Breaking down these three pillars of exercise and healthy living from the perspective of a personal trainer, JOGA coach, and nutritionist.

I don’t typically make new goals when January rolls around, as I tend to work on and reassess my personal fitness and nutritional goals regularly throughout the year. A new year is of course a fresh start, but it doesn’t always mean a reset of your personal objectives or a change in perspective. Many times, I’m working towards the same goals as I was the year before and the year after that. A new year is an exciting thing! But I don’t like to put too much pressure on myself or my clients to change things up if they don’t need to. This is why this post here won’t be a typical “new year, new goals” post that many of us are used to seeing every January from the fitness industry. 

Instead, I’d like to talk about three distinct, yet interconnected, pillars of fitness and health that I so strongly apply to my own exercise regimen and encourage with my clients and athletes; alignment, balance, and intention. Three incredibly important factors have an indisputable effect on the effectiveness of your physical exercises and mental health habits. When we focus on alignment, balance, and intention in our workouts we are allowing our body to strengthen, lengthen and operate in its most optimal state. And when we focus on alignment, balance, and intention in the way we think and perceive ourselves/our world, we are working to break negative thought patterns and manifest calmness, compassion, and curiosity in our minds. 

We’ll be addressing these three pillars as they relate to physical fitness and nutrition goals this month. Diving into the importance and benefit of each when it comes to exercise and food, and what they mean for a personal trainer, a JOGA coach, and a nutritionist (all of which I am!). 

Woo, here we go!

Having good alignment keeps your joints in their proper positions. This produces optimal muscle performance which translates to power and stamina.

Alignment 

Alignment refers to how the head, shoulders, spine, hips, knees, and ankles relate and line up with each other. 

Alignment is huge in the JOGA world. It’s one aspect we emphasize heavily as we transition to and from and as we breathe within each pose. From the crown of our head down to our toes, there is always a way to keep our neck and spine long, our hips square, and our knees in line with our ankles. Alignment in JOGA teaches us to tune into our bodies, stay focused within the exercise and adjust in ways that work for our particular body (because we’re all different!). When it comes down to it, alignment is at the very core of JOGA and that’s what makes it such an effective practice for people and top athletes in the world.

Much like in JOGA, alignment in the personal training world is all about keeping our joints safe and strong and preventing overcompensation in any part of our body as we’re lifting weights, using resistance bands, or supporting our own weight. I am always encouraging proper form and alignment to ensure the body functions at its best and the risk of injury stays low. We want to strengthen our muscles and joints, not put added stress on them. 

As a nutritionist, I like to encourage my clients to align their fitness goals with their nutrition goals. Make sure that the calories you are taking in positively affect the work you put in during your exercise days. Eat enough calories to fuel and refuel your body. Eat enough of the right foods to regenerate your muscles and help them grow/repair while you rest. Eat foods that sit well in your gut and give you the energy to keep you motivated for your workouts. When food and body are aligned, anything is possible.

Balance is a key component of fitness, along with strength, endurance, and flexibility. It is a fundamental aspect of any movement we perform.

Balance

Balance training is often neglected when people are developing their fitness regime. This may be because they don’t understand the incredible benefits it can have on our bodies and minds, or perhaps because it’s not an aspect that immediately comes to mind when we have exercise on the brain. The thing is, improving our balance will ultimately allow us to achieve more – achieve our goals! – in our respective sports or training programs.

In JOGA, we work a lot on keeping our bodies in balance, specifically when we transition from one pose to another. One-legged poses give us a chance to find our center of gravity and dance around its edges. When we balance, we align our body’s center of gravity with the earth’s gravitational field. The sustained effort to center and recenter, when successful, brings not only our flesh and bones into balance but also our nerve impulses, thoughts, emotions, and consciousness. 

A focus on staying balanced helps us find mental and emotional steadiness as well. Calmness of the mind is a huge takeaway from JOGA sessions.

Focusing on balance in JOGA is what rounds out an entire session, complementing the muscle-building exercises and our breathwork. Balance is what keeps us on our feet and allows our bodies to continue doing what we love to do, both in and out of our JOGA sessions.

I get many clients who come to me wanting a personal coach who will provide a program that focuses on weight loss and/or strength training. I love to create programs of all styles that will allow my clients to reach their personal goals, AND I never forget to add in the element of balance training (which many people aren’t prepared for!). As I said, it’s not an exercise element that readily comes to mind when you think about putting together a fitness program. But it’s essential to create a well-balanced, fully functional, and effective exercise plan. Improving balance is important for overall fitness and everyday activities simply because it increases overall movement function. Any workout move you do requires some level of balance—to even just walk you need to have basic balancing abilities. So balance is absolutely, always a key element that I include in my clients’ custom fitness programs. 

Balance for me, as a nutritionist, relates to the food we ingest and our personal nutrition goals. In order to find a healthy balance in our life, eating the foods we like that allow us to reach our goals, is so important. Otherwise, the food portion of your healthy lifestyle program will always feel like an uphill battle. Finding whole, healthy foods that work for your palate, your stomach, and your digestive system is essential to keeping your body feeling strong, energized, and functional in all respects (including your mind). As a nutritionist, it’s my job to work with the foods that work for you to create a custom plan that you’ll be happy to stick to day in and day out as you progress on your fitness journey. And I’m here for it!

Without clear intentions, people tend to wander aimlessly from one situation to another. Life then becomes one of least resistance, never really getting the molding needed to accomplish their goals.

Intention

We live in such a fast-paced world. Everyone is go-go-go. We need to be here, have to be there. Need to get this done, have to start planning a new project. Some days, it can feel hard to catch our breath. It can feel hard to simply stop and sit. We fly through the hours, many times on autopilot, and end up wondering where the weeks, months, and years go. And to top it all off, we’re inundated on social media with images and videos that distract us from our individual lives and make us think that we should be somewhere else, doing something else, with someone else; making happiness seem as though it can be attained elsewhere and that it’s not already exactly where we are. Living with intention and ensuring our healthy lifestyle programs – exercise and nutrition – are done with intention (acute attention and focus on the present movement, breath, activity, food) is extremely important to make the most of your JOGA sessions, workouts, and meals.

Every JOGA pose, movement, transition, breath, and exercise is led and sustained with absolute intention. It’s a fundamental pillar of JOGA as a fitness program. Bringing your focus onto the present moment, onto your body and all its sensations as you move and hold each pose is what allows you to get the most from a session. Bringing the focus to your body and your breath is what gets you out of your head and into practice. You can engage your muscles more effectively, inhale and exhale more efficiently and maintain the mind-body connection that makes JOGA an incredibly powerful exercise for athletes and people looking to level up their fitness program.

This mind-body connection we strive for in JOGA is just as important and just as encouraged in strength training. As a personal trainer, I also like to empower my clients to make intentional goals for their custom program. Do you want to deadlift a certain amount by the end of the program? Do you want to achieve a certain body mass index? Do you want to strengthen your body in a way that eliminates targeted pain and tension? What are your specific personal goals that have brought us together? I find that these goals allow for the magic to really happen. The hard work pays off too of course,  but goals without intention are just dreams. Let’s make some magic together this year!

When I think about intention as it relates to food, I think about mindful eating. Take your time to plate your food and then eat slowly enough to chew 20-30 times to really taste the food that’s on your palate. Savor the flavours, relish in your hard work and enjoy the textures of the foods you love. Aside from the pleasure portion of eating more mindfully, taking more chews in every bite is important, because the better your body is prepared to break down and digest the food, the more nutrients your body will absorb from said food. The stomach is a bit like a blender mixing everything up, and breaking down food into smaller constituent parts. Protein digestion starts in the stomach, so the larger the food particles are, the harder the stomach acid has to work to break it down, therefore absorbing fewer nutrients than it could if the food had been masticated more before swallowing. The physical action of chewing supports digestion.

So cook up your favourite foods, marvel at the plate in front of you, and take nice slow bites as you enjoy every part of your plate!

Starting a new year is always exciting – especially after the last couple years we’ve had! – and I look forward to what’s ahead for us as a collective, for me as an individual and for my clients. Cheers to a great January and a happy, healthy 2022!

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Interested in giving JOGA a try for your sports team or as an individual? I’m available for in-person and virtual JOGA and I am currently offering two online sessions a week that you can sign up for here: link here

Looking for a dedicated personal trainer and/or fitness nutritionist for 2022? I’m accepting new clients and would love to work with you to create completely customized programs. Reach out to me via email to start the conversation: info@getfitfirst.ca

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