It doesn't take much to improve your quality of life. You don't need a gym membership or money to make healthy choices and put into action which can positively affect your life for years to come. All it really takes is a little bit of personal responsibility.
 
Check out Kimberly's TEDxNUV Talk about how simple it is to invest in your health and why it is so important. 

While everyone is off to a new start with the new year with their health and fitness regimen, I have been spending it healing. I suppose it happens to all of us at one time or another; I got injured. I tore my calf muscle kicking a football. True story - I just passed it and came down on it normally.

To the hundreds who have sent well wishes, I greatly appreciate it. Also, there have been endless comments about how I should have done this and that and what I should be doing to heal it, I decided to open up and share a few thoughts and answer a few of the questions I have been asked. 

• 'You should have warmed up.'  - I DID warm up. In fact, having been in sports for the past 35 years of my life, a very important part to me having stayed healthy this long is that I have always warmed up and cooled down. 
• 'You are so fit/are an athlete, you should not have gotten hurt.' - SHIT HAPPENS. Our bodies were made to move, but athletes train their body to move in the way of which their sport requires. I have never played any sport which requires my body to move in a nonlinear motion. So football really is something, athlete or fitness level aside, my body is not trained for or adapted to. 
• I have never done a sport which requires the coordination of my feet to move with a moving object under me. In fact, I have only done fencing and golf which are eye hand coordination sports and not about making contact with the feet. 
• Trust your gut.  I went against my better judgement after saying no three times and did it anyway. Lesson Learned. 

I often have to remind myself that I grew up in a world with a very different medical system which strongly encourages prehab before surgeries and movement for healing the body. It is very rare cases where complete rest is necessary for injuries. 

Now, allow me to address the 'You need to rest.' Because there seems to be a huge misconception that when there is an injury to the body that we should be on complete bed rest and not move. 

• The body needs fresh oxygenated blood circulating in order for injuries to heal and this is done best with movement. Did you know that in developed countries most heart surgery patients are put on their feet  and start walking around to get the blood flowing and help them heal faster? In fact, my father had 5 bypasses in one go and was on his feet the next day and that was almost 12 years ago. I had surgery on my knee 22 years ago and I was in an immobilizer, however was walking the very next day. MOVEMENT HEALS.
• With a calf injury like mine, in the beginning I couldn't even walk on it. So there hasn't been anything I can do on it where I can over use it because I can't use it. 
• Surprise!!! The rest of my body is working perfectly fine. Therefore it is completely acceptable to do exercises which use the rest of my body. My calf muscle can continue to heal while I do push up modifications and reclined glute exercises, core work and so forth. Please understand that I am an educated fitness professional and I know how to exercise around such injuries. It is my job to know these things.
• As a fitness professional, my job requires me to use my body a lot. It is essential for me to be healthy in order for me to make a living. I can assure you I am taking better care of healing mine more than 99% of the people in the world does when they do get an injury. We only get one body and mine is the most valuable asset I have.
• So while I appreciate all the concerns for my well being, I do know My Body better than anyone out there and I listen to it. I have spent a lifetime of learning to be in tune to all its changes and how to adapt to what I need to give it. I have quietly listened to people telling me I need to do this and that, however, not once has anyone taken the time to ask me valuable questions which would assess My Body as a WHOLE. 
• Rest is essential to staying healthy. I believe in rest so much, it is the number one thing I track on a daily basis. But just as much as we need rest, we also need to move. 
• Oh, and last time I checked, my brain still works, even with a torn calf muscle. I am completely mentally capable of working and making decisions. In fact, it is good to have mental stimulation  when the body can't move as much as it is used to. 

As upset and frustrated as I want to be over an inconvenient injury as such, I am trying to be positive. Let's face it; I don't need surgery and it is a torn muscle. There are worse things that can happen in life! It is humbling for me to have an injury like this when I have lived my life with not many. There is theory and practical application - personal practical gives you hands on experiences you can't read from a book, so this experience helps me become a better trainer. 

With this injury I am taking this an intelligent approach and am learning from this healing process. So rest assured, I got this! Sending much love and thanks. 

Decades ago the first fitness tracker came onto the market as a pedometer. Then came the heart rate monitor. Even the simple fitness watch with just stopwatch was an incredible asset to runners for decades. In fact, that is where I started; running on a 400 meter track and keeping splits from my watch in my head to figure my pacing. As my distances got longer, I learned to calculate distance by my pace splits. It is something I still do in my head to this day. But I love how much technology has helped us take the guesswork out of our movement patterns, motivating us to move more, giving us a realistic look at our input and output. 

Call me a loyalist, I have used Garmin for almost a 15 years, but that doesn’t mean I have haven’t tried other brands. In fact, when fitness tracker companies such as Jawbone and FitBit came onto the market, I tried them out to see what type of data they had to offer and to be able to have an honest opinion when clients and gym members when they asked me for my professional opinion. At the time I was currently using a Garmin Forerunner as well for my triathlon training and competition. I found them to be of great motivation for daily basics of wellness. But as soon as Garmin put out their vivofit, I had it on my wrist within a week of its launch. It was the integration of data with Garmin Connect and other apps which I found to be superior. 

I spent months tracking gym members and asking them what they were doing with their data. Most of them said, “I just try to get to 10,000 steps like they say.” I always like to ask who is ‘they’. No one really seems to know. Regardless, it was a good start and more importantly it was great to see members were becoming more conscious of the need to move more, thus creating a change, a new good habit. This was good. But what else could you do with that data collected?

This is where fitness tracking really got personal and interesting to me. Living in the heart of Chicago, walking to work every day, training for triathlons and teaching fitness classes five days a week kept me very active and allowed me to be able to eat more than the average person. Months before I made my full time move to India, I knew my work habits and movement patterns were going to change drastically and we all know we don’t have the friendliest walk about cities here in India. On top of that, my food was going to completely change to an Indian diet. My lifestyle was about to change and I didn’t want to become less fit or gain weight based on less movement and different meals. ​

I was proactive and gathered 4 months of data from my Garmin vivofit.
    1. Steps: daily, weekly and monthly

• I found that I was averaging 20,000 steps a day / 6 days a week, 12,000 steps / 1 day a week (rest day)
• Monthly I was averaging over a half million steps.
• I determined this my movement baseline.

    2. Sleep: how many hours a night I averaged and the percentage of deep sleep I was getting.

• This was the most fascinating data I believe which can be collected from a FT (fitness tracker)
• I found that between 7:30-7:45 hours of sleep a night, I was most fresh when waking up, needed less naps and had more effective workouts.
• If I consistently had less, I was more likely to have worse workout recoveries and was more vulnerable to illness. This is the last thing I needed when living in India 15,000 miles away from family
• I found my body would not feel normal until I caught up on those lost minutes. Therefore I consciously made an effort to go to bed a little earlier or sleep a little later when I got off schedule. ​