What you do with the other 23 1/2 hours out of your day is up to you...

Many of you may have seen this video already...if not, watch it now. It's worth the 9 minutes. (Copy and paste link into browser.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUaInS6HIGo

Interesting way to look at it, huh? In case you haven't heard that exercise is THE single most important thing you can do for your health...well, it is. Not only to reduce your risk of practically every disease, but also to add years to your life. Do you want to die 5 years before you had to? It's been proven, as the doc in this video shows us. We've all heard that we should exercise for 30 minutes each day. Thirty minutes is a blink of an eye in the course of your whole day, and it doesn't have to be fancy...walking will suffice. I challenge you to find one person you know who couldn't do this...even prison inmates can meet the 30 minute requirement.

But...in case you STILL might think you don't have time for exercise, read below...

"Fat Burn" Versus "Cardio" Settings

One of the FAQ's I get as a health/fitness specialist is, "Which is a better program to do on the treadmill/elliptical? Fat burn or cardio?" Oh, how that "fat burn" setting is so deceiving.

If you've ever tried the "fat burn" program on a machine, you know that it was at a fairly light intensity. I'm guessing your heart rate and breathing never got to a point where you felt challenged. Shape magazine's December issue addressed this topic and summed it up very nicely.

"As long as you're moving, you're burning calories...But the harder you work, the higher that number will be....Preset cardio programs on most stationary bikes, treadmills and ellipticals shed calories by working with intervals--sandwiching challenging periods of training between easier ones. Fat-burn sessions, on the other hand, typically keep you going at a consistent pace and exertion level, but for a longer period of time....To get the biggest bang for your buck, choose the program that gets your heart rate up and keeps it there." Shape, December 2011, pg. 18.

So why do they label it "fat burn" if that isn't true? The confusion comes in because people have heard that when you are working at a lower aerobic intensity, most of the calories you burn are coming from fat. That is absolutely true. Almost 50% of the calories shed during lower intensity cardio exercise are from fat, which is a high ratio. However, you aren't burning very many total calories. Think of it like this: On the "fat-burn" setting you may burn 50 calories, 50% of which are fat, so you've burned 25 fat calories and 25 calories from sugar sources in your body. On the "cardio" setting, for the same amount of time, you may burn 100 calories, and say only 30% of them were from fat...that's still 30 fat calories PLUS 70 additional calories. Easy math.

If I could personally re-label all the machines in the gym to say "beginner mode" instead of "fat-burn," I would.

Light at the end of the tunnel...or at the beginning of the year, however you want to put it.

In light of the last blog post, we are rolling out a new personal training program that I am super excited about, which will both enhance what we're currently offering to our clients as well as open up more time in my schedule. (I'm excited enough to talk about it on my personal blog!) This is a program that other sites within the NIFS corporate world have successfully pulled off and recommended to me.

Our training program has evolved tremendously in the 3 years that I've been here. When I first started, we offered 1-on-1 training, but not many people knew about it, or else didn't take advantage of it. Starting in January 2009, we put a big push behind personal training, reiterating that it was a FREE service to employees, and from there, it took off. (Shoot, I would take advantage of that too!) Over the past 3 years, my client list has only grown...rarely anyone decides to quit their sessions, but new people are always interested. (At least I know they like me, right?!) In January of 2011 we had to cap people's sessions to one time per week, which helped open up space for new people. However, we're setting new records for the numbers of clients that my co-worker and I each have, and a wait-list of at least 10 people to top it off. (Which will only expand with New Year's resolutioners!) So, starting in January 2012, we are rolling out a new program called the Personal Fitness Quest, which limits personal training to a 12-week experience. While is is a limited amount of time spent with a trainer, it will be a more focused, more goal-oriented, and more include a more scientific approach. Week 1 is a pre-fitness assessment getting all the baseline measurements. Weeks 2-10 are training programs that start from the very foundations of strength training, progressing up to H.I.T. intervals and plyometrics by the end. Week 12, then, is a post-fitness assessment, so we will be capturing numbers (and hopefully seeing improvement) in just a short 3-month period. 12 weeks sounds like a short amount of time to be comparing pre and post assessments, but then again, in 12 weeks if you aren't making ANY progress, you've wasted a significant amount of time.

One problem I've identified with our current personal training program is that our clients, generally speaking, are less motivated than what they could be, because these sessions are guaranteed for them. There is no end date is sight, so it's just a given that they see me on their designated day/time, and even if they don't make improvements, they've got these sessions booked a year in advance. We're bringing back the intentional exercise and showing them that this time is to be valued and used to make major strides towards their goals. (We have clients who really do work their tails off and have shown major improvements, so I'm only speaking in general terms.) After the 12 weeks spent with a trainer, each client must spend at least 6 weeks on their own before being added back to the wait list. These 6 weeks will enable us to see new people who have not yet even had one session, and it will be forcing our clients to take total responsibility for their own fitness. After all, we're not teaching dependency. And it's not like we're throwing them into the deep end and saying, "Swim!" We're currently working on different tools to leave with our clients to make sure they're scheduling their exercise, staying accountable, and preventing injury while on their own.

Now the perks for us :) More quality time spent with our clients and a chance to revisit their new or original goals. More time to spend on our other job roles when we eventually limit our client list to somewhere between 10-15 Personal Fitness Quest-ers. While I don't love admin work (who does?), there is a LOT of it that has been pushed aside lately, and that can't be the norm. Not only do I have certain job requirements that I need to fulfill, but it also leaves me with a nagging sense of unfinished work when I leave for the day. The other thing to remember, is that in a corporate setting, I am not just a personal trainer. There is a whole population of the company that must be reached through other avenues: health literature, health fairs, smoking cessation, nutrition incentives, periodic health screenings, etc. Once you factor in the time it takes for planning and marketing of these programs, group fitness, and weekly admin/managerial work, you simply can't be spending more than 20 hours of your week doing personal training. Trust me, I've tried!

Our clients have taken the news pretty well. Of course they are all slightly bummed about spending 6 weeks or more on their own, but they know they have been spoiled with this free service, and they also see how I run through my day from appointment to appointment almost like it's an 8 hour workout! I've actually had clients ask me if I need a water or bathroom break before we start our sessions! So to refer back to my last blog post, when I feel more balanced at work, less stressed, and have ample time to plan for each individual appointment, I can do what I do better. I can bring my fresh face to their session with all the motivation and dedication they deserve, whether they're paying me or not. That's what it's all about for me too...the face time (and I don't mean the iPhone app!) that brings the immediate gratification of helping someone in my own way.

The Irony of the Healthcare Industry

I've been at my current job for a little over 3 years now. All jobs are ebb and flow with workload and demand from your clientele, but when working at a corporation whose growth (both with physical space and employee population) is always on the rise, the work load just flows, flows, flows. I look around at our department: I know I'm always busy--my weeks are scheduled with appointments to the extent where I end up with about 2 total hours of free time spread all throughout the week. By "free time," I mean unscheduled time to work on other things that have been neglected. The health fitness specialist (HFS) position, who reports directly to me, has had two staffing turnovers this year, and each of those brand new employees starts immediately with a full-plate, as they take over the prior HFS's client list and group fitness classes. Those poor girls would probably never believe that when I first started in this role, our team had plenty of down time. Oh, how times have changed. Our nurses are overworked, either constantly seeing patients for extensive new hire exams that our company requires or working on injury/illness cases. From there, the work spills over into our admin and support team. Truthfully, we all need a duplicate of ourselves to split our workload with.

Being a healthcare professional doesn't make us any less prone to job stress. It's true that we may have better outlets of dealing with that tension, but we fall suspect to it, regardless. The concern is when the job stress comes out, inadvertently, in our interactions with customers. Speaking for myself, I've had to be really careful with my responses when I get requests for new personal training appointments or new member orientations. Practically every time I sit back down at my desk, I see a membership application that a new member has dropped off. So, the thought running through my head is "oh geez...another one." I do new member orientations so often that I'm beginning to sound like a broken record (again, since we have an ever-growing employee population, the gym does too). I have to remember that this is (usually) a brand new employee who is excited about a new chapter in life: new job, new fitness routine, new goals, and I need to be there as a welcoming face and show my interest in getting them started and introducing them to all the fantastic programs we offer (those genuine feelings are within me, I promise!).

Same with personal training...when someone contacts me about setting up personal training session, the choices of reactions inside my head would be either screaming, rolling my eyes, or telling them to wait a year until I'm more free. But then I instantly remember that sending even slight messages of not being able to make time for a potential client or neglecting to come across like a motivated personal trainer is dampening the excitement they have of the goals they come to me with. Asking for help from a trainer is the first step from them--sometimes a courageous step, depending on the individual, and the worst thing we can do as a healthcare professional is come across as anything less than enthusiastic to work with them...honored that they are seeking out OUR expertise and sometimes taking a leap of faith to trust our judgement calls. In the larger picture, they are giving us all job security, after all!

I know I'm beyond blessed to say that I enjoy my job and that on most days it truly is fun. I have an awesome team of co-workers that make the best of our crazy schedules and are all team players. But, when I'm practically running out of the gym at the end of the day, avoiding making eye contact with anyone so they can't stop me with questions, paperwork, a lost locker key, etc. and then go home only to think about my to-do list as I'm falling asleep...that's the problem. And guess what: this is our supposed slow time of year.

New Heights of Fitness

Oh, hi blog. It's been a while since I wrote, but mainly because things right now are kind of routine in my fitness life. Just pulling myself out of my post-Thanksgiving turkey hangover, and trying to maintain throughout the month of December amongst all the Christmas parties. Other than my normal weekly schedule of group fitness classes, I've been maintaining my weight lifting and also running 1-2 times per week. I haven't done anything over 6 miles since the marathon.

I did try the thing I've always been saying I wanted to experience...indoor rock climbing. Chad and I both randomly had a Tuesday afternoon off work last week, so we dug out our Groupons to Climb Time that we purchased back in the summer. I've always heard what a good workout that climbing is, and after having done it myself, I concur!! I was in the middle of my first venture up the wall, probably about 4 feet from the top, and even though I was so close, my arms were shaking, my shoulders were burning, and I had to ask Chad to lower me down. I think part of it must have been nerves from getting used to the height and the feel of how to stay steady on the rocks. There's a big trust factor involved when someone is holding your rope and you are standing on a rock so small it's more like a pebble. Each climb after that was a fairly easy trip to the top, and I was much better at it than I thought I would be. I will admit that we purposely only did the "beginner" routes. There were rock paths marked in black tape that designated the easier climbs where you had a rock for right hand, right foot, left hand, left foot all the way up. I completed all of the black routes, so my goal for the next trip is all of the white routes, which is the next step up in difficulty level. While upper body strength is definitely a huge factor, as much as you can use your legs the better. My trick was to find the highest rock that I could grab onto with my hand, then use my legs to push up to that point.

I had done a pretty in-depth upper body workout the day before, so it's hard to tell entirely what was due to the rock climbing, but when the muscles in your forearms are sore for the next two days, you can bet it wasn't from the shoulder presses you did in the gym. Talk about functional fitness of pulling your own body weight! We tried some of the inverted walls where you literally are hanging on my sheer upper body strength--I didn't make it too far up those. You might think that it can't be that great of a workout when you're constantly switching off with your partner, but I found I needed those minutes to let my arms and heart rate recover.

I laughed at myself on one climb where the last rock that was available to pull yourself to the top had an impossible grip. I reached for it, but there was no way to hang on, so as soon as I lifted my other hand off the wall, I instantly slipped (well, more like slipped and then the rope flung me backwards into the wall. THAT left a mark.) I was complaining about how there was no way to grip that last rock because the ledge on it was facing sideways...then the thought hit me, wait, in real rock climbing it's not like they give you these irregular shaped knobs to hold onto every couple feet!

I can't wait for our next trip!