Tag: FAI

Thinking about Thanking

I have blogged several times in the past about the health benefits of being grateful. Our general outlook on life (positive or negative) can have a profound effect on our health and wellbeing.

In the spirit of the holiday, and in the interest of good health, I would like to briefly reflect on those things for which I am thankful this year at Thanksgiving. Of course, I am grateful for my health, my family, my friends, and my general welfare, but I want to discuss a few more obscure blessings in my life.

I am truly grateful for the clients in my personal training business, At Home Senior Fitness. I am truly fortunate to have a great group of clients–not just because they help me pay the bills, but also because I have been able to build great relationships with most of them. I have shared meals with clients, visited them in the hospital, and seen them through joyous occasions and times of loss as well. They have also seen me through ups and downs. I really do care about my clients and that care and concern is returned in spades.

I am grateful for the personal trainers that I had as a client. I always enjoyed the workouts and the results, but did not realize what a huge effect they had on me, pushing me to always do more and better. This has influenced the way that I train my clients as well. I also learned from them the importance of relationships as well as building and maintaining trust.

I am thankful that I have a network that has helped me build my business. Sam Kalamasz, who is working with me, has been a great resource and is committed to helping me grow my client base. ACE (through whom I maintain my certification as a personal trainer) has been helpful and informative. FAI (through whom I have my specialization to work with older adults) continues to enrich my skills. IDEAfit is the main source of my continuing education credits; their on-line resources and conferences are pretty top notch. SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives) is also an invaluable tool; they exist in most cities and helped me get organized as I launched my business. I definitely could not have done this all on my own and these organizations have been vital.

As we approach Thanksgiving, I encourage all of us to go beyond the “typical” things we are grateful for and consider some of the other factors that have helped us get where we are. The next step, then, is to try to be the person that others are grateful to have in their lives.

Best wishes to all for a happy and fit Thanksgiving!

I’m a certified Functional Aging Specialist!

Readers may recall that I attended the IDEA Personal Fitness Conference – East at the beginning of April in Alexandria, VA. My main reason for going was to do the all-day training for the Functional Aging Specialist Certification. It was a great training (and I got CEC for it), but still needed to take three on-line exams in order to be certified.

I hoped that I would be able to pass all three by the end of April, but wasn’t sure if I could pull it off. Being laid up after foot surgery left me with more time on my hands so I decided to be productive. Many hours of reading and watching videos and I passed the last exam today! With four hours left in April!

As I blogged about earlier, FAI is in the forefront of fostering better practices and research in the realm of fitness for older adults. The focus is less on building muscle strength and more on working to keep older adults able to do the things they want and need to do. In other words, we address the wants and needs of our clients in order to keep them functional and independent. There is a greater emphasis on building muscle power (which helps with getting out of a chair or going up the stairs) as well as improving balance and reactivity time.

This will be very interesting for me since this is such a diverse population. Every senior presents with a different fitness and health history; there are 60-year-olds who cannot walk without assistance, and there are 80-year-olds running marathons. This kind of training requires more intense planning and specialization based on getting to know the client really well.

I will keep you posted on how this part of my “business” progresses. In the meantime, I look forward to a little celebration of my accomplishment!