At the end of September, I hosted and ran the first Co-Women fitness brunch session. There are five more dates which you can still book onto, so I thought I’d share some of what we covered in order to give you the inspiration to join us.
Classes take place at a privately-hired strength studio in central Hove – it’s a lovely bright space, where we can get the tunes going and be by ourselves to work on what we choose. Each class blends mindset work with an exercise session, and I wanted to start with the biggest mindset issue of them all – motivation to train.
I can’t give away the secrets I shared via the blog, but if you’d like one of these sessions for yourself, please let me know and I’ll gladly book you in for this specific type of personal training.
Once everyone had warmed up their brains and their bodies, I took the group through five foundational and functional movement patterns. Some of this was for my benefit, to assess what stage everyone was at with these specific movements – otherwise known as a movement screen – and most of it for the benefit of the participants – so that they could get to know these foundations and be sure they’re performing them correctly.
Together, we worked through: squat, hinge, lunge, press and pull movements. And I managed to bust some myths along the way! Members of the group are at different points on their journey, which I found really exciting: some already train several times per week and are quite confident, others are returning to strength training after a break, or even completely new to it. Despite their differences, everyone was surprised when I dropped the bombshell that not allowing your knee to move past your toe in a squat or a lunge is a complete myth, so I’ll aim to talk more about that soon, as it is something which is commonly believed, but absolute bullshit. If you’ve believed the hype on that one, I’d love to know how you manage to ascend any stairs…
Everyone focused well on the movements, and I’m proud to say that by the end of the class, they were completing them confidently and appropriately for their own bodies. It’ll be great to see how they can progress as the classes continue!
Participants also went home with some top tips to get themselves prepared for committing to a movement practice which suits them. A quote I love, courtesy of Laura Khoudari’s Lifting Heavy Things is, “creating a practice is a process” – it’s not a case of deciding on a plan and it magically happening or that initial plan being The One that you “stick to” forever more. We learn about ourselves as we go along. We fall in and out of love with activities. Our bodies change, and we discover what works best for them during each chapter of our journey. Maintaining a flexible but committed attitude is the key to accomplishing what you want and developing a consistent routine.
Once we wrapped up the class, we popped next door for a replenishing brunch at Oeuf – I hadn’t been before and I really enjoyed their signature frumpets (French toast crumpets!) as well as the chance to chat with the group outside of the gym. They asked me follow up questions about things like protein intake and how to increase their strength, as well as how I got to where I am having got off the couch initially to get as far as 5km and somewhat overshot the runway to become a personal trainer!
The next class is booked for Sunday 30th October and I’d love to have you join us! For now, the mindset and exercise themes are a closely guarded secret, but I’ll tell you this much – it will be an active class this time (you might get sweaty!), but you will still be encouraged to perform at your level, not anyone else’s.
If you can’t make it in October, our other dates are: 20th November, 4th December, 8th January and 5th February. All dates are available to book now via the Co-Women website. See you there?!