Music That Moves A Sassy Girl

How important is your workout music to you? I can only speak for myself when I say that I obsessively pick songs with the appropriate beats per minute to keep up the pace I want to maintain for each class I teach. I use something called BeaTunes that scans my entire iTunes library and assign a beats per minute to each song. I also use Spotify and that means I spend countless hours taping an app on my iPhone to find the BPM of each song.   I have been in classes before where the music has mentally taken me right out of the class and for that reason I try to put a some thought into my playlists. Some teachers are so good that they could play Josh Groban in a High Energy kickboxing class and get away with it but for the rest of us music has the potential to make or break a class. Music can inspire your body to move and make your workouts more powerful. Here is a kickass playlist I used just this week. There is a slow-boiling track by Metric. It's brilliant, but I thought it might be too slow. And Booty Luv have a textbook UK dance hit--in the best sense. But, there's also a load of angsty, rock that I don’t normally play. Nevertheless, I got awesome feedback from my students and here are the tracks they loved working out to: 129 BPM – Kylie Minogue - Into the Blue (Patrick Hagenaar Colour Code Remix) 115 BPM- Foster the People- Best Friend 143 BPM – Forever the Sickest Kids – Whoa Oh! (Me vs. Everyone) 126 BPM – Wisin, Jennifer Lopez & Ricky Martin - Adrenalina 128 BPM – Chris Lake & Nastala – If You Knew (Feed Me Remix) 131 BPM – Hyper Crush – Keep Up 129 BPM – Metallica – Cyanide 148 BPM – Basshunter – Now You’re Gone 152 BPM – Trapt – Contagious 127 BPM – Booty Luv – Say It

Easter Candy Do's

Happy  Easter everyone! Easter is the 2nd biggest candy holiday after Halloween. There are a lot of tempting treats out there. Be careful.  I’ve put a list together of Easter candies that aren’t too terrible for you.

All of the following are Under 150 Calories

3 Lindt Milk Chocolate Solid Mini Eggs, 143 calories

1 Hershey’s Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Eggs, 100 calories

1 Cadbury Creme Egg, 150 calories

4 Peeps Marshmallow Bunnies, 130 calories

10 pieces Reese’s Pieces Pastel Eggs, 150 calories

20 pieces Brach’s Pastel Candy Corn, 108 calories

Even Sassy Girls Get The Flu

This is going to be a short blog post. This week has been a challenge. I have been sick. Being a personal trainer means that I have to be very intimate with my clients. I adjust them and I work in very close proximity to them. With that comes the risk that I could pick up germs pretty easily. I am generally healthy and part the benefit of focusing on fitness is that my immune system is pretty healthy and luckily I don't get sick all that often. When it comes to teaching my job is to not let students know that I am feeling Ill. So all week long I’ve gone to class and had a huge smile on my face when all I wanted to do is curl up into a ball and be by myself. My body needs rest and unfortunately I have a schedule that made proper recovery impossible. Being self employed means that I have no boss. It also means that when I take time off of work even if I am sick that I am not getting paid. To be responsible to my personal training clients I cancelled them so as to not pass on whatever bug I was battling. But I still went to the gym every day and taught as often as I was able. I put on a brave face and I focused on the job. All in all the classes went well and I even got a few compliments from students after class. I'll be back to my old self soon. But this post is going to have to end here. The sassy girl is for today the sickly girl.

The Lighter Side Of Lifting

You wouldn’t necessarily think that being a personal trainer is a very funny job. But the truth is that my job is strange and so often times hilarious.  The weirdest things happen to me on a daily basis.  No matter what happens on the job I have to keep a straight face and act like whatever happened is totally normal. I need to make my client feel totally comfortable so that they can focus on their workout.  I don’t want to be rude and laugh or act disgusted. For example I used to train a 80 year old woman who insisted upon working out in a threadbare nightgown. Yep, I’ve seen all of her belongings. Or the time I had to train a dude who only wore tighty whiteies while we did yoga. That means I was alone teaching him to exercise in his apartment and he was close to naked. He also liked to be left alone in the final relaxation pose. I was to take the money he left on the entry way table and leave. God only knows what he wanted to do when he was alone.  

My favorite story is a phone call from a client trying to cancel. I had one in my first few years where a woman called and told me “I can’t leave, my dog is stuck to the driveway." I asked her how this could have possibly happened and she said her driveway was just recently re-tarred and the dog ran out and got stuck. Not buying it, I told her “Well, he’ll be there when you get back, see you at 3." Another was a gentleman who called and cancelled because he threw his back out. I always ask how someone did it to better know how to train them when they do come back in. “Well, I met this girl on Saturday downtown…” That was all I needed to know.

Some funny questions that I still don’t know how to answer…”Do you think it’s weird my friend still breast feeds her kid who is about to turn seven?" “What are the pounds per square inch of force generated by the leg extension machine if you move your leg at 4 miles an hour?" “How much can I drink (of alcohol) before I come in and workout”?