Some words of wisdom from my business.....

I had these inspiring pieces of advice written up to share at rural women’s event recently so thought I would share them here.

Why do I take the online approach to coaching? Why do I not head into town to train women in a gym each day? Why do I make training programs that suit people who train at home?

For along time I feel that people have thought strength training isn’t for them because most people associate that with the gym right? And for many rural women it's not practical to drive a 1 to maybe even 4 hr round trip to a gym.

I've done a few bits of research and the conciseness is that rural women feel they miss out in terms of what fitness coaches can offer because it doesn’t suit their lifestyle so I wanted to fill in the missing pieces basically.

Lock down in 2020 was the turning point for me here. When NZ got sprung into lockdown, I packed up my horse and dog and quite literally rode lock down out at the end of NZs longest no exit road. 40mins up the Waitotara Valley where my partner was working at the time.

I hadn’t been without a gym for about 5 years at this point and my anxiety of not being able to hit the gym 5 days a week was high. I have videos of me balling my eyes out not knowing what it meant for me mentally and emotionally because the gym had been a huge outlet for me but I also didn’t know what it meant for my business.

But it was during this time I feel in love with training at home, blasting my fav music, surrounded by dogs and litters of puppies at this point, with a beauty of the rural landscape as my gym views. I adapted many gym based exercises to things that I could utilise at home, I put more focus on the execution of the exercise and the slow tempo and not only maintained muscle but felt the best physically I ever had.

When I went back to a gym after lockdown it wasn’t the same, it didn’t give me the same fulfilment anymore, I was happier training at home and knew I was getting just as good a results.

I knew then that more rural women needed to realise that they could feel the same.

My business mission used to be I aim to help women realise the power of grasping a barbell this is related to the confidence and empowerment that can come from learning the art of lifting weights but the same can be said for simply I aim to help women grasp the power of strength training in the comfort of your own home.

You talk a lot about mindset and building and growing this over time - what helps you strengthen this and what advice do you give to your clients?

My opinion is that balance in life comes from working on all areas of yourself, mind, body and soul, hence my business tagline. In order to have this balance and strengthen your mindset you need to mix time spent learning, growing, working and also resting. Like literally doing nothing but breathing, society is so busy doing that its easy to forget we are human beings not human doings. This is another lesson from the four legged actually it doesn’t always have to be about the doing sometimes it can just be about the being. I think this is an important thing to remember in all aspects of your life because we are not designed to always be on the go, running off adrenaline and operating outside of window of tolerance, so meaning we are operating in either hyper or hypo arousal which are two stress states. The more you can increase the size of you window of tolerance by doing things like mediation, reading, breathing, journalling, anything that you love - things that fuel your soul, even ensuring you are eating nutritious foods will help reduce the chances of you entering fight/flight or freeze stress states bringing more balance to your life which helps strengthen your mindset.

I am also really big on practices like affirmations and gratitudes, every morning I write down what I am grateful for, this practice helps you to see more of the good in your world because no matter how shit of a day you may be having, there is always something to be grateful for and the more you practice this the more you will see it.

My biggest advice to clients is generally to focus on food first because at the end of the day you can only be as strong as the fuel you do or don’t put into your body enables you to be and for the most part rural women particularly are under eating, we live busy active lives, we need fuel to do to this. As I very much learnt myself when I first started my health and fitness journey, improving the quality of your nutrition will also improve your ability to be in a better place mentally.

You talk about the importance of having a strong mind, body and making time for yourself. What barriers do you normally come across for women living rurally and what advice do you have for these ladies?

Women living rurally are often jugging dozens of roles, farmer, cook, house wive, book keeper, mum, partner whatever else, its hard for them to see time to put into themselves but as you may have heard me talk about before I am huge advocate that in order to look after others, the farm, the animals, you need to first look after you. It all starts with you. What I mean by this is you cannot give from an empty cup and while people may think their cup is not empty I can assure that if you keep giving from it without refilling it, It will end up empty and worse with a hole in it.

By making time to give to yourself, it often means that you may have less quantity to give others but you will have more quality. Putting yourself first to ensure your cup is full and over flowing is a service to others, it means you have more energy, clarity and patience and that to me is more important that less quality but more quantity.

Just like any habit it takes time to build, start with small bits of time focusing on you and the things that fill up your cup, even if its just 5mins a day. Don’t go in to it all guns blazing thinking you can suddenly go from making no time for you to hours a day, you will overwhelm yourself and never follow through. Change is hard, change is scary, we are literally wired to move away from change because what we know keeps us safe, so the best way to make changes is small bits at a time. After all the journey of a thousand miles started with a single step.