In Netflix’s Pretend It’s a City, Fran Lebowitz donates a solid ten minutes to bitching about the world wellness. Franky, I don’t blame her. The word wellness conjures up visions of thin women in yoga pants with green juice in their hands. It makes us relive that boot camp class that we almost died from when the instructor had us meditate at the end of how “strong” we are. In a nutshell, wellness has begun to represent everything I hate about fitness.
And yet, despite all of this, I became a board certified health and wellness coach last year. During Covid I began looking for new education. I knew that I was looking for something. I needed and wanted new skillsets to help me as a re-launched my business and as my training pivoted to online.
A lightbulb went off. I had started working with clients on health and wellness habits over the years, but this was the first time that I could see full picture how crucial these were in order to help them reach their fitness goals. It became more imperative that I learn skills to help them connect with things like stress, sleep, water intake and self-care. If they couldn’t do these things, how could I get them to really embrace their strength and cardio workouts?
So alas, this became my journey to connecting health and wellness to fitness. I began implementing small habit changes for my clients that were geared towards improving their overall wellness. At first they resisted, saying how could drinking an extra glass of water or meditating for three minutes each day make any difference?
And as the weeks followed, they came to me saying they had improved their eating habits, made more of an effort to go to bed earlier, and were doing their exercises more regularly.
Bridging the gap between health and wellness and fitness for me meant helping my clients be successful in a whole different way. It became less about losing weight or finishing the 5K (not that those aren’t great goals) and became more about living better lives as a whole.
Helping my clients, both business and fitness, to understand the importance of taking care of themselves and bring their wellness into focus has allowed me to create a niche for what I offer to them as a coach. But even more, I finally created a place for wellness in my personal practice, and it’s made all the difference.
