After coming to college, I found myself missing playing sports much more than I ever anticipated. Throughout my freshman year of college, I was actively seeking new forms of fitness to keep me in shape. I went to spinning classes, kickboxing classes, circuit classes and I even decided to run a half marathon. No matter what I tried, I kept running into issues. Running got boring and walking to the Rec for classes was too time consuming. When I tried to do strength training on my own, the same routine got really old really fast.

Then I stumbled upon Kayla. For those of you that don’t know who Kayla Itsines is, I recommend Googling her name right now. She is a fitness trainer that lives in Australia and has created an entire fitness community promoting positive body image ideas.

The workouts themselves are pretty wonderful. Each week, the Sweat with Kayla app provides its users with three resistance training workouts and encourages four days of cardio. Her resistance workouts are largely focused on body weight exercises, so I can even do these workouts in the comfort of my room when I don’t have time to go to the gym. The exercises constantly change so that you don’t get bored of doing the same thing in the same order day after day. One of my favorite things about her program, though, is that she doesn’t insist on long periods of strenuous cardio day after day. She encourages long walks or any other low intensity form of cardio. I had spent some time thinking that the best way to be in shape was to run for miles and miles. However, spending an hour or two running led to a huge decrease in my energy. With these shorter workouts, I felt stronger and more energized.

One of my favorite things about Kayla Itsines is her perspective on working out. She strays away from common “health” measures such as the number on a scale and encourages people to pay attention to how they feel and look. She reminds clients that working out shouldn’t be rushed and overdone. It’s about having a healthy lifestyle, not shedding pounds or gaining muscle instantaneously.

I love that she is promoting strength over skinny and encouraging lifelong habits instead of rapid weight loss. I think this is so important. Our society continues to become more and more filled with perfectionist thoughts, which leads to people thinking they need to have the perfect body. I spent all of my high school years so hyper obsessed with this mentality that I missed out on so many great experiences. I would recommend this program because it doesn’t talk about “Losing 10 Pounds in Two Weeks” or “Get the Perfect Body for Summer.” It helps people find happiness in strength in many ways, beyond just their physical appearance. The other day I stumbled upon something really inspiring that Kayla said, so I’ll leave you with this:

“'Strength' is not lifting more than someone. It's not 'having abs'
Strength is not how hard you can punch, how fast you can run, how high you can jump. It's not what sport you can play, what team you are in or how much training it took you to get there. Strength is getting out of bed everyday when you don't want to. Strength is forgiveness. Strength is helping others less fortunate that you. The term 'strength' has nothing to do with fitness and EVERYTHING to with mind set -- because strength comes from within.”