A Fresh Look at Fitness

Awaken Athletics has grown and evolved so much over the past 4 years and I am so thankful! It has been my dream for so long to create a gym where women can come and feel welcome at every level, feel challenged and find community. I can confidently say that you can find that here!

Whether you have been coming for years or you’re thinking about starting, I wanted to give you all the information you need, to feel confident in what you’re getting when you walk through these doors, invest your hard earned money and your precious time!

So let’s dive in!

There are SO many ways to create a fitness program and over the years, I personally have tested out many, many avenues! When it comes to group fitness, each and every person is different, goals are different and needs are different. How do you tailor one program to everyone? I’ve found that having a program that offers options and variety is the only way to go! In our program we train:

-Strength

-Speed

-Agility

-Stamina

-Power

-Coordination

-Balance

-Accuracy

-Cardiovascular Endurance

-Flexibility

Having a program that fails to focus on one of these areas is cutting your fitness short! When you start at Awaken Athletics you will have the choice to follow 1 of 2 programs: Functional Fitness or Functional Performance! Both programs cover all 10 points of fitness, they just go about it in a little different way! The 2 can be interchangeable day to day depending on how you’re feeling as well, that way you can listen to your body and tailor to what it really needs!

Functional Fitness: You will increase your fitness in each of the 10 areas listed above, however in this programming, when it comes to weight training you will see mostly dumbbell work with occasional barbell work and building up the core skills and strength it takes to build towards more advanced lifting and gymnastics movements! It’s always challenging and effective no matter what your fitness level, however this is where I recommend start out if they’re just joining!

Functional Performance: Again, you will increase your fitness in all 10 areas! This programming Involves more powerlifting and olympic lifting exercises and well as works more advanced gymnastics movements. You will see two options under the conditioning portion of the workout- “Full Effort,” which is the most challenging option- you will often see higher volume, heavier suggested weights and higher skill work here. “Full Victory” is a scaled down version of full effort. Anyone who loves barbell work, has the desire to compete or just wants a new challenge, functional performance is for you!

Is one better than the other?

No! I want to reiterate that these two programs will both get you super fit! They are just different roads to getting there. Not only that, they are interchangeable!

I am a huge proponent of listening to your body. Just because something is written on the board for day, doesn’t mean you have to be married to that exactly. If modifying or subbing out a movement feels like a better option for you that day, by all means do so! Listening to our bodies will help us progress further than working against them ever will!

That being said, if you normally do performance but your body is sore and tired, maybe taking a day doing fitness could be the better option for you! Or, if you normally do fitness but the performance workout excites you and you are feeling up for a new challenge, maybe you do that instead!

Flexibility and Fluidity with is a must in order to get the most out of our workouts!

Tracking Progress

We use the Wodify app to schedule workouts as well as track our results. This is an amazing feature because it allows us measure progress. It's an exciting thing when you’ve been putting in the work and look back and see how far you’ve come! Each workout is tracked differently depending on the day but a few things to remembers:

-Tracking workouts is for YOU, not to compare yourself to other people. At the end of the day we are all on our own journeys and we are just trying to be our healthiest, fittest selves, right?!

-RX versus Scaled. When tracking you will see this option. RX means you performed the workout exactly as written. If it calls for pullups and you did them all on your own, you RX’d it. If you used bands, it’s scaled. If it calls for a 400m run but you did 300m, you scaled. If it calls for toes to bar and you hit your toes to the bar every time, you RX’d it or if it calls for hanging knees to chest and you did so, you RX’d it! If you did the exercise to full standard it’s always an RX and if you modified in any way it’s a scale.

This is not to make you feel bad!! There’s zero shame in scaling anything and it should motivate you to keep pushing and challenging yourself. The cool thing is when you track it, you can look back and see when you can finally RX something- it’s a celebration of progress in your fitness journey!

The beauty of this gym is that no matter where you’re starting, you are welcome and you are READY. We all started somewhere and we all have that little internal voice of doubt but that’s why Awaken is so amazing, we uplift each other and overcome that voice and turn it into confidence and strength!

I hope this gives even more clarity to how Awaken operates! Please never hesitate to reach out with any questions!

Now let’s get to work!