
Speaker 2:He used to drive me crazy because all my friends, I could see him up there in the distance and I'd be struggling. I'd be struggling to catch up with them and they'd get to a rest stop and then I'd arrive, and they'd get to a rest stop and then I'd arrive, and one day I'm just watching this like sweating it in my head. Here I am Kelly's too slow again and I realized that. Think that rest stop. Like eight seconds before me, 15 seconds before me. It's not a thing, it just suddenly. It just like sometimes you have those epithenies in life.
Speaker 2:It hit me I was like just drop the whole worry and just enjoy, and for me that changed my cycling 100%, and that's one of the things that I try and show people is that don't worry about it. Just get out there and enjoy yourself. If you're five seconds behind or a minute behind or five minutes behind, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like that. Tell me about this adventure fitness concept. I know a lot of people when we talk about fitness, we think about going to the gym, so is that what you're talking about? Are you talking about hiking? What's your approach?
Speaker 2:My approach to fitness. In fact, when I wrote the book, somebody said to me wow, that is like an anti-workout fitness book. And I went. That makes me feel good, because now I love the gym and I've always gotten to the gym. Until the pandemic started, I was just a gym goer. It was what I did and I realized that a lot of people don't love the gym. They might learn to love the gym, but first they need to learn to move.
Speaker 2:So, in my world. It's a fitness plan, not a workout plan, and that fitness plan includes some movements, some mobility, some resistance. But it doesn't have to include just like grinding it out somewhere. It has to include something that's fun something that gets stimulated, something that makes you go, hey, I want to do that.
Speaker 2:And one of the things that I think I put it in the book for a cardio workout that I put in there pickleball. I haven't tried it, but my gosh, it seems to be like this thing that people are loving and it's a cardio workout. Your workouts can be fun, your fitness can be fun. It's just a matter of thinking of it that way. And then the more you do it, the more you probably get to that point where you want to do more gym workouts and you want to do more of that pilates and things like that.
Speaker 1:But just start right, and I've been writing about this a lot lately for this course that I'm working on, that we were discussing and the idea being that people think there's this false dichotomy. I think that people have in their head that fitness means I got to go to the gym for five hours a day and lift weights for two hours a day and I can't eat anything. Fun again, and I'm going to be miserable and I better do it or else, or I can't do that, so I just won't do anything. And the point of what I'm trying to write these days with this course is to just do something. Go for a walk, take the dog to the park, go ballroom dancing, for all I care, just do something to start. And then, as you said, you're going to find that, let's say, you do begin ballroom dancing. Well, you know what A good trainer at the gym can put you on a program that will make you stronger for ballroom dancing, give you more endurance and agility, to make you more graceful and to prevent your back from hurting, and all these wonderful things that you'll gain from the gym. So it's not that you love going to the gym, it's that you love the life that you have when you have the strength and endurance and agility.
Speaker 1:Yeah, fitness really is freedom. That's a theme I come back to a lot in my material is when we were younger. We thought that it meant having muscles or looking good in a tight t-shirt or whatever those things were. And if you didn't really care about having muscles or looking good in a tight t-shirt, maybe you weren't interested. But now, at this stage in life, we need to be able to enjoy ourselves, to have our physical autonomy, to play with our grandchildren, to go on our vacations that we worked so hard for, to continue to be their brother-in-law, golf all these things right, it's freedom.
Speaker 2:It is freedom. And sometimes people will say to me oh, you know that's rather selfish to just like put your fitness first, Like I always tell people you need to prioritize your fitness, and I'll have people say that's kind of selfish. I need to take care of all these other people in my life, and to which I say the truth is is that our medical system is designed to keep us alive. We're probably going to stay alive for a long time.
Speaker 2:Barring a few unforeseen things, we're probably going to be alive for a long time. It's up to us to decide how we're going to live that life. Are we going to live it sitting on the couch waiting for the next doctor appointment? Or are we going to do all the things that we can do to really enjoy life and get out there and just thrive? And people are doing it right and left all ages all ages.
Speaker 2:I talked to a woman the other day who was I don't know, I'm going to make it up I think she was like 89 or something and she just summited some mountain out in the West. I'm like, yeah, there you go.
Speaker 1:There you go. You do that or not. You know we write a lot about people doing extraordinary things like that, and then I make the point of writing about people doing ordinary things too, because I don't want to climb a mountain, but I want to be able to do the things that I want to do, whatever that is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Everybody has something different right. That's your North Star. You got to know those things that you really want. I mean, I have clients who, like you just said, have zero interesting climb in a mountain, but what they really want to be able to do is keep up with the grandkids. They want to be able to play with them in the pool and throw them around. They want to be the cool grandmother or the cool aunt or whatever it is.
Speaker 2:Do it. I don't believe in dieting, but I do eat pretty well. It's the 80, 20 thing. If I can eat well 80% of the time, 20% of the time, I can do whatever the heck I want. But those are the things that we need to think about. Is that, if you just focus on the majority of getting a little movement in having the fun doing the things that you wanna do, eating the things that really make your body happy? Yeah. We're on track. It doesn't take that much.
Speaker 1:No, it doesn't, and we need to break free from these ridiculous extremes that we've been fed, not only about fitness, but about aging, and women, of course, have it worse than men, I think, for a lot of this. So what are the challenges that you face in getting women on board and getting them moving?
Speaker 2:90% of the time when someone comes to me they say I wanna lose weight, and I'm like, okay, then let's dive in a little bit Because you can lose weight. But how many times have you lost weight in the past and then gained it back? Usually quite a few times. So I had somebody that came to me just recently and she said I need to lose about 20 pounds.
Speaker 2:I'm like okay, I'll come. So I've got my daughter's wedding is coming up. I don't wanna look good. I'm like, okay, why do you wanna look good? And that was the right question, right? Then it was like well, because I don't feel like I've looked good for a very, very long time. And it made her sad, which obviously it would make any of us feel sad. And so when you know that, then you know you're not doing the weight loss for the weddings, for everybody else. You're doing the weight loss because you wanna feel good when you pass the mirror, because you wanna feel good and energetic. And so it goes a little deeper and I said if you felt good, what would you do? And then she's like I'd be the person who gets on a plane and she's got her suitcase and she doesn't need anybody to help her toss it up above into the overhead bin. I'd be the one going on the cool trips and I'd be having fun. I'm like, well, there you go, let's focus on that. If we focus on that, the other stuff will follow.
Speaker 1:I like that. It's true If anybody any trainer out there or gym owner out there has a sales conversation with a prospect and they say I wanna lose weight, you better be saying why and then say it two or three more times before you get to the real answer. Because it's never that they wanna lose 20 pounds.
Speaker 2:So with her, what we did was I got her on a very specific online program. I am not a personal trainer not at all but I know a lot of different modalities and I can usually tell, when I get to know somebody pretty quick, what they're gonna work with. First, we had to get the junk food out of her life. We had a husband who loves his junk food, and so we took a cabinet in her house and that's where all of his junk food went. So we can do anything he wants to in that cabinet and eat any of the junk in there. But that was his cabinet and she just pretended like it didn't exist.
Speaker 2:Okay. She never, ever looked at that cabinet again. So suddenly she took all those options of junk out of her life. So that helped right there and then I got her on one of the online programs that was pretty persistent for her, things that were bothering her health-wise and got her started on just resistance. She loved cardio but it wasn't working for her. We got it started on getting out of the junk food habit.
Speaker 2:And then we got her into the right mindset. I love to say that fitness begins in your head, not in your feet, because it's how you're thinking about things. Once you start focusing on how she was seeing it and what she really wanted it, everything changed. It was just a total shift for her, and she suddenly quit worrying about whether or not the dress fit. Yeah, Right the dress ended up fitting pretty darn good, and she looks hot, quite frankly. Yeah and she feels amazing.
Speaker 1:Well, that's the thing. When they stop focusing on the weight, the weight comes off anyway, because if you're eating better and you're moving more, guess what it?
Speaker 2:just happens yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you mentioned cardio, which makes me want to think about strength training, because I I'm always telling folks they got to tell their women clients to lift weights and a lot of women don't want to hear that. What kind of resistance do you get? Or is it changing? Are women becoming more open-minded to it?
Speaker 2:I think that a lot of the women I work with Something happened during the pandemic where some of them started getting like. For me it was not if it didn't help me. My gym shut down and I just like in a panic state, like a deer in a headlight, I just went out and did cardio for hours a day because yeah that was what calms me down. Didn't work so well for me but for them. A lot of them started getting home gyms Like mm-hmm getting barbells or dumbbells or whatever at home.
Speaker 2:Another thing I like I like just body weight exercises. The what body weight body weight. Yeah. I already with body weight, or by starting with Bands, like all of those things I love. Bands, yeah, tell me.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about body weight. I don't think women know about that enough or people know about that enough. Is it enough for me to do a little yoga and some push-ups?
Speaker 2:Well, quite frankly now, going back to the fact that I am not a personal trainer, but I try all these things on myself like I love being a guinea pig. Yeah, and so for about two months solid, I did nothing but body weight. Really.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean nothing but body weight. I have a little bit of a Shoulder stuff going on because of all my kayaking so I had to be a little careful there. But everything else, that's all I did and and I Didn't see anything detrimental and I saw some real improvements in certain areas of my body. If you're doing lunges or if you're doing squats or stuff like that. Generally their body weight anyway, mm-hmm, it was super effective and I could do it anywhere and that's why I?
Speaker 2:was doing. It was I was proving to some of my clients who travel a lot and they use the I'm on the road as the excuse. I was like okay, two months, this is what I'm gonna do. Let's see what happens. Workout just fine I.
Speaker 1:Love combating the excuses I don't have time, I don't have money, I'm traveling, I'm busy, blah, blah, blah. Give me, give me a couple that you run into all the time.
Speaker 2:Oh, excuses I get. Well, one of them is what I mentioned earlier is that I don't want to do that because I'll hold people back. Yeah that's a huge one. That's just like a total brain mess. I don't have time. It's probably the biggest, second one I get, and for that one I tell people okay, if you don't have time, that's okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah but you have to only do ten minutes. Yeah, first week I just want you ten minutes a day, and then, if you want to do 20 minutes a day, go to 20 minutes a day, and then if you want to do 30 minutes a day, go to 30 minutes a day. A Body in motion stays in motion, right? So once somebody gets started, even at a ten minute, they often go longer 15, 20 minutes, and and you just have to bust those myths about no time because, like, look around, everyone has the same amount of time.
Speaker 2:It's just how we use it.
Speaker 1:That's right. I saw something on Facebook or Twitter or something that said if you have time for Facebook, you have time to go to the gym.
Speaker 2:When we do, our group calls a lot of times. I'll just say to people okay, turn off your camera and start doing your workout. Yeah you can listen while you work out with me. I'm chatting away and they're. Their cameras are off and they're doing their workouts. Good for them.
Speaker 1:Good for them. Yeah, I want to ask you about your adventure. Where did you, where did this come from? Where did you get into kayaking and hiking and going and doing and having fun? What's that about? Tell me the story.
Speaker 2:I've always been active, okay, but active is different. In different phases of my life and I was in my 20s, I was a sailboat racer. In my 30s I started doing long distance skating. In fact, I did the Athens to Atlanta skate one year. Oh six miles. In the hills it was a bear. Yeah and Then when I bought this company, that was an outdoor activity club. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:I realized that the stuff that I did the sailing, the skating they're not really things that were normal outdoor activities, not the cycling and the hiking and the backpacking and and all in the kayaking and all that stuff.
Speaker 2:And I had to figure it out. So, like my job when I first bought that company was to get out and try these different things and get better at them. Then the people who were coming in because most people who were coming into the company were they were new at this so I just got into it and then really loved and then so at that time I was probably Early 40s and I'm reading an article. There's magazine and it called Texas Monthly and I'm reading this article and the guy is talking about the Devil's River. He's talking about running the Devil's and the Devil's is this little bitty river, clear river out in Texas that only runs certain times, but it's really beautiful, very remote, and it has white water on it, rapids. And he's telling this story and I put the magazine down and I said, wow, if I was younger I would learn how to whitewater kayak. I was just like, wow, I have missed something in my life.
Speaker 2:And about three years later one of my members in the company said, hey, I did this class, this kayaking class, and it was in San Marcos and you went down these rapids and I was like, oh great, we'll put it on the calendar. So I put it on the calendar and I realized that it was the most terrifying thing I've ever done in my life. I couldn't swim I mean, at the time I didn't swim at all and I'm claustrophobic. And I'm stuck in this boat and I'm terrified out of my mind and I am hooked, like, wow, I finally found something that scares me so bad that I don't want to do it and I want to do it and that started. Since then I am just addicted to rivers. I drive 14 hours to the Smoky Mountains any time I can, because I've got my boat in my car and I go play.
Speaker 1:So how did you get from that to this company that you have now what you're doing?
Speaker 2:So I sold that company I sold the outdoor company to a friend of mine and I had helped her start the same company for a younger group, and so then I sold it to the other company and so she had those going on and I thought, okay, I want to take what I've been doing and apply it very specifically to helping women get active. I had something that happened that really completely triggered me to do this. So I was leading a hike in Houston, texas, houston's very flat we have a little bit.
Speaker 2:We have a few hills.
Speaker 2:We have a few hills. So I'm getting ready to lead this hike, this lady pulls up and she gets out of her car and she has a cane. It's not trekking poles, it's not a hiking stick, it is a cane. And she said, wow, I just wanted to prove to myself that I would get here Now. I'm not going to go hike with y'all, I'll come back in a year but I just wanted to prove to myself that I would come. And I was like, well, that's great, and you don't know me, you're coming with us.
Speaker 2:So we did the hike, we took her, we helped her, we got her up and down the hills you know all the things. And when we got back she was like grinning ear to ear. She was just so ecstatic. So that was that, except that about five years later, I get an email and it's a picture of her. She's at the trailhead of Yosemite Falls and she's like, yep, just did Yosemite Falls, took my friends up there, and I'm just getting ready to leave and I'm heading around the country to hike all the trip, hike all the national parks. Wow.
Speaker 2:Wow, like wow Game changer. I just did all I needed to do in life done, but I want to do that for other people. That was the thing that stuck with me and has carried me through creating this company and writing my book and doing all the things. It just mattered.
Speaker 1:Yes, it does. That's a beautiful story, congratulations. Tell me about your company and what it is that you provide for women who get involved.
Speaker 2:So the company is called Fit is Freedom and it is basically what we do. 90% of it is group coaching, so I'll get the women come in as a group. They're, they join for a year and we provide support, we provide accountability, we provide knowledge. Not everybody knows how to do this. You're not bored knowing how to do all these different things? Right.
Speaker 2:I work with them one on one and I'll be like here's a suggestion for how a good momentum and movement plan would be for you. And then we just do small group accountability, which really helps, and and my job is to get them to what that why was that they wanted when they came in. Sometimes they wouldn't want to also go with me on retreats, but not all of them, you know. I mean, obviously I can't take all of them on retreats, but a lot of them just want to get to that point where maybe it's about energy. One of them was about sleep. She's like you know, I've never slept in my life. I'm like that's an easy one, we'll wear your butt out and she sleeps great now. But it's just like all the different pillars and fitness that matter.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we bring them all together and figure out what people need.
Speaker 1:And you do this through group calls. Yeah, we just do it on zoom and and is this a support group where people come and say I want to do this, I want to do that. I don't know how, I'm not sure, I'm confident about it? What's the nature of it?
Speaker 2:Actually, it's a great question. Part of it is that I do a training every every call, so the training comes out of my online course. It might be about something as simple as how to create a movement plan, or it might be something as simple as, or as hard as, quitting sugar not quitting sugar for good Okay, I don't do anything in extremes, but, like we do sugar freedom, which is 30 days without sugar. That definitely becomes a support group. Everybody's like oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:I'm having trouble, but I would call it a support group so much as a ask me a question, let's figure it out. The cool thing about groups is that Everybody gets to see what other people's questions are and they realize that they're not alone Like so much of us. And what we're doing there's almost a shame. There's almost this little shame down inside of us that says, wow, you know what, I should be moving, or I should be losing weight, or I should be eating less, or whatever the should is of the day, and when you see that other people are going through the same thing, you don't feel so alone. And there's anything that like blue zones. So blue zones have suddenly become like the thing, right.
Speaker 2:They've been around for a long time and it's nothing more than places in the earth where people live the longest. But one of the pieces of that I think is the outlier piece, is the need for community. Don't think we realize how much we need community. And when you're in a group of people who are cheering you on, you have community. You have that. You get that, those endorphins and that love that we need. I mean, I don't think people really want to call it love, but that's what it is. When you've got somebody else connecting with you and even if you're on Zoom, you're like, wow, I'm heard.
Speaker 1:That's right. And in the blue zones, what's so fascinating about the way they keep people in their communities as they age? It's so different than the way we do it, which is we shun old people, we ship them off somewhere. We don't live near them, we treat them as alien or weak or foreign somehow, and we don't want to be like them. But in the blue zones, you're just part of the community. You're not the old lady, you're just another person in the community. It's really profound to see it. I was familiar with the blue zones for quite a while, of course, but this recent documentary series on Netflix is just beautiful. Have you seen it?
Speaker 2:I have.
Speaker 1:Yeah, tell the folks where they can go to learn more about your services and how they can get involved with you or get in contact with you. Sure.
Speaker 2:Easiest place, just find me on my website. It's fitisfreedomcom, and one of the cool things is Jay is going to give those of you who would like a free copy of my book it's an electronic version, but a free copy of my book it'll be available, I'm assuming, in your show notes, so you can find me that way too and the cool bonuses that come with the book, because the book has actually some very cool bonuses. Oh, well, good. I worked on them as hard as I did on the book actually.
Speaker 1:How about that? Well, I want to hear more about those things. But yes, I will put your website, fitisfreedomcom, in the show notes and I'll put the ebook in the show notes and encourage everyone to learn more about it. I really love your approach and your enthusiasm. Thank you, it's been a delight getting to know you.
Speaker 2:You too, you too, what a fun, fun day. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show and I hope you'll subscribe, tell a friend and write a review. I hope that helps us grow our audience. I also hope you'll check out the powerful fitness business training and certifications offered by my friends at the Functional Aging Institute. Fai is the leading authority on how to build a business that's focused on helping people over 50 live their best lives through fitness. Their educational services, networking opportunities and coaching are invaluable and the pricing is unbeatable. Just use this special code so they know you're coming to them through me. You can find it on the show notes page and follow the link to learn more. Also, fai president and co-founder, dan Ritchie, was our very first guest on Optimal Aging, so reach back to episode one for more about the Functional Aging Institute.
Speaker 1:I'm now thankful for FAI support as another affiliate sponsor of this show, so you'll be supporting me as well as yourself and this great organization. So thank you. You can learn more about me and my content business at PrimeFitContentcom. Send me an email at JJAY at PrimeFitContentcom. I'm also on Facebook, linkedin, instagram and just about anywhere else, so check me out. Love to hear from you. Again, thanks for listening. Join us next time.