The Tea with Tina

233 | Why I Don't Promote Intense Fitness Bootcamps and Burpees

Tina Wieland Season 1 Episode 233

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Ever wondered if high-intensity workouts are the only route to fitness success? My 13-year journey, which began at the tender age of 16, uncovers the truth behind those bombastic claims. Embarking on this path with workout legends like Jillian Michaels and Beachbody, I quickly realized that lifting weights in high school gym class sparked a passion far beyond competitive sports. Yet, like many, I initially fell into the "cardio bunny" trap of burning calories to justify eating them. It took a significant shift in mindset, fueled by health challenges like Hashimoto's, to embrace a more sustainable approach to fitness that goes beyond the surface level.

Transitioning from a childhood diet of fast and processed food to a more mindful and healthy lifestyle wasn't easy, but it was transformative. I recount the early days of learning to cook, overcoming my fair share of culinary blunders, and how these small steps led to a 30-pound weight loss. However, the realization soon hit that shedding pounds without building muscle wasn't the balanced approach I needed. This chapter of my life was a lesson in persistence and adaptability, shifting from a fixation on aesthetics to a holistic view of health and strength.

Navigating personal health challenges, such as the hormonal imbalances caused by birth control and coping with my husband's deployment, taught me resilience and adaptability. Strength training became my solace, but it was yoga that offered healing during setbacks like a hip injury. I share how these experiences led me to become an independent trainer and advocate for moderate, consistent exercise. By establishing a baseline of lifestyle fitness, we can adjust our routines to match life's unpredictable phases, ensuring our well-being isn't sidelined by stress or circumstance. Join me in redefining fitness as a journey of growth and balance, rather than merely a pursuit of physical appearance.

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Tea with Tina, your favorite podcast, where we talk all things health, fitness, lifestyle and maybe a little bit of tea gets spilled. We chat all about this in a super casual environment. So grab your beverage of choice, sit back, relax and enjoy. Relax and enjoy. Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of the Tea with Tina podcast. Today's episode is an impromptu one, as much of these are.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to be honest with my creative process. It doesn't work very well for me to pre-plan. I don't know why. It's just the way my brain works. You may agree with this, but if I try to sit down and like script out what I'm going to say, write my talking points, it never comes out as genuine than if I just kind of tell it from my heart and my mind. Now, I do believe also, kind of doing stuff impromptu leaves room for a little bit more chaos and not being as organized. But for some reason I just I can't script it unless it's more of like a list or more. You know, fact-based, science-based. This is more personal experience, so it's harder to script. My only thing is I want to make sure that I'm saying everything that I need to say here. So I wanted to chat today because I feel like it's been a while since I've kind of referred to my own fitness journey and my own story. I do give you guys real-time updates on things, but it's important to know where I came from, because I really got into fitness I would say around the age 16, 17. And I just turned 29 a couple days ago and that means it would be 13 years. That's a long time right to be into fitness, you know. Just to give you a brief timeline of that, around 16, 17,.

Speaker 1:

I did, um, you know, jillian Michaels. This was when Comcast had like the on-demand center and there was all these free on-demand workouts with your Comcast subscription, which is now Xfinity, uh, for those of you who don't know. Uh, but I did, jillian Michaels. I did belly dancing stuff. I actually did Beachbody, um, which they just rebranded I guess they're just Body now uh, but I did Beachbody. My first program I bought from them was Brazilian, the Brazilian butt lift, and it was like this three disc set and you get the booty bands, um, and it was actually kind of an interesting program, but I used that. I remember I'd be doing crunches in my room. Then I actually went to a gym galaxy fitness was the place was a private gym. I got a gym membership because I was doing some training at in the high school gym. That's really how I got into lifting.

Speaker 1:

You can choose between do you want to play dodgeball and all these games with the super competitive guys, or do you want to go off and do a lifting class. And me and my friend did the lifting class. There was only like two of us, but the teacher would put us through like these basic workouts and he'd test us and say, hey, what is this working? Let's go out and run the stairs, let's do some ball slams, you know. So it was fun and it really kind of started my passion for actually working out and lifting, you know, versus getting hit in the face with a dodgeball from some guy who cheated in gym class and took it way too seriously. I loved games in gym class but, yeah, I don't know, it just was old and I wanted something different, and I'm glad that I did so. I got into it through that I was going to the gym, I don't know, it just was old and I wanted something different and I'm glad that I did so. Um, I got into it through that I was going to the gym.

Speaker 1:

I didn't know much, you know, I was a cardio bunny. I was, um, you know, doing a ton of cardio. I remember my friend who would go with me. She I specifically remember her just walking super fast on an incline. She's like I got hit 1200 calories. She's like, because I ate 1200 calories today, so if I burn 1200, you know, I'll be good and like. That's how disordered it was. I was doing some machines. I don't know if I was tracking like sets and repetitions at that time, but I was just moving my body on a consistent basis, right.

Speaker 1:

Another part of this of me telling my story, which I'll probably add to the title, is I want to explain why I talk about things the way I do, and I'm not. I personally have drifted away from super intense cardio, super intense workouts and more sustainability, and the reason I'm explaining this is when a lot of people come to me, whether I'm teaching classes or they're trying to lose weight, they want to approach it from a very extreme route. You know they feel that if they're not doing burpees, they're not super sore the next day, they're not dripping sweat. Then they're not seeing progress, and that can be wrong in many ways you can be an experienced lifter, experienced trainee and not get sore. Muscle soreness is caused from new stimuli and while it is good to switch things up and challenge the way you're doing things, doing the same thing or something similar to the same thing over a extended period of time can actually get us better results and help minimize injury. There's a lot of reasons behind that and my own personal journey with Hashimoto's and things like that how my body personally cannot handle that high intensity in the long term. Now some people can and they may enjoy that. They might be a little bit more of the adrenaline junkie and you know that's their stress relief and that's totally fine. But I'm talking to the people out there who maybe they don't want to do the crazy HIIT training, they don't want to do 100 burpees, they don't want the drill sergeant boot camp. There is another way, because I will say that's not me either.

Speaker 1:

I never was in sports for various reasons. I just never got involved in sports. I was like the art kid. I did all kinds of, like you know, different hobbies, but nothing fitness related. I would play outside with my friends growing up, we would run around and I would definitely get movement and working out, but just never formal sports. You know wasn't super involved in gym class at some point. Sometimes I'd get really into it, sometimes I'd hang out with my friends, but growing up, you know, I just was never naturally fit, never exposed to that.

Speaker 1:

I ate very processed foods because we were a family of five it was, you know, hot dogs, mac and cheese, spaghetti. Some meals weren't inherently bad. We had like a protein, carb veggie, but you know it might have been like a bagged crockpot meal. We went out to eat Friday, saturday, sunday. I always looked forward to Friday, saturday, sunday because we would get Burger King, we'd get Wendy's, mcdonald's.

Speaker 1:

I remember where I lived we actually had a strip and it just had every fast food chain you could think of. And back in the day fast food was more, it was viewed differently. I feel like fast food is kind of crappy now. This could just be because I'm eating healthier, but the quality has definitely gone down. Back then I would say it was the golden era of fast food. You know they had all these promotions to get you in. You know they had all these fun foods they were advertising. So it was like the heyday of fast food and it was actually good. I wasn't saying it was good for you, but it tasted good. But yeah, there was McDonald's, wendy's, arby's, burger King, literally any Long John Silver's, dairy Queen any fast food you could think of was in this little strip.

Speaker 1:

And I remember my mom would just hop from building to building depending on what we wanted. Oh, my brother wanted Burger King. Well, I wanted Arby's, she wanted McDonald's and we would. Just that was like our routine. You know, sundays we would go out to eat, usually for breakfast. We would maybe go out to dinner. You know, because my parents worked a lot, they were busy, they didn't have a lot of time to prep stuff, so we would go out to eat. So it was just ingrained in me Ice cream. My family would eat ice cream after dinner every single night. My sister loves ice cream Vacations. We would always get ice cream, even when it was cold out. Um, you know, that was also a big part of my life.

Speaker 1:

So my life culture was not very healthy and maybe a lot of you can relate to that. And I think there's a lot of trainers out there. Um, not that it's a shame or crap talking there, but there's a lot of trainers that just naturally came from a healthier background. Like, maybe their parents worked out, maybe they grew up and were in sports their whole life, so they kind of grew up in a space where they learned fitness and they learned healthy eating habits. And again, maybe their parents cooked healthy food. They grew up around smoothies and home-cooked meals and their parents limited them to eating out and it was a rarity, you know, and that's fine. But I will say that they don't know what it's like to come from the opposite end of the spectrum and then go into fitness. And that's when I kind of decided to do it myself.

Speaker 1:

Like, as I was getting older 16, 17, 18, I was getting closer to being an adult, I became more independent. There was some stuff at home it wasn't a big deal but like pretty much my mom and dad just like argued, like my dad didn't want to eat the stuff my mom was making. So my mom kind of went on this thing where she just didn't cook dinner and she's like everybody fends for themselves, because she got so fed up with it. So that was when I took things into my own hands because I was working a job at the time. This was probably when I was about 18, 19. And I just learned to cook, because my mom never taught me to cook. You know we never really did that. So I just went out to Walmart. I bought groceries. I was like learning things At this time.

Speaker 1:

This is when I started Advocare, because I was doing my at-home workouts. Now Advocare, they gave me some guidance on how to build healthy foods. They sucked. It was like plain chicken breast that was barely cooked enough. I was afraid of overcooking it and it was like almost pink on the inside. Right, no seasonings, plain broccoli that was microwaved and heated up. You know bagged rice or a cup of rice. It was bad, okay, but I was trying. I was trying. There were some fun protein pancakes in there. You know I played around with different things. So you know we were making some progress. I will also say this reminded me right before this happened and I really dived into my fitness journey.

Speaker 1:

Another part to show how unhealthy I was was I would go out to Denny's, the diner with my friends. We would get milkshakes. I'd get chicken strips with mac and cheese and french fries, like every night. You know, full sugar soda. I was drinking full sugar monsters. This was before the zero monsters, Okay, um, loaded with sugar, loaded with calories, like we would just be always eating this crap.

Speaker 1:

And I'm surprised I wasn't heavier than what I was. But at that time, um, you know, I was easing my way into the working out space and I lost, um, about 25 to 30 pounds. I'd say 30 pounds at most. Now let me explain this, though that first initiation of 30 pounds that I lost, I think I did it in a good way, but it was almost. I didn't have the muscle on my frame. So when I did lose those 30 pounds, I looked skinny, right, it almost was a little too much. But you get to that point where you're addicted at seeing the scale go down and you get that energy rush. You're like, oh, I need more, more, more. Um, and that's what I was doing. And, like I said, it got to the point where my calories were super low, like 1200 calories.

Speaker 1:

I remember being hungry all the time, super cold all the time, but I was so happy to be so thin and everybody complimented me and and this and that, and then from there, and that's when I started to study for my personal trainer certification, right, because everybody's like, oh, you're so into fitness, why don't you do that? So I did and at this time I started studying. I signed up for a different gym and I started to get into actual strength training and I found the strength training craze that was on social media at the time. Girls were getting more into lifting weights it wasn't so much cardio and workout videos so I got more into that and I slowly shifted my eating habits. You know, you got to eat more, you got to eat more protein, and this is when I started to build a little bit of muscle and, of course, I gained a little bit of weight with that course, I gained a little bit of weight. With that. I'd say I probably gained maybe 5-10 pounds back and it was good you know good weight. My body looked completely different than if it were to be just fat. That was gained back and I got certified. I started training at a gym. I started teaching my ways. You know, fast forward, maybe five years.

Speaker 1:

At this time I was struggling with birth control issues. You know different methods. My hormones were so wonky I don't believe it was directly related to, like, my fitness or anything. I had this since, you know, I was going into puberty, but my periods were just crazy irregular. I've made many episodes on this podcast explaining that, but they were just so irregular. I had crazy heavy periods. I didn't know when it was coming. It could not come for six months, a year, three months. I tracked it. There was no pattern to it. Super light, super heavy. Doctors couldn't give me an explanation. They didn't run any tests, just like every other female issue. They just say, hey, go on birth control. So that's what I did because I didn't know any better. So I went on all these different pills, iuds. I had different side effects every time. They never just seemed to work and on top of this, it did affect my body. It would affect hunger cues. Some of them I could stay leaner on and it was easier to stay fit. Other ones I'd get super bloated, hold on to water weight. I had no energy. I would be in pain. So it really affected my ability to keep up with my fitness journey right. So I was going through all this. My husband got deployed for a year at the time, so that was really stressful, but it allowed me to focus on my fitness.

Speaker 1:

And then let's fast forward to COVID. Okay, covid happens, uh, as we decide to move across the state. So I'm, I'm starting new, we're in lockdown, okay, um, I pretty much lose a lot of my muscle because I don't have access to strength training and my eating slows down because I'm not as hungry, because I'm not moving as much, so it's walks home workouts. Then I sign up for a gym and I join this gym and I'm a trainer there and they have big boy free weights like barbells and things. My other gym didn't have as much equipment. So now I really get into strength training, I get into lifting heavy, I get addicted to it. I'm not really tracking my calories, honestly, and I would say I gained about 10 to 20 pounds honestly and it was, you know, probably my most muscular physique and I felt really, really good. I felt energetic. And what happened and this was probably over like a three year period of me really getting into strength training right, like I'm getting over 200 pounds in my deadlift and my squat it felt amazing. I felt good, I was eating whatever I wanted.

Speaker 1:

I don't know what happened here, but it could have been a result of COVID, it could have been just stress. Who knows, one day I get a hip injury. You may have heard the updates through the podcast. It was just a mystery hip injury. I woke up with it. It's not like I did a move and it happened, but it was kind of like chronic inflammation, chronic soreness of this, my groin area. It was giving me immense pain. No matter what I did. Anything that engaged my core, I just could not work out. Okay, on top of this I'm getting tested for hypothyroidism and underactive thyroid. You know they're monitoring my thyroid because my levels are a little bit high and but it's not high enough to get diagnosed. So let's see what happens over the next couple months. So pretty much over six months they keep retesting me. So between this hip injury and between getting tested, I'm trying to do everything in my power to be as healthy as possible Drink water, manage stress, take my supplements, eat really clean Like I'm doing everything and pretty much this thing is not healing this. My thyroid levels are actually getting worse.

Speaker 1:

So it was I was in limbo and I was doing so well and I really found my space in heavy lifting and strength training and I was kind of doing a little bit of everything. It felt great like I was training like an athlete and all of that had to go on hold. It just had to. There was no way I could grip my teeth, white knuckle through it. I had to just pull back and it sucked. As a trainer to be like, oh, all I'm doing is walking. And that's when I fell in love with yoga. So it was a blessing in disguise. You know, yoga was a wonderful healing tool for me, mentally and physically.

Speaker 1:

Um, that gym also was very stressful for me, work-wise. Um, you know, I needed to move on from that gym for various reasons, so that was also putting a lot of stress on me. So it was like this whole transition. Um, at this point, you know, I found out it was my birth control that was causing extra inflammation to my groin area. I don't know if that was the cause, but as soon as I got off of it, um, it improved significantly, like overnight. Um, I was going to pelvic floor physical therapy for it, doing everything for it. Um, then I left my job and went full time by myself. So that was crazy, um, but freeing, and I I got finally diagnosed with, uh, with hypothyroidism and Hashimoto's, so I got medicated for that, which that was its own journey. I, as of recently, in the past couple months, just finally found a dose that works and that can change. Also, like so many factors, your thyroid can just weaken and you need a higher dose. You know you can be in a stressful situation. You can need a less dose. You know it can just change, right. So I'm going through all of this and I'm trying to maintain a level of fitness right. I'm sticking to the basics water walking, stretching little lifts when I can.

Speaker 1:

When I started my independent trainer journey and I worked at my new gym, I started from the beginning. I started on machines. I felt very, very weak Dumbbell work. I worked my way up to a barbell and I will say, as of now after I guess it's been a year, a little over a year, about a year and a half I feel in a good spot, especially with my groin and stuff, because my groin was irritated even then if I trained a little bit heavier. But I am jumping, I'm moving, I'm sweating. I'm not pushing super heavy weights as of yet, but I do want to get into it. I do want to get into it. I was really more so focusing on my clients and building that up and and doing my online and in person clients and really just getting a system situated. It's kind of crazy now that I say all of that stuff out in one swift motion, but there's been a lot of changes and you're hearing the simplified version. There was a lot of little details in between but it's a lot of change, but it's good change. So you know, I would say as of now I have a good routine going.

Speaker 1:

You may have heard me chat about this before on the podcast. My biggest thing is kind of finding a schedule that works with my brain and around my clients and getting everything I want to get done done right. That's the big thing. So that's been ever evolving because I think things change, especially when you have clients Like I could have, you know, more morning clients for a couple months and then all of a sudden I have more evening clients. So my schedule is going to adjust based off that and I think that's one of the things holding me back from workouts. Giving you a little insight into that is for me.

Speaker 1:

I personally like to strength train in the early to mid-morning. The way my schedule is all of my clients. I'm pretty much 7 to noon, back-to-back doing stuff. So usually after all that, the last thing I want to do is work out and usually I'm already up at like 520 ish in the morning, so I don't know if I want to get up any earlier. So that's where we're. That's where we're at. But luckily I've been able to take my own classes, my own fitness classes, as a way to work out, and it's a nice combination between cardio and strength, but definitely a little bit of a lower intensity than like a HIIT. Right, you're going to get your sweat and heart rate up, but it's not as physically taxing. Cardio wise, you get more of the strength benefit and that's been really, really great. So through all of that, you may be able to see why I choose to teach in a more sustainable way, because my life's pretty crazy.

Speaker 1:

Even though I'm a trainer right, and inflammation is one thing. If I like run a ton or push it, I feel it like pretty bad, not like a normal. I'm tired, like I physically need to recover for like a week, like I'm burned out. And's what's doing all the right things. It's just because with Hashimoto's, you already have inflammation in your body, so adding extra inflammation from working out makes the recovery process that much harder and puts extra strain on your body. So I have to be more mindful of my recovery and more mindful of quality nutrition and things like that.

Speaker 1:

And again, where this ties in is a lot of you guys listening have crazy lives too, like when I first started. Yeah, I was young. I was I'm still young, I know, but I was like a teenager. You know, you don't have as much responsibility. You're in your early 20s. You have the whole time. I still don't know how I was able to, like, stay up till 11 o'clock at night working out and and then wake up early to go to the gym. My schedule was everywhere. I somehow had the energy to do things and I don't know what happens. It's just like you get older, you get more responsibilities and things get harder. Right, it's just what it is and that's pretty much what happened. I'm running a business now, you know I'm doing online and in person clients. I have an apartment. I have pets to take care of. You know, there's just more responsibilities. And again, you have kids. You might work one or two jobs, you know, maybe you have fur babies to take care of. You are busy, right, and I believe that a lot of us even if you don't have an autoimmune disorder although some of you might in general our inflammation and stress is high.

Speaker 1:

So to add something that's super stressful and inflammatory on top of it is usually not good. Most of us are coming from that super stressed place at least the people I'm talking to and the last thing we need is to add a ton of cardio, a ton of high intensity stuff on top of it. There are some people that maybe they benefit from it Probably not as many as you would think, and I'm not saying cardio is bad or the devil. I'm just saying, unless you're like an athlete or you truly love doing it, I would question why you want to like run a ton of miles or do like crazy burpee, jumping around, bouncing around moves right, unless you're truly passionate about it or you need to do it. Very rarely do we need to right.

Speaker 1:

Walking is great. There's no shame in walking. I love walking. It has been my saving grace. So there's a lot of good things that could come from. You know, doing lower intensity cardio, moderate cardio, right, and it doesn't hurt to throw it in every now and then. I did a 5 um in the springtime and I was fine. I didn't die, it was good. I was a little sore, but it was whatever. But yeah, so that is kind of where I wanted to talk and wanted to share basically why I'm at, where I am right and I'm somebody to like. So I'm going to start wrapping this up.

Speaker 1:

I'm somebody who I always like to know someone's background and I try to connect it as to why they do something, because I've learned over the years with anything, you can look at somebody from the outside and it doesn't show the whole story, and this can go in both ways. You may see somebody who's extremely fit, um, and they could be in the worst shape of their life and they could feel the worst they ever have. And I know because I've been friends with these people um, like it, they could have shredded six packs and they could be starving themselves. They could have no energy, their blood works completely off. Maybe they're going through a divorce or a breakup or like something really shitty, and their body just looks that way because they're not taking care of themselves, not eating enough, whatever, and they just go to the gym for two hours a day because that's their only stress relief, right? Does it mean it's healthy? No, okay, you just don't know what that person's going through.

Speaker 1:

Or, on the other end of the spectrum, you may see somebody who's really fit and you may get jealous, but maybe they have the resources. Like a lot of these influencers, they're hiring nannies, okay, they hire housekeepers to come clean their house. They have nannies, you know, so they can go to the gym when they want. They can hire a chef or a meal prep service so they don't have to think about prepping their meals and they literally just mindlessly eat and they're perfectly hitting their calories, right? There's a lot of things that go on behind the scenes, uh, that we don't realize.

Speaker 1:

And another thing, too, is, just because you see somebody who's fit, you want to say is this appropriate for me? Right, if you're seeing a 20 year old girl who's super fit and doing all this crazy stuff, but you're like 50 years old with three kids, like, and you have a hip injury or something and you're starting to go through menopause, like, would her advice pertain to you, right? You guys are in two different phases of life, and that's something too, as you could probably see here, is that you know life goes through phases and you need to adapt with it. We all have seasons. I wish we could go full speed ahead and just feel amazing and do everything perfectly our whole lives. But that's not how it works, right? You know, life is unpredictable. Sometimes you're gonna have really long streaks of bad stuff, sometimes you have really long streaks of good stuff. Sometimes things come out of nowhere and you just have to adapt, right.

Speaker 1:

And I think that's why, at the end of the day, I teach lifestyle fitness, kind of base lifestyle like, don't get me wrong, I love, I would love, getting under a barbell and lifting heavy and being empowering, because I could teach you that. I can teach you the strength training, I can teach you the circuit style. But at the end of the day, I love teaching that baseline lifestyle fitness, because I think that's what we need more than ever. Right, you need something to fall back on. I want you to have that baseline even when times are hard and even when times are challenging. I don't want you to just do these perfect boot camp classes for when you feel great two times out of the month and then the rest of the month you're sitting around doing nothing and you're wondering why you're not getting results, when in reality, if you were to do something sustainable and you can turn that dial up, rev it up when you're feeling great and then turn it back down to that baseline when things are getting rough. You would have so much better progress and you wouldn't have to work as hard, right? I know because I've been there and that's something that I've went through and I love my baseline fitness to fall back on. It is the best thing. These tools carry me through life and that's just what you need to succeed, right?

Speaker 1:

So, yeah, I don't know what the purpose of that podcast was. I guess it was just to get some of my thoughts out about that. I just feel like I've been through so many changes. Um, I'm still kind of currently going through a shift.

Speaker 1:

Um, I'm hoping in the coming months I could kind of rev up, because I feel like I personally have been at my baseline fitness now for a while, as I've allowed, and you'll see good fitness people do this, you know, as maybe they build families or they're building something in their business. They put their fitness kind of on the back burner, not necessarily in a bad way, but they just, you know they're doing the basics. They're not trying to like PR or do anything like that. And and that's where I feel like I was at, I was sustaining. I'm still learning in different ways, but it's nothing. Like you know, I'm changing my physique. I was in a little bit of a cut phase there right now and now I kind of want to get to the point where I'm going into the strength training a little bit more. I just got to figure out how that's going to work into my schedule and change some things around and plan and execute and all that fun stuff.

Speaker 1:

So, you know, maybe you're in a certain phase of your life, whether you want to rev it up or just start with the basics, you know. But I hope that maybe you found this helpful and relatable, knowing that, like not all trainers just you know come out of the womb ready to do burpees and hit a max PR squat and know everything. We came from not knowing anything. We all had to learn, you know. So, yeah, that is the chat for today. So thanks for tuning in and I'll catch you in the next one. Bye for now.

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