Spring into Action: Small Changes for Big Results!

Spring has sprung! It's time to put away the winter coats, break out the shorts, and embrace the warmer weather. It's also the perfect time for a little spring cleaning, not just for your home but also for your health and wellness routine.

Why do we tend to over complicate our health & wellness? We often think we need to change alllll of the things, all at once, in order to improve our wellness and reach our goals. Who can relate?!

Making big changes to your routine can be overwhelming, so instead, let's focus on incorporating small, sustainable changes that will have a big impact. Here are three simple tips to help you clean up your health and wellness routine this spring.

1. Prioritize Sleep

Sleep is one of the most important things we can do for our health, yet it's often the first thing we sacrifice when life gets busy. However, getting enough sleep is crucial for our physical and mental health, and it's essential for our overall well-being.

Start by setting a consistent bedtime and wake-up time. Try to stick to this schedule as much as possible, even on weekends. Create a relaxing bedtime routine that includes turning off electronic devices and winding down with a book or meditation. Make your bedroom a peaceful and comfortable space that is conducive to sleep. Try taking a magnesium supplement before bed (one of our favorites is CALM powder, honey & chamomile flavor!), or a relaxing tea.

2. Take Morning & Evening Walks. Who out there DOESN’T need a mood booster?!

It sounds simple, but there's no better way to embrace the beauty of spring & fresh beginnings than by taking a walk. Whether it's a quick stroll around the block or a longer hike in nature, walking is an excellent way to improve your physical and mental health.

Morning walks, aka sunlight!

Getting sunlight (even if it’s cloudy!) first thing in the morning helps set our day up for success. It helps regulate the circadian rhythm by resetting the biological clock. Exposure to natural light in the morning helps to suppress the release of the sleep hormone melatonin, which helps to promote wakefulness during the day. This, in turn, helps to improve sleep quality at night and promote overall health and well-being. Moreover, sunlight exposure has been linked to the production of vitamin D, which is essential for healthy bones, muscles, and immune system function.

Post dinner walk:

A post dinner walk can be helpful for several reasons. Here are just a few!

-Aid digestion: Walking after a meal can help aid digestion by stimulating the digestive system and increasing blood flow to the stomach and intestines. This can help improve the absorption and assimilation of nutrients from the food.

-Regulate blood sugar: Walking after a meal has been shown to help regulate blood sugar levels 

-Promote physical activity: Great for overall health and weight management.

-Reduce stress: Walking has been shown to have a calming effect on the mind and body, which can help reduce stress levels and promote relaxation after a long day.

3. Hydrate, Hydrate, Hydrate

Drinking enough water is essential for our bodies to function properly. It helps regulate body temperature, aids in digestion, and keeps our skin looking healthy and glowing.

Try to drink at least half your body weight in ounces each day. Carry a refillable water bottle with you wherever you go, so you always have access to water. Set a bottle in each room of your home if that helps remind you. If you struggle to drink plain water, try infusing it with fruit or adding a splash of lemon or lime juice (and pinch of sea salt for extra hydration!)

Eat your water! Remember, often times it is just as important to eat our water. Think fruits & vegetables high in water content (cucumbers, melons, celery, etc). They help our bodies absorb water in its natural form, closest to found in nature. Get your GLOW on!

At the end of the day…

Remember, making small, sustainable changes is the key to improving your health and wellness. By prioritizing sleep, taking morning and evening walks, and staying hydrated, you can start cleaning up your routine this spring and feel your best all year round!

Cheers & Happy Spring Cleaning!

When More Is Not Better

“You either need to start eating more, or cut back on your exercise.”

When I told this to one client who wanted to lose fat and build more muscle, she told me she hard a hard time wrapping her head around that idea. Isn’t the goal to push harder and eat less when you want to lose weight and build muscle?

More exercise is only better if we can meet the demands of more. If more is leaving us always sore, prone to injuries, in constant pain and feeling “heavy” all the time, irritable and anxious or unable to mark improvement in our workouts and in making body composition changes, we may be doing too much. Or, I could also share the perspective that if you may not be over training, but you may be under recovering.

When we consider the balance of movement and recovery, we have to remember that if we are exercising more, our recovery needs to be even more intentional and meet the demands of what we’re asking our body to do, otherwise, we send our body into a stress response that can prevent us from feeling our best and meeting fitness goals like weight loss and strength gains.

On average, most of us benefit best from training 3-5 days per week of moderate to intense workouts. You can certainly exercise 7 days per week but likely some of those days should be mobility focused or lower intensity.

If you’re participating in the BUILD program in the BBH Online Studio, you’ve already noticed that even though we schedule out 6 days of workouts for you each week, we want you to focus on meeting the 3 priority days workouts first! If you’re recovering well from those 3 workouts, you’re invited to complete our supplementary workouts. Always included are mobility focused workouts and recovery focused workouts. Every single workout shouldn’t crush you.

If you’re hitting these recommendations and not seeing results and notice your body is always exhausted, you likely need to prioritize recovery better to meet the demands of your moderate/intense workouts with these tips:

• Fuel Better: Often when I have clients track their nutrition to help troubleshoot why they aren’t seeing results from all of their hard work, I find a lack of nutrients and proper hydration. Not enough protein is a big culprit for a lot of women but also lack of energy from very low-carb diets with frequent exercising contribute to lack of results.

• Sleep Better: Ya’ll, I cannot stress the importance of this one for better recovery. Get on a schedule. Go to bed earlier. And try to keep the routine at least most weekends too.

• Consider your program: Stop over doing it! If you’re training 6-7 days per week and doing a heavy full body workout or HIIT workouts every single workout, you may want to consider varying your workouts to include recovery based workouts, lower intensity cardio and mobility focused workouts between heavy days to give your muscles more time to recover.

• Supplement: Many times, lack of important minerals from for example an insufficiently nutrient dense diet can lead to deficiencies that aid in better muscle tissue repair. Start with a basic multi-vitamin if you haven’t already!

If you feel like you need more guidance, it’s not too late to join the BUILD program on the BBH Online studio. As a member of the BBH Online studio, you can expect the availability of more personalized coaching just by reaching out to your BBH trainers any time you have a question.

What I’ve Learned About Correcting Movement, Balancing Hormones & Improving Your Fitness

I’ve always tried my best to commit to a growth mindset. In an industry where science is still being uncovered, we must accept that we don’t know it all. I’ve continued to evolve my training practices around the latest science but also around daily discoveries I make with each individual client. 

I want to share a few things I was confronted with this year that really challenged what I know about correcting movement, balancing hormones, and improving your fitness.

Is Corrective Exercise Overrated? 

I have been a self proclaimed “form police” type of trainer. I’ve always believed one of my biggest responsibilities as a trainer is to fix my clients muscle imbalances through corrective exercises. There’s a very big message in our industry claiming that we are broken and we need to be fixed or else we’ll get injured. Well, that’s not necessarily true and that messaging with clients only instills fear of movement. It can prevent many from even getting started on their fitness journey. In reality, we are not as fragile as we may believe.

I recently dove into numerous published studies around movement dysfunction and their relationship to injuries. Excuse me while I grossly summarize these findings for the sake of this article- I’ve cited sources below for reference if you are interested. 

In these prospective design approaches where we look at the outcome (injury) first to hypothesize a causation (why it happened), we see that joint dysfunctions was not the likely cause for injury. Clients rehabbing from injuries got stronger and became pain free over time simply by following a gym strength training program EVEN THOUGH they showed no change in the way they moved. So they got better, but still moved the same way.

So how does this change the way that I train? I still demand better form from clients, but I am less rigid about it. While we can still agree that major muscle imbalances can create problems over time, it appears that some degree of imbalance is totally safe. If the movement isn’t absolutely “perfect”. I’m less hung up on addressing it solely through corrective exercise before moving forward. I confidently lean more into the “where do you feel this exercise? Or “how does this exercise feel” question I always ask my clients. If the exercise is eliciting a muscle burn in the intended muscle group, we’re moving in the right direction. We can “correct” and strengthen at the same time. And what seems to be more important for becoming pain free, is to prioritize getting stronger using heavier load.

Sources: 

Swain et. al, 2020 PMID 31451200

Menezes Costa et. al, 2011 PMID 20655254

Alfonso et. al, 2021 PMID PMC C8067745

Pardos-Mainer et. al, 2021 PMID 33419178

Hormonal Health. 

For the past two years I’ve been on a more in depth journey to see if there was anything new I could discover around women and their hormonal health at every stage of life. I completed multiple online continuing education courses and soaked up information from experts in the field hoping to uncover some new truths.

The biggest truth remains unchanged, and that’s that our first line of defense for creating a more flexible metabolism and balancing our hormones to maintain a healthy weight, achieve weight loss, gain energy and to build muscle at any age, boils down to managing stress through diet and exercise (specifically strength training). 

That’s not to oversimplify the fact that our hormones fluctuate depending on our monthly cycles and reproductive age, but regardless of whatever stage we are in, a healthy diet and focus on strength training should be our first approach to encouraging a more flexible metabolism.

My mission in 2023 is to help women become more in sync with their own biofeedback so we can translate it into what their exercise and nutritional approach should look like. You may be eating too much, you may be eating too little. You may be over training, you may be under training. You may need more recovery. You may need to focus on a few lifestyle habits to combat insomnia and improve energy. In the new year, I’ll be focusing more on coming up with easy methods for interpreting our hormonal cues to be able to implement more effective training and nutritional strategies. 

Focus on PROTEIN and Improve Your Fitness.

I’ve wavered from not really paying much attention to protein (just paying attention to eating whole foods and keeping it healthy), to (after reading Proteinaholic) believing we get way too much protein and in the next year limiting animal protein to no more than one meal per day or less, and now swinging back around to the power of protein for faster recovery and more efficiently achieving body recomposition. 

Whether you choose to get your protein primarily from plants or from animal sources is your own choice but I do wholeheartedly believe that getting animal protein has incredible advantages. Animal protein is more bioavailable, it’s a lower total caloric whole food protein option, and holds unique micronutrients you can’t find as available in plants. 

If you have goals to lose weight more easily and build muscle for better metabolic health, then eating enough protein must be a priority for reaching those goals more easily. 

We’ve explored prescribing protein rich diets in our BBH Nutrition Corner for our online studio clients as well as encouraged clients in the studio to track protein and in every case where the client has been compliant consistently, we’ve witnessed them achieve body recomposition goals. They have lost fat AND built muscle at the same time which is typically no easy task! If you want to become MORE FIT in 2023, prioritize protein. Don’t know where to start? Well, I’d say reach out for a personalized evaluation. Or start by following our BUILD program featured for the next 3 months this year.

“The more you know. The more you realize you don’t know.” - Aristotle 

Keep on learning in 2023.

The Compulsive Entrepreneur

My self-employed dad operated his own publishing company, Friends Publishers. The Pamlico Scoop was his self-published human interest newspaper that circulated across eastern NC. Selling advertisements to pay for publishing and himself, he seemingly made just enough money to scrounge by and rarely had a little extra to spare. Dad’s self employed status gave him a flexible schedule which was good because he was also the only parent who drove. My mom refused to drive so it meant that my dad was the only chauffeur to seven other family members. His schedule became a bit more restricted around monthly deadlines. He would lock himself in his office, ask not to be bothered, and crank out the design, layout, and everything else it took to publish the next edition. He’d then send the pages off to the printer and spent the week post-print making drops at grocery stores, gas stations and businesses from Elizabeth City on down to New Bern.

Although a pauper entrepreneur, my dad’s entrepreneurial lifestyle obviously made its’ impact. The apple wouldn’t fall far from the tree. Over time, I would discover that I was a compulsive entrepreneur. 

At 12, I wasn’t old enough yet to get a job so I needed to figure out a way to make money if I wanted to buy new clothes or go on field trips with my friends. Earning an allowance from my parents wasn’t an option. A lemonade stand became my very first business venture.

My childhood home stood on one of the busiest street corners in little Washington. It was prime location to set up shop with the best lemonade stand in town. My sisters and I promoted the stand with plenty of signs and word of mouth. We were excited to make a couple hundred dollars that summer selling lemonade in two different sizes and then expanding our offerings from just lemonade to a few baked goods as well. When summer ended, I traded in that business venture for one I could work year round. I cleaned houses and babysat and when I was finally legal working age, I got a job at my best friend's family’s dry cleaners. 

Fast forward to adulthood. I created three business all before turning 27- Broadway Babysitters Inc, a babysitting agency, Body By Hannah, LLC, my personal training business and Gotham Versatile Training Inc., a community of independent trainers and trainees and fitness facility management. All three businesses were successes.

I’ve described my entrepreneurial style as “jump into the deep end and figure out how to stay afloat”. And that’s still true to some extent. But, If I could go back, I wouldn't do things the same way. Although I learned by doing, I could have saved myself a lot of headache and heartache by seeking out mentors, finding the right resources earlier on, and hiring help I should have hired. 

The entrepreneurship blog series ahead will explore some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way and share the struggles I still face as a business owner. The successes, the failures, and the jaw dropping stories in between will hopefully help other entrepreneurs find their way a little bit easier and find incredible success of their own. 

If you’re thinking about starting a business or have started a small business and wish to grow, subscribe here to get exclusive content I’ll be sharing only to those interested! I’m not trying to spam those totally uninterested in this topic!

The story behind my first business, Broadway Babysitters Inc., coming soon!!……