Salvere Blog: Ageless Activity

by Salvere Health and Fitness

Raise your hand if you heard at some point about certain types of exercises “should” be done at certain ages. Very regularly I hear something about geriatric exercise on the news or hear clients say something along the lines of that’s for the “young people”.

I will use two examples to get to the real story behind these types of statements. First, the oldest client we work with just turned 89. If we followed the “geriatric” exercise recommendations, we would be doing almost all exercises from a chair and anything else focused on balance. We do cable machine rows, standing one sided band exercises and step ups on the side of the treadmill. Conversely, with “younger people” it’s often assumed that they “should” participate in higher intensity type movement.



Maybe instead of presenting exercise in the form of certain ages do certain things, what if we looked at it from the standpoint of each individuals capabilities including their experience, injuries and health. What if we didn’t wait until we struggled with things like balance or mobility to work on them? What if we appropriately challenged our abilities while also working all components of movement?

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: I Wanna Exercise But …

by Salvere Health and Fitness

Something gets in the way. Do you feel like this? You want to workout, create a plan and even set out your clothes but yet seem to struggle with getting it done. First, you are not alone!

What happens to the disconnect between the “want” and actually “doing”? Lets take a closer look at the various reasons we come up with for wanting to exercise. Often we take action because something does not feel good or we want to change our outside body. We might add something else to the list but when the main “motivator” comes from something we don’t like, it becomes difficult to keep going.

Now, lets look at what messaging we send through the fitness industry, marketing and social media. First, the fitness industry presents movement and exercise in a way that suggests significant progress can be made in weeks. For example, how many programs last 4, 6 or 12 weeks. As an industry professional for over two decades, I can say from experience, it takes me 4 weeks of training a client to build a solid foundation and determine appropriate exercises based on experience, injuries, illnesses and abilities.

Second, marketing. When you see these programs advertised and discussed, they present if you “succeed” it was their program but if you “fail” its your fault. (Just so you know, I don’t agree with their ideas of “success”.) They also lead you to believe that you only need to do exercise for a finite amount of time. This deserves a little more attention as advertisers target us with so many subconscious messages we need to dig deeper into this by itself!

Third, social media. Okay, this needs to be a separate post too so look for that next time! If getting and staying in a routine is something you struggle with, send us a message with any strategies that you used or any questions with how we might be able to help.

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

Salvere Blog: Navigating the Unexpected

by Salvere Health and Fitness

What unexpected events, people and/or things entered your world this year? How did you navigate them? Did you find yourself feeling excited, stressed, nervous, upset or some combination of emotions? Unexpected things and change happen all the time (probably daily if we took a few moments to process) yet when a big “thing” comes along, we often respond as if its unusual.

Since it’s what we do, how does this then apply to fitness specifically? The biggest struggles to maintain a consistent exercise routine come in the form of unexpected events such as injuries, illness and life changes such as a new job, marriage, divorce, etc. These events come along and suddenly change the schedule of life. Once your normal routine gets turned upside down, it takes time and intention to navigate something new and/or different.

In simply processing through the last 2-3 years, so many unexpected events, suggestions, twists and turns got thrown our way. What strategies did you use to develop new routines? How did you challenge yourself to try something different? Could we begin to look at unexpected things with a new lens of expecting unexpected? Let us know your thoughts!!!

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: Obstacles

by Salvere Health and Fitness

“Life is full of challenges, obstacles, and problems. But learn to face them courageously with joy. Live every moment with happiness and positivity, for we never know.” – Sai Kaustuv.

Obstacles, what’s your mindset when one enters your path? Do you see it as an opportunity? Do you head towards it with excitement or slight apprehension? Do you try to avoid it all together?

Obstacles challenge our fears, courage, and curiosity. They come in different forms and look different to each of us — They can feel scary, exciting or a little bit of both. What’s an obstacle you navigated your way through over the last year? How did you feel during each stage, going through it and coming out on the other side.

When it comes to fitness, obstacles look like injuries, vacations, feelings of not accomplishing certain goals, uncomfortable experiences, new relationship and/or job and moving to a new location.

Share with us any of these you experienced and what strategies you used to move around the obstacle.

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: 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: Getting the Most Out of Fitness Videos

by Salvere Health and Fitness

Peloton, Beachbody or any other recorded workout (or even a live one with limited personalized guidance) or virtual workout provides a great resource for convenient exercise options. How do you know if the program fits your body, life and needs?

You take charge of your routine. Simply because the instructor says do it, you always hold on to the option to choose something else.

Listen to your body and be present throughout the workout. What feels like a stretch? What feels like a strength challenge? What feels like it gets your heart and lungs pumping? Does a movement feel not quite comfortable or cause pain?

Pick an option that fits what your inside body feels like that day and time. Framework with flexibility, remember? Take 5 quiet minutes prior to selecting your video to really tune into what feels. Work to suspend what you think you “should” do or what someone else told you to do.

Think through what kind of time you can set aside and what would balance out your movement from the days prior to the days ahead.

Finally, start to develop a sense of curiosity and playfulness with your movement time. What feels and where? Does your right leg feel different then your left? How about your hands, where do you notice the pressure?

Think about how to develop a child like sense of curiosity with movement. Pick something that you might not normally do. Challenge yourself to do something because you want to not because you think you “should” and get in touch with your intuition. Let us know how it goes!

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: Planning with Flexibility

by Salvere Health and Fitness
In our last blog, we mentioned planning with flexibility to work towards living between all or none when it comes to movement and food. Often we hear people say something like, well I don’t have self-control so I need to give it all up. Doesn’t not eating something at all require self-control? Exercising every single day requires self-discipline, right? This does not mean it’s not a challenge or difficult.

Now that we established that we do possess the ability to do hard things, we want to provide you with tools to establish that planning or framework with some flexibility. First, do you check in with yourself before you do you movement activity for the day? Spend 5 min (yes, take that amount of time!) checking in with what you did yesterday, what “feels” in your body and what might help mentally.

Do you look at your entire week with fueling your body? Do you put a microscope on every little thing you eat instead of looking at it more broadly? Also, check in and learn what hunger and being more intuitive with food feels like?

If the “schedule” says challenging cardio day and you did not sleep well, what can you do to be kinder to what your body may need? If you get invited out to dinner with a friend for nachos and a beer, can you swap that planned meal to tomorrow? If it’s Tuesday and you have not gotten a workout in that week, can you plan something for tomorrow instead of throwing in the towel for the whole week?

Put some tools in your toolbox so you give yourself more options to be flexible within your plan. Be aware of what is driving your choice to do or not do something. Remember, YOU CAN DO HARD THINGS!

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: What is HIIT and Is It For Me?

by Salvere Health and Fitness

In our continued conversations on diving in a little deeper to what these different types of workouts mean, this blog focuses on the HIIT workout. We wanted to expand on this style a little bit as it’s often misundersood and overused. One thing we often leave out of our fitness discussions comes with intensity and how to use it in a healthy manner. When life feels stressful, a high intensity workout often can actually add to that stress when it comes to your internal health.

What is HIIT? – HIIT stands for High Intensity Interval Training. It is a workout done in various intervals of high intensity exercise alternating with active or passive recovery time. A true high intensity interval cannot be sustained for very long. This label often gets misused to include any higher intensity workout or circuit training.

How long do the workouts last? – Typically a HIIT workout lasts 30ish minutes maybe a little longer including warm up and cool down time. Anything much longer might be higher in intensity but does not fall under the HIIT label.

How often? – Perform this style of workout only a couple times a week at most as it stresses the body and requires a bit of recovery time.

Why do HIIT? – What does this type of workout provide the body? Most people say they want to do this for weight loss yet that would not be the most important reason to include HIIT in your regular movement routine. HIIT workouts do improve cardiac functional capacity, improve insulin sensitivity as well as other benefits to overall health.

Knowing when to use different workout styles really matters to overall healthy living. Listen to your body and it will tell you what kind of movement to do that day. Ask yourself, what does my body need and how does my body feel, inside. Remember, movement lasts a lifetime!

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.