Salvere Blog: Field Day and Presidential Physical Fitness

by Salvere Health and Fitness

Okay, how many of you sparked a real feeling of something between “ugh” and full on dread?? How many reflected on more fun memories? These two “events” from childhood help formulate the perspective and feeling many of us carry throughout life regarding physical activity. Now, before I go any further, this blog does not mean to suggest these events should be done away with at school.

So, what’s the point then? Take a survey of those in your closest circle by simply mentioning one or both. I find over half of respondents (really, it’s way more!) literally give a very real emotional reaction to how much it did not feel good for them to participate.

So, why then do we (still) do them (or some version of them) and require everyone participate? As with so many other things, lets dig a little.

Like, whats the purpose, where did they originate and why. Field day looks different everywhere but in general, it holds onto one of several events that culminate the end of the school year, designed around fun games. Presidential physical fitness events started in the 1960s as a way to measure the fitness level of the youth in America. Now you can go on and find out more about the whys and whats as some of the history is quite “interesting”.

Here’s the thing, for many, many individuals the memories feel embarrassing, traumatizing or simply not positive. If we spend more time peeling away these layers, it really starts the foundation for how someone feels about fitness, exercise and moving their body. While some people enjoy these types of events and the competitions surrounding it, many people don’t.

How do we provide different opportunities for different people? How do we look deeper to realize that something that seems one way on the surface may not actually elicit the intended feeling?

by Lisa Martin, owner and personal trainer at Salvere Health and Fitness.

To contact, email lisa@SalvereHealthandFitness.com or call 410.707.0055.

We welcome your thoughts and ideas! Thank you for reading and staying the path to

continuous growth opportunities and taking time for curiosity.

Salvere Blog: Half Way Through

by Salvere Health and Fitness

Okay, it’s July and we stand here half way through the year. Take a minute to reflect. What unexpected things happened? What events happened that you felt excited about? Where do you find yourself struggling? How are you connecting with your tribe?

These last two plus years certainly provided an opportunity for us to reflect on various parts of life and the activities/people/experiences we choose to include in our days. What positive changes did you make to your life?

How did you navigate change over the last 6 months?

What do you have planned for the next 6 months?

by Lisa Martin, owner and personal trainer at Salvere Health and Fitness. To contact, email lisa@SalvereHealthandFitness.com or call 410.707.0055.

We welcome your thoughts and ideas! Thank you for reading and staying the path to continuous growth opportunities and taking time for curiosity.

Salvere Blog: Success in Holding Steady

by Salvere Health and Fitness

How many times do we look at holding stead as success? This could be at your job, in your friendships, in fitness or even with your finances.

Look at corporate America — how many times does a company come forward and say they set the goal for their growth and finances to stay right where they are for the next 5 years? Who would invest in that company? Yet that would help to create stability and longevity, build an environment where employees feel less stress and allow different opportunities to better envision how to plan for the next 10, 20 and 50 years.

How would it feel to apply this to your fitness routine? Simply holding steady with your current program — not looking for every workout to improve on the last or every run to be faster than the week before. Not looking to add more days or more time to your workouts, simply holding steady. The victory in maintaining something for a period of time with consistency often gets overlooked.

What can you do to navigate yourself to appreciate the staying steady? Pick one thing new and start tomorrow then don’t change a thing about it for at least a month.

by Lisa Martin, owner and personal trainer at Salvere Health and Fitness. To contact, email lisa@SalvereHealthandFitness.com or call 410.707.0055.

We welcome your thoughts and ideas! Thank you for reading and staying the path to continuous growth opportunities and taking time for curiosity.

Salvere Blog: Holding Steady

by Salvere Health and Fitness

… Right where you are today. How many times do we take the time to simply be okay with how we exist in the present? Right here, that day, that moment.

Not trying to advance in a job,

not thinking I’ll do better tomorrow,

not feeling the need to lose weight,

not pressuring yourself that you should have done a harder workout,

not worrying if you did enough for others,

not planning to do more things during your day…

Take time to hold steady, simply be where you are at this moment and maybe, stay there for a few weeks. See how it feels to be A OK with being.

by Lisa Martin, owner and personal trainer at Salvere Health and Fitness. To contact, email lisa@SalvereHealthandFitness.com or call 410.707.0055.

We welcome your thoughts and ideas! Thank you for reading and staying the path to continuous growth opportunities and taking time for curiosity.

Salvere Blog: Yep, It’s Boring

by Salvere Health and Fitness

Ever felt the challenge to sticking to an exercise program because “it got boring”. As fitness professionals, we hear this frequently as to why someone stopped their regular program. Let’s take some time to peel this away as it’s got a few layers!

Rewind to a time when life presented more opportunities for movement all throughout the day. A time when the fitness profession did not even need to exist. Fast forward, fast forward to today when that movement exists but, for most, very little, we now “need” our workouts to actually move our bodies.
In a nutshell, we created an environment where instead of accumulating movement throughout the day, we now set aside time to move in a gym type environment and set parameters on what that “should” look like. Amount of cardio, strength, etc with artificial measurements of “progress” and “success”. Well, it was only a matter of time before that gets boring. Maybe not all of it but certainly some parts.

Stepping away from fitness for a moment, think about the process to learning something such as a new language, math, an instrument, or a sport. When you first start, how long do you spend on knowing the basics, building a solid foundation? Every time you add numbers, do you want to do it differently? Or kicking a soccer ball? Or speaking a new language?

Okay, now back to fitness. How often do you apply the same process to an exercise? As with any skill, there’s something to be said about spending a lot of time mastering the “basics” and then returning to them frequently. As professionals, how can we begin to teach fitness better, with this same philosophy?
Sometimes, in the name of making it “not boring”, we suggest exercises that are not appropriate. Sure, things might get repetitive, but how do we change our conversations and realize that doing same or similar movements matters?

How do we find “success” in taking time to build a solid foundation? Why do we expect something different from fitness then we do other things we learn in life? Maybe instead of “boring” it’s building a foundation? How do we find other ways such as connecting it with time spent with a group of friends or family members?

by Lisa Martin, owner and personal trainer at Salvere Health and Fitness. To contact, email lisa@SalvereHealthandFitness.com or call 410.707.0055.
We welcome your thoughts and ideas! Thank you for reading and staying the path to continuous growth opportunities and taking time for curiosity.

Salvere Blog: Growing Carrots

by Salvere Health and Fitness

Over the past year, more people picked up gardening as a hobby since it provided a safe environment and something to do outside the house. I happen to be one of those people who returned to gardening, something we did quite regularly growing up as a family. (Although I bet my parents wouldn’t say we did it happily or voluntarily!) This year, two of my nephews decided to join us and it started some interesting conversations surrounding growth and patience through their initial planting of carrots.

The planting of these carrot seeds took place in March and here we sit, the beginning of June, yet to actually eat a carrot. What a lesson in growth! From a seed in March to teeny tiny sprouts in April to very big stems in June with still more to go.

What if we learned from the way a carrot or any other plant goes through the life cycle? A planted seed needs to be watered and tended, a conscious paying attention to what it needs at various growth stages. What if it attracts a pest or fungus, something to impact growth? What would you do to give it proper care? No matter when you want the carrot to be ready, it will grow at its own pace. Regardless of how much you want the carrot, it will not magically appear.

What if we provided space for different attention needs at different times, awareness of various phases of growth of self and others as well as appropriate expectations? How do we learn to appreciate the rainy days, as we need those just as we need the sunshine?

How about being present in each phase of growth and not trying to be somewhere else.

Pondering …………………

by Lisa Martin, owner and personal trainer at Salvere Health and Fitness. To contact, email lisa@SalvereHealthandFitness.com or call 410.707.0055.

We welcome your thoughts and ideas! Thank you for reading and staying the path to continuous growth opportunities and taking time for curiosity.

Salvere Blog: Participation Trophies

by Salvere Health and Fitness

Okay, stay with me on this one. There’s often random one liners thrown out to blame something in our society on “participation trophies” so I ask you to read this one with an open mind and take time for introspection/reflection and even some philosophical processing.

So, in nutshell, in more recent times society started giving mostly everyone something for simply participating in activities such as sports and the like instead of only rewarding the winners. I know there is more to it and I wanted to spend time on a mindset shift, not the nuances of a definition or the details here.

What if we talked about participation trophies differently? Thinking about life and what happens for many of us on a day-to-day basis. How many of you experience something massively different in your daily work/life tasks? Even if someone wins a sports championship, award or huge promotion, what led them to that? What happens the days and weeks following the “big win”? For the most part, it’s the small daily activities, showing up day after day and doing our best.

Sometimes the hardest workers never win the championship and conversely, sometimes the ones with natural ability who don’t work as hard find themselves winning time after time. Sometimes the hyperfocus on winning causes cheating and discourse, just look at the news regarding the sidelines of youth sports and rules placed on parents because of unkind behavior or even coaches that demoralize their players due to the overemphasis on winning.

Now, imagine if in our conversations with “participation trophies” we talked about the importance of the daily showing up to do the simple things that add up. What if we talked more about how to appreciate the day to day, the stitching together of small actions to build on each other from week to week, month to month and year to year?  Maybe “participation trophies” can be the key to developing a greater perspective on navigating life and appreciating more when it comes to the “little” things?

Pondering …………………

by Lisa Martin, owner and personal trainer at Salvere Health and Fitness. To contact, email lisa@SalvereHealthandFitness.com or call 410.707.0055.
We welcome your thoughts and ideas! Thank you for reading and taking the steps to become a healthier YOU.

Salvere Blog: Identity and Labels

by Salvere Health and Fitness

How do you identify yourself and how many labels do you use to define what makes you, you? Society comes with so many – mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, cousin, niece, nephew, male, female, compassionate, friendly, introvert, reader, quilter, cis, nonbinary, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Democrat, Republican, athletic, biker, dancer, walker, gay, straight … And the list goes on.

If you think of all the various identities and labels, which do you focus on within yourself? Who gave you those labels? How much does society impact how important or unimportant each becomes? Do some get more attention and focus then others?

Thinking about how often one piece of the many things that make us each unique gets lots of attention, both internally and externally, while others stay in the background. How often do we hyperfocus on some external and more superficial (either with ourselves or with others) label/identity while the core of what makes us beautifully, complex humans stays hidden?

Think about how and what you “see” in yourself and others. Is there a something less obvious that you can get to know a little better? Back to that curiosity and being interested to learn more about someone, even if that someone is you!

by Lisa Martin, owner and personal trainer at Salvere Health and Fitness. To contact, email lisa@SalvereHealthandFitness.com or call 410.707.0055.
We welcome your thoughts and ideas! Thank you for reading and taking the steps to become a healthier YOU.

Salvere Blog: A Microscope

by Salvere Health and Fitness

We put an object under a microscope in order to examine a small segment by focusing on very tiny details. Sometimes we need to focus on the little details to understand how something works and/or to better understand the components. At what point do we take away the microscope and examine things as the bigger, whole?

In life, how often do things go under a microscope, focusing on the tiny details? Could be learning something new, fitness, raising children, a career, or a relationship.

How often do we take time to step back from the little details and examine the whole picture?

Take time to step away from the details and tasks to see the accomplishments and growth you make along the way.

by Lisa Martin, owner and personal trainer at Salvere Health and Fitness. To contact, email lisa@SalvereHealthandFitness.com or call 410.707.0055.

We welcome your thoughts and ideas! Thank you for reading and taking the steps to become a healthier YOU.

Salvere Blog: Not Knowing and Learning New Things

by Salvere Health and Fitness

When presented with an opportunity to do something new – do you feel excited or overwhelmed? Does it matter the topic of the new “thing”? Do you change your expectation of yourself depending on the topic? For example, if you start an education program or read on an unfamiliar topic, do you give yourself more patience to spend learning? What about a new skill?

In fitness, we present new skills and movements fairly regularly. We demonstrate and talk about the skill then expect that’s all we need to learn how it’s done. This could be something complex like the mountain climber or something simple such as the squat. As fitness professionals, we can approach teaching a new movement in the same way we teach math or learning a foreign language.

Breaking down the squat first. Feet hip width apart, keep your head up and sit back, don’t let your knees go over your toes. Sound somewhat familiar? Sometimes the knees do actually go over the toes and sometimes we need to address alignment from sitting, crossing the legs or even wearing a wallet in the back pocket. What if somewhere feels painful? What if it’s the first time doing them?

Now, after looking at the squat, imagine all we need to learn before we attempt the mountain climber. Starting with a high plank as the first step. Once you feel comfortable with a high plank, try lifting a leg or arm. Then build into a moving your knee in towards your elbow slowly. Can you do it without dropping into your lower back? This process might take a year or more to learn. (FWIW — As a trainer, I don’t include mountain climbers in my own workouts and I’ve been exercising for decades!)

Do you look at not knowing as something exciting or overwhelming or scary or something else? Lets experiment with applying curiosity to movement and giving yourself patience and grace to take the time to let your body guide you through progressions. Learning also can be through letting go.

by Lisa Martin, owner and personal trainer at Salvere Health and Fitness. To contact, email lisa@SalvereHealthandFitness.com or call 410.707.0055. We welcome your thoughts and ideas! Thank you for reading and taking the steps to become a healthier YOU.