Episode #174 group fitness is fun but is it truly serving you?

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:35

Hello, hello, welcome back to the podcast. Somehow it has been like two weeks since I last recorded whoopsie. I don't even know what happened last week, but clearly I forgot uh to podcast, so apologies. But I am still getting a bunch of downloads every week, which is very exciting. So if you're new around here, thanks for being here. Welcome. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out on any episodes. But today, well, right now I just finished hammering out like four emails, and they're honestly all really good podcast topics. Um, so I might make each one a podcast, I haven't decided yet, but one that I want to talk about in this episode is about group fitness. Now, I totally get that group fitness is fun, but I want you to ask yourself, is it truly serving you? And this is coming from somebody who has coached group fitness my entire coaching career, which is 13 years at this point. I have coached thousands and thousands of group fitness classes, okay? Um, and uh I still think there's such a large portion of people doing group fitness who would be much better served doing a personalized program. Now, on the other hand, I know that there are plenty of people who go to group fitness and truly feel really good in their body, have no aches or pains, and to that I will say I am jealous. But the pattern that I tend to see is that people show up to class consistently, they have aches or pains or movement limitations, so they have to modify movements, and because they're always modifying movements, these issues never seem to get better, so they never actually start to move better because group fitness is generic and it's not written for everybody's issues, that would be impossible. And because of this, this person tends to develop more aches and pains due to these limitations that they're dealing with, and then they eventually take a break because they're frustrated with your body, they're frustrated with always hurting or not making progress or whatever. So, like though they might take a break, and then on the break, it's highly likely they're not doing much of any movement other than like walking, and then when they come back to the gym, they just come right back to class and just jump right back in. This is the equivalent of like not running for six months and then trying to run a 10k race, it is not going to go well, and your body's gonna be like, excuse me, ma'am, like what are we doing here? This does not feel good, like we are not ready for this, and you're likely going to be in pain again. Now, I do realize that there are people out there who do not care about their body feeling good, and it's just about like showing up, getting the work done for them, like whatever, that's great. They don't, it's not a priority for them to like solve these deeper issues, and that's totally fine. But for those people who do care and want to feel better in their workouts, they want to modify less, they want to feel less nagging pain inside the gym and outside the gym. I promise you that it is worth the time to take a break from group, do individualized work that your body needs with a coach who can help you and knows how to help you, and then reintegrate back into group class as your body fills in the gaps and limitations that you're dealing with. This is exactly the type of stuff I help with clients with all the time. Now, the caveat here is that if you do want to go this route and work with a coach one-on-one to fix these issues, you have to make sure they actually have the knowledge to solve the problem you're looking to solve. Quite a bit of personal trainers have no idea how to like solve these limitations, and they will just you know continue to modify, you don't do anything that hurts or whatever, and like they don't really know how to solve it. So, Murph, don't do that. Sorry, Murph is like trying to lick a plant. Um, but so like the person that you do work with, like, you need to be confident that they know how to do a proper assessment to identify the real reason why you're dealing with you know the hip pain, the back pain, the knee pain, like whatever it is. Like, they should have a thorough assessment and testing process, then they should know how to build a customized program off of those results and know how to find a proper starting point for you, and then progress you slowly from there. Like, that's what the process should look like. And not all personal trainers work in this way, so this is why I'm bringing it up. If you're somebody who like has no idea what this process should look like, like those are things that you need to look out for. Um, and this is something that I help clients do all the time, both in person and virtual. And uh I sorry, I'm just like trying to think about how to phrase this next thing that I say is that people who love group fitness, like I know it's really hard to do this. Like, I know it is hard to take a break from the thing that you love, from working out with your friends, in order to fix what's going on with your body. And um, I've worked with a lot of CrossFitters, and like CrossFitters really deal with this mindset thing of like, you know, they don't want to stop going to class, and you know, it's fun and all these things, but it's like, okay, how long have you been dealing with this issue? Do you want to keep dealing with it? If the answer is you've been dealing with it for a long time and you don't want to keep dealing with it, it's worth the time to take the time away, right? And you know, if you're gonna miss your friends, like you can see them outside the gym or outside of the gym class setting, right? Um, and in the long run, and we think about like the longevity of you working out in the gym, the this like picture in time of like six months or eight months or whatever it is, like it's a small blip in the radar compared to the years and longevity that you're gonna be moving your body and hopefully being able to do group fitness. And so I know in the moment it can seem like such a huge thing to take a break from it, but if you really take the concentrated time and like follow the guidance from your coach on like how to you know solve this issue that's going on, then you're gonna be much better off at the end when you're able to okay, you fill in all these gaps that we find. So let's say we find mobility issues, we find a strength and balance, and you know, you have to do all this personalized programming to fill in those gaps, and then you know, reintegrate those harder, more advanced movements from there. Like your body's gonna be in a such, I was gonna say such much, but a much better place after you do that. And like then when you return to group class, you're gonna just feel so much better because you took the time to fill in the gaps, you know, work on the strength and balances, and truly like rebuild your foundation the right way, and your longevity of moving your body is going to be so much better when you do actually deal with the issue and the root cause of why your body actually feels the way that it does, instead of just constantly modifying or throwing a band-aid on the issue, and it's always kind of there, always kind of lingering, you know. So, anyways, you only get one body, so I encourage you to take care of it, solve the problem because the longer that you put off dealing with a problem in your body, the bigger of a problem it honestly becomes over time, and the longer it takes to fix. So, yeah, I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you learned something, I wanted to send I want you to send it to your gym buddy and make sure you're subscribed to the show so you don't miss an episode. And if you're somebody who wants to take the first step towards um seeing, like, okay, hey, what's going on with my body? What do I need to do in order to start feeling better? Check the link in the show notes to reach out to me. The first step that I take with all of my clients is doing an assessment to make sure that I am even the right person to help you. So let's have a conversation, see if you're fit for an assessment, and then go from there. If you are somebody who wants to solve this issue for good. All right, chat soon.