Putting together the FUNctional Fitness Plan with Rachele for VFit Studio has been one of the most rewarding projects we've done.  It's absolutely shaped my mindset around workouts and has personally made me the most physically fit I've ever been.

While I always gravitated towards sports and exercise, I rarely included balance in my workouts which led to fatigue and a series of injuries.  I'd go all in on one particular sport but without the proper coaching, failed to recognize that there are four components of fitness that should always be a part of my workouts: cardio/HIIT, strength, mobility/balance, and stretching recovery.

In high school I was a student athlete and played three sports - tennis, field hockey and basketball.  I trained hard with the teams but did not do anything beyond what my coaches had us do and mostly that neglected stretching recovery and mobility and balance work.  Moving onto to college, I played intramural sports and took a variety of fitness classes, but again only did what was part of the set programs or classes.  Through my 20s and early 30s I went through phases of running marathons (being constantly injured), hyper focused on Bikram yoga, doing CrossFit, and snowboarding.  Time after time, I was injured and had to take breaks from activities I loved to do!

I always thought my body just couldn't handle it.  That I had weak ankles and bad knees.  That my hips were misaligned.  My back was weak.  And that I had to live through this series of activity, injury, and recovery.

Fast forward to my time with VFit Studio working with Rachele and putting together the FUNctional Fitness Plan!  My biggest 'Aha Moment' with fitness.  We took all the VFit Studio classes, broke them down into the four main categories of fitness, and then developed a model of recommended ratios that we suggested our members use to plan and execute their weekly workouts.

Cardio/HIIT - Strength - Mobility/Balance - Stretching Recovery

Now that made sense.  We used that to build out time slots in the schedule and work through our trainers class load to ensure that they were able to stay healthy and injury free.  Getting in all four categories each and every week made me feel amazing!  I experienced far less setbacks due to injury, got stronger even though I was lifting much lighter weights than my CrossFit days, and felt entirely more balanced thanks to the Stretching Recovery category and adding in much more yoga and stretching than I gravitate towards.

How does a fitness trainer decide what classes and workouts to take personally?

This was my next quest!  It's important to get in my own workouts, but now I wanted to get down to the science of the FUNctional Fitness Plan and figure out the exact ratios of our recommendations and what kinds of classes I should work to take for my own personal workouts to ensure my body was getting the full benefit of all four categories of fitness each week.

Something many of you may not know, but I love spreadsheets, modeling, and analytics.  From my time at Carnegie Mellon as a business major, to getting my Master's in Public Policy & Management with plenty of management science and analytics classes under my belt, to running an economic research and consulting firm for 15 years, besides wellness, numbers are MY THING.  I'm also hyper visual and need to see things out in front of me to really get a handle on a concept.

First, I built a model and plugged in all of VFit Studio's classes, broken down by the four subcategories and built this dashboard:

FUNctional Fitness Recommended Ratios

Then, I took a look at my teaching load and plugged those in to see where the gaps were:

FUNctional Fitness Plan - Maria's Teaching Load

Well it doesn't take a genius to see what's missing.  I quickly revisited what classes I was taking on my own (which tended to be the two categories I naturally gravitate towards) and made sure that I was adding in balance/mobility and more stretching recovery.

Another 'Aha Moment' happened during that first week!  I felt amazing.  I hadn't realized how much underlying soreness I was living with because I hadn't been balancing out my workouts.  I felt stronger and was lifting even heavier items on our boat than before.  Then I realized I had to bring this dashboard and my coaching services to the team.