This is a deeply personal episode for me, Kara, the host of PlayGrounding. This is the second part of my conversation with Sabrina Must. Last week, we explored the role of playfulness in facing and handling grief. Sabrina and I kept talking on the day of our interview and we went in a completely different direction, but with the same sense of vulnerability and depth.
In this episode, you'll hear the second part of my conversation with Sabrina Must - this time about health and fitness. After that, I'll be sharing with you some of the personal challenges I've been inspired to face based on my conversations with PlayGrounding guests like Sabrina over the past year. I'll talk about how I'm planning to incorporate play into my effort to get healthy - specifically my effort to take on a bad habit I developed to combat anxiety over the past few years: wine. I've recently started attending Moderation Management meetings to try to change that habit and find new ways to handle times of great stress - and that's where play comes in.
I hope you enjoy today's episode, and as always, please feel free to reach out to me at kara(at)playgrounding.com if this episode resonates with you. Not to be on the podcast, just because I'd love to hear from you and maybe be an ear if you don't feel comfortable talking about these kinds of things with anyone else.
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Some people train for a sport from the time they’re very young and become elite. Some people don’t even begin to get active until much later in life but become high level competitors. This week’s guest is here to remind us to never underestimate what we can accomplish regardless of age, even those of us who’ve spent most of our lives as couch potatoes.
Our guest this week is Fitness Trainer and Coach Robin Legat, host of the Seasoned Athlete podcast. It’s your home for stories, inspiration, motivation, training tips and more directly from elite athletes from a wide variety of sports who all share one common bond: they are all over 40 years old. We're here to prove one story at a time that age does NOT have to prevent you from achieving bold athletic and fitness goals, and living your best life.
Robin herself is a "late in life athlete". After spending most of her life as a self-proclaimed music and theater nerd, Robin discovered the full-contact sport of roller derby at age 28. She played for eleven years before retiring in 2014. She has now found a new sport to channel her athletic energy - obstacle course racing. She has run nine Spartan Races since her first race in December 2015, earned her first Trifecta in 2016 and has recently begun competing at the elite level. Robin's goal is to podium in the Masters Division in the coming years - sooner if she has any say in the situation.
As a trainer, Robin unlocks the full athletic potential for busy professionals in Los Angeles and beyond who want to push their physical and mental limits and live their healthiest and most awesome life. And she has a lot to say on the subject of play.
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Do you remember what it was like to be a child at the playground? When you first arrive and see the equipment, the sand, the grass? I remember that feeling well – the desire to jump, crawl, run, do summer saults and cartwheels. But somewhere along the line, that feeling began to fade. For many of us, our enthusiasm for physical play went out with our teddy bears and blankies.
I think many adults have these memories and, dare I say, even the desire to be able to play that way again, but our bodies are very different than they were when we were children. If we tried to crawl, jump, do somersaults and cartwheels, we’re afraid we’d end up in the ER. But JJ and Brian would like to challenge us all to give our bodies another chance to embrace physical play again.
In this second episode of the “Can Fitness Really Be Fun?” series, I’ve invited personal trainer JJ Kovacevich to join me and Brian Bristol to explore how adults can re-learn the basic movements children take for granted. We also discuss the role of shame and how it can keep us from even trying in the first place.
JJ Kovacevich is a movement junkie with a fierce commitment to body positivity, and she wants to help you find ways to celebrate what your moving body is capable of! She has a diverse movement background as a professional dancer, vinyasa yoga instructor, and circus artist and is a NASM Certified Personal Trainer and a Certified Functional Strength Coach (with additional certifications in modalities such as TRX and kettlebells). Sessions with JJ are tailored to fit each unique person’s needs and abilities, and her passions include working with folks new to movement practices and those working with challenging relationships to body image, food, and exercise.
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Fitness fun? For most of my life, I would have answered NO WAY to that question. It’s the one challenge I’ve had to my belief that whatever is true about play for children is also true for adults. Children play very differently from adults. They play with their whole selves, their imaginations, their creativity and especially their bodies.
Physical play comes naturally to children. They run and jump, swing, slide, do cartwheels. We talk a big game here on PlayGrounding about adults and play, but what about play through movement? Is “exercise” an unpleasant necessity after you reach a certain age? Or can grownups experience the same kind of joy a child does when they run out onto a playground?
This episode is the first in a series seeking to answer the question, can fitness really be fun? I mean really? Fitness for adults seems to be a series of measured movements meant to affect the body in specific ways – to help with strength, stamina and to help us lose weight. To me, that’s always seemed more like work than play. We do specific activities to achieve specific results. But not everyone gets results, even when we try to follow the rules.
And this is only one piece of a larger problem: our culture’s epidemic of mental illnesses like body dysmorphia and eating disorders.
Brian Bristol, a small business owner whose worked in outdoor sports for over a decade, wants to tackle this problem head-on, but he needs your help. It’s not as easy as it might seem to bring fitness and play together in one place – especially for adults. He wants to open an alternative indoor playground filled with movement-based activities and programs so youth and adults can experience play together in a way that is healthy, productive AND fun. He’s on the PlayGrounding Podcast seeking YOUR insights and ideas to re-think play and fitness so that his dream can come to life.
You’ll be hearing more from Brian in future episodes. He’ll be joining me to interview some other fitness and play experts as we go through the series to find out what’s already being done to make movement fun instead of painful for those of us who don’t already gravitate toward the fitness world.
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