Hello…Now Let’s Get You Fit!

Hello Everyone and by gosh, Amanda, you have me blushing!

I am super excited to be a part of the Amanda Russell Workouts team and look forward to sharing with you all tips and workout philosophies that I’ve gleamed over the years. I also hope to do it in a way that is amusing enough to keep you reading and wanting to come back for more (always gotta keep ‘em hungry, right?!), but most importantly get you excited about your workouts, achieving your fitness goals, and debunking the propaganda insinuating that workout is a ‘bad’ word!

So, off my pedestal now…for those who may have heard it’s been a rather tough year for me. We don’t need to go into the gory details, but the short of it is, that for a girl who’s literally ALWAYS on the move (we’re talking I’ve never even attempted to sit through a single Lord of the Rings flick for the sheer fact that there is NO WAY I’d be able to sit in a theater for more than an hour and a half), going through an accident that left me bed bound for months felt something akin to a death sentence. Thankfully I have some incredible people in my life that helped me make it through one day, and then the next, as I couldn’t have done it without them.

So, you’re probably thinking, “Okay, and what does this have to do with working out??”…don’t worry I’m getting to the point. The point is…the way I made it through is that I took it one day at a time, actually more like one hour at a time. I didn’t think about the long road ahead of me, I didn’t think of all of the ‘what if’s’ and I didn’t even really look beyond one measly task at a time. First it was wiggling my big toe then it was trying to move my foot. When I was AT LAST able to attempt walking, and then doing the elliptical machine, I forced myself to disregard anything I had ever done in the past and didn’t compare the ‘new’ me to the me of the past.

I’ve had so many people say to me, “I really want to be a runner, but I just can’t go more than two minutes without having to stop!”; the rest of their end of the conversation usually winds up with them stating that they ended up getting so frustrated by what they can’t do that they just stopped and gave up even trying. They wind up not doing anything at all. But the thing is, by beating themselves up they not only end up feeling like a failure but they also make it impossible for them to ever improve. Don’t look so far down the road, or even to the ultimate goal that you want to reach; instead, accept where you are today and set mini-goals along the way, (think of them sort of like check points) eventually leading up to a bigger goal.

A year ago I would have laughed at myself for feeling like I’m going all out on the elliptical when the tension setting was at level 1. But at that point I was just so grateful to be doing ANYTHING that it felt like a victory; I had achieved one of my mini-goals and I set out to conquer the next.

Alright, I hope this wasn’t too incredibly long-winded, but I thought about what I wanted my very first post to be (yes, even nervous like that first day of school feeling…Are they going to like me?!?!) and I thought I had to at least kind of introduce myself without jumping straight in…but I also wanted to make a very important point in regards to your own fitness. The mind is usually our BIGGEST limiting factor…don’t out-think yourself of achieving what you want to do. If you want to be a runner but don’t think you can, take those two minutes you CAN do and set your first mini-goal to be able to make it to three minutes. Don’t look past that benchmark until you are there…and in time, you’ll have traveled so far down the road you’ll look back and think, “Huh, well, I guess it was possible!”

-Cait :)