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Summary
On episode 189 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan sits down with Kathleen Trotter, a personal trainer and Pilates specialist with 15 years of experience who makes regular TV and media appearances and writes for publications including the Globe and Mail and the Huffington Post.
Kathleen argues that the key to lasting success is finding your own recipe for health and fitness instead of copying what works for someone else, and that health is an active process you set yourself up for, not something that magically happens.
The conversation moves through her seven strategies for health success, the difference between goals and wishes, and how mindful eating habits (why, how, and how much you eat) shape long term results.
Links
- https://kathleentrotter.com
- https://twitter.com/ktrotterfitness
- https://instagram.com/kathleentrotterfitness
- Episode 369 – Kathleen Trotter – Your fittest future self
Key Takeaways
- Find your unique fitness recipe. Stop comparing your routine to your mother’s, your father’s, or your best friend’s. What works for someone else is close to irrelevant; the goal is to find the version of health and fitness that fits your own life.
- Stop aiming for perfection. Waiting for the perfect workout or the perfect body before you start is a trap. A half hour workout at home beats skipping the gym entirely, and movement should be treated as non-negotiable, not all or nothing.
- Convenience and consistency (the two C’s) beat intensity. A single hard workout once a month will not produce results. Building a wide net of convenient options (a gym at home, a gym at work, a Fitbit for tracking steps) makes daily consistency realistic.
- Find your exercise bliss. Pick activities you do not despise and ideally grow to love. Kathleen’s mother hated spin class but loved yoga and gardening; forcing an activity you hate is a losing long term strategy no matter how effective it is on paper.
- Find your why, and let intrinsic motivation take over. Exercise often starts for an external reason, like a doctor’s warning, but the goal is for the activity itself to become enjoyable so the motivation becomes internal rather than a means to an end.
- Flip negative self-talk. Reframe “I don’t want to train” into “how lucky I am that I get to train.” Kathleen points to a friend hospitalized with a rare blood disease who just wanted to move again as the reminder that the ability to exercise is a privilege, not a burden.
- Goals require a WWWH plan, not a wish. A goal needs to specify where, when, what, and how you will fit it in. Wishes (“I’ll go to the gym more”) fail because they were never connected to your actual schedule and realities.
- Mindfulness applies to eating as much as exercise. Knowing why you eat (boredom, sadness, thirst mistaken for hunger), how you eat (standing up, off your kid’s plate, mindlessly at your desk), and how much you eat matters more than chasing a perfect diet.
“Moving is a privilege, being able to run is a privilege. You get out the door and you go for a run.”
Kathleen Trotter
