For Women, Fitness Is Much More Than Weight
By: Mandy Oakes
Women live in a society that bombards us with image after image of the “ideal woman,” and if we don’t live up to that, if we aren’t a certain shape, then somehow we’ve failed.
If that weren’t enough, women also have to navigate through a sea of companies telling us how easy it is to lose weight by using their products, or eating their food, or using some kind of points system to evaluate the food we eat. We’re inundated with diet pills and fad exercise gadgets and past-their-prime celebrities telling us how to look the way we’ve always wanted.
Get Real about Your Fitness Goals
After so many years of this, it’s inevitable for women to view the idea of fitness through a different lens. Going to the gym or making better dietary choices stops being about living a healthier lifestyle and becomes all about losing weight. In our quest to look like society wants us to, the notion of fitness becomes nothing more than a number: the number we see on the bathroom scale every morning.
Fitness is so much more than that. So ladies, let’s get real about fitness. Living a healthy lifestyle goes well beyond how much you weigh. And fitness isn’t something you can order over the phone or online for three easy installments of $19.95. There’s no get-fit-quick plan that works, and you certainly can’t transform yourself overnight. If fitness were that easy, everyone would do it.
Fitness is a commitment, it’s a lifestyle. Fitness is a pledge to yourself to take better care of yourself.
Weight Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story
If you’re reading this, then there’s a good chance you train at Manduu or are thinking about working with us to get in shape (your first session is free, by the way). If that’s the case, you should be proud of yourself for making an investment in your wellbeing. It’s so important.
But I want you to keep this in mind: using weight as the benchmark for creating and tracking your fitness goals could be detrimental to your progress, and ultimately, your health. From a mental perspective, how you look and feel is much more important than how much you weigh. And from a physical standpoint, weight isn’t a great unit of measure that accurately tells you what’s going on in your body.
Here’s why: a pound of muscle weighs the same as a pound of fat. However, fat is much denser. More specifically, a pound of fat is bulky, cumbersome and takes up more space in your body. As opposed to a pound of muscle, which is harder, packed tighter and takes up less space. By that rationale, two women can weigh the same but have completely different body compositions.
The Right Way to Track Your Progress
That’s why at Manduu, our 15-minute electric muscle stimulation (EMS) sessions focus on working out your entire body, and we use a series of metrics aside from your weight to measure your progress. Manduu personal trainers work with you to establish goals and then track your progress using InBody™ technology. The InBody body composition measurement device breaks down your body into its core components: fat, protein, minerals and body water. This gives us a much more accurate picture of your overall health, so we can better guide you on your fitness journey.
Muscle is everything. Muscle boosts the immune system (think lower cancer risk), makes us feel younger, helps us look sculpted and allows us to do more in a day.
At Manduu, we throw “weight” into the trash can and focus on muscle mass and fat mass. Looking at only weight is just medieval!
Weight cannot tell you muscle mass nor can it tell you how much fat you are carrying. As a matter of fact, you can be normal “weight” and still be fat (skinny fat)! That’s right! You see, many people have sacrificed their muscle mass just to keep that number down on the scale. Don’t fall into that weight trap, use the Manduu system to get informed and empowered.
We see females who engage in a regular Manduu EMS routine develop lean, sculpted muscles and lose body fat, particularly visceral fat – the unhealthy fat around your organs. Strengthening your muscles has the super awesome side effect of boosting your metabolism too. Wouldn’t you love to burn more calories while you are resting? Our Manduu workouts help you do that!
Women of all ages and fitness levels come to us to build strength, boost metabolism, increase flexibility and live an overall healthier lifestyle. Because at Manduu, fitness is more than just how much you weigh, it’s about how healthy and strong you can be. Did you used to run regularly but now you complain about your knees hurting and not having the strength to run down the block?
Do you long to get stronger but dread the idea of going to the gym to lift weights? Do you want to go hiking with your significant other but worry you can’t keep up? Do you want to feel more balanced in your Yoga classes? Then, I encourage you to give Manduu a try so you can go out and truly live life to the fullest.
Mandy Oakes, Manduu’s Director of Client Experience, has more than 10 years of experience serving as an athlete, fitness motivator and boutique gym owner. At Manduu, she is dedicated to client service and retention.