I grew up in the United States and did ballet when I was four. It was probably my first love. When I was 14 my family moved to the UK and I turned away from ballet. I got married and had my children young and my priorities have changed. I just stopped exercising, stopped moving.
My then-husband and I ended up in Craughwell, Co. Galway more than 20 years ago. I now live here with my partner of 18 years and my four children who are 23, 21, 16 and 11 years old. I have no connection with Ireland. I think it’s a great place to raise kids.
In my thirties, I decided to retrain and qualified as a nutrition therapist, fitness trainer and personal trainer with certification for both prenatal and postnatal training.
In 2016 I founded Fittsteps Training Studio in Craughwell, mostly for mothers. i wWe wanted to create a place that was a little softer and more comfortable for women.
We have a really nice community now, but Covid-19 changed everything. However, we brought the entire community online and it was great to see how many mothers loved the convenience of not having to travel to class and so many of the kids went along.
For me it was a massive change. No more than many people who worked for themselves have all the security and routine of work been taken away overnight. It was hard to find consistency and stability in my own life.
I taught everything online Classes themselves and I got tight and sore and found it hard. I noticed a pattern that consistently matched my menstrual cycle. I realized that I had to work with my menstrual cycle and my life became a lot easier.
We think of our menstrual cycle as simply PMS and then a period, but there is roughly a four-week cycle with four different phases in which your body is capable of different things and craves different things.
In terms of training, instead of having the same training focus week after week, I would do one week intervals, another mobility or recovery or cardio. I let my cycle work for me and soon my tightness, pain and injuries subsided. In addition, I have tailored my food to different nutritional needs every week.
There is not enough education about what happens to our body during the cycle, not just physically, but also emotionally and nutritionally. Hormones affect everything from our muscles to our brains to our digestive systems.
Top athletes have all of this information, but why shouldn’t every woman have it? It’s about finding consistency in an ever-changing flow. It’s about working with your body rather than fighting it.
In 2016 I founded Fittsteps training app to bring all of this together in one place where a woman can see her cycle as part of her life. Traditional calendars and plans are always in straight lines, but women work in circles. We’re trying to act as a round pin in a square hole, but that’s not intuitive. We end up feeling bad because we are unable to complete the workout or follow the diet.
We’re not bad or broken in the weeks when we can’t do heavy weights or want to eat certain things, it’s just that we’re not attuned to what our body is telling us.
When you get our app, you get training plans based on moon phases and your menstrual cycle. There is a personalized meal plan and you can even have meal plans and shopping lists sent to you at the touch of a button, so you can take the stress out of organizing a healthy meal for the whole family.
I hear women say so often that they don’t have time to look after themselves and I want to change that.
I want women to see themselves as the whole individual. Too often we split up into families, our jobs, ourselves. Hopefully the app will allow women to put all the pieces together and find that flow.
The Flow app can be downloaded from fittstepstraining.com. Different plans are available depending on how much assistance you want or need with fitness, nutrition, or even stress management, with meditations, meal plans, 10-minute daily workouts, and full moon activities.
In conversation with Sarah Caden
source https://dailyhealthynews.ca/i-made-my-menstrual-cycle-work-for-me-jessica-keniston-on-her-fitness-app-for-women/
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