Today I’m excited to welcome Vanessa Bogenholm to the Seasoned Athlete Podcast. Vanessa is a Bay Area based personal trainer and an avid runner who is a regular age group podium fixture. She is also the author of It’s Your Body which shows you step by step how to slow down and understand how the body works so you, too, can get the results you want.
She was not born a natural athlete, but thanks to an influential coach in her early teens, she found joy and freedom through running and that has led her to a life of helping others make their own physical, mental and emotional commitment to pursuing what excites them and becoming their best selves.
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We discuss:
How she started her athletic journey.
Why you need to hire the right people and the value of a great coach.
How nutrition, sleep and taking care of your body is vital every day.
Why you need to be honest with yourself about your goals and what it takes to achieve them.
How your athletic journey can help you gain confidence in other areas of your life.
… and more!
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Here are some highlights.
You need to figure out what YOU love to become an athlete
“When I start with a client, I always try to say, ‘Okay, we've gonna figure out who you are, to figure out what sports you wanna do. Don't run because I run. Who cares what I do? But if you're someone who likes to be in a team environment, you like to be with other people, you might wanna be a tennis player, you might wanna play soccer, you might wanna play basketball. if you're a loner, you like individual things, you might wanna swim. So for me running in my morning run is very meditative, it allows me to clear out all those cobwebs in my brain, it allows me to sing and dance while I'm down the road at 4:30 in the morning and no one's watching, but it allows me to connect everything before I start my day, which is incredibly important to me. But we have to figure out who and what you are mentally before you can figure out who in which you are as an athlete, and everybody can be an athlete.”
How her book came to be
“When I was 13, I didn't see any stories in the library, when I was getting books about people who changed their lives through running or through sport. I only saw professional athletes, and when you look online now we see the Jillian Michaels of the world. We don't see people transforming their lives or how the average person or how 300 pound people literally can run a marathon. That kind of book, I'd never seen written really about the reality of obesity, the reality of people being in wheelchairs, all of that stuff. And so I decided I was gonna write a book about it, 'cause I've always been a reader. I’d written a fiction book before, and so I wanted to write the story, not just of myself and my changes, but I wanna talk about my clients and the types of clients I see and how they change their lives for the better, sometimes. I talk about the reality, and I talk about a lot of death and suicide in my book and about clients that are not here today because they chose lifestyles that didn't work.”
How stress affects our physical lives
“We have complicated lives, and the stress of our lives is remarkable now. How you handle stress and what you do with that stress is really so different now in our 50s than it was in our 20s, and so teaching people to walk away from stress is really one of the things that I work on all the time.You have to decide that that is not gonna get you anywhere. In my 20s, I thought it was great to be riled up and excited and scream and yell at people and do things, you know... and now I know if I scream at somebody, I feel worse, so I don't do it. I don't get in arguments, I don't do those things because I don't wanna feel bad. Because if I scream, I yell, I physically feel bad. So I avoid it, and I try to teach my clients to avoid that kind of stress. We're all gonna have disagreements, but how we handle disagreements will affect our physical life.”
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