I love my life at the moment, maybe more than ever. In this post I want to share with you why and how I started to make changes and how it affected my life. Everyone has a different dream about the perfect life, this is what worked for me to feel more happy, fulfilled and healthy and get a step closer to my ideal life. Feel inspired and then make your own dream come true step by step.

As there is so much I want to share with you about that journey I separated it into two parts. This first post will be about my reasons for creating a „new“ life, my changes in my training and the second one will cover my new eating habits.

My reasons for changing my life

Since I own a studio I felt stressed most of the time and studying at the same time didn´t make it easier. Often I had no time left for learning as well as my training, free time, family and friends. It forced me to stop studying although I enjoyed it a lot. I felt like I was close to a burnout, so this decision had to be made. But as I love my job so much and enjoy every minute at my studios this was okay for me. I never regret that I opened a studio, it´s one of my most important parts in my life.

What really motivated me to change something was the moment when I looked at some snapshots we took right before the German Championships this year. I just didn´t like what I saw. It´s not that I was fat or totally out of shape, but there was more belly fat than I wanted and it was the highest weight I ever had. I felt like that body didn´t fit to me anymore.

I just didn´t like what I saw.

My metabolism was bad, I was stressed, I didn´t eat healthy and I didn´t take enough time for my own training because I always felt guilty when there was still work to do (which was always the case). But instead of feeling  frustrated, I took this as a motivation to change my life! So I started my journey to a new self in the end of May this year. I lost 4kg in about 4 weeks, got my abs back and feel amazing. And I even started to study again!

If you want to know what I changed, read on! 😉

New training habits

The first step for me was to change my training. I started to do more cardio with the hope to increase my metabolism and give my body new unusual stimuli. I had a metabolism check in the end 2015 and it was so bad, the trainer said I burn zero fat and instead only sugar, which is not what you want if you want to lose some weight (I´m soon gonna do another check soon to see how it developed and will let you know).

I started running – which I hated in the beginning (if you also want to stop hating it you should read this blog post: Fall in Love with Running), I went to the gym for cardio and also swam a few times. I started with shorter times and increased it until I felt good with doing 30min of cardio. Recently I added HIIT workouts to my cardio because it was so rainy. This sounds like a lot, but I normally add cardio sessions about 2 times a week to my training schedule. I love the diversity, I don´t get bored of my training and it helps me to stay motivated if I don´t do the same again and again.

I did the same with my strength and aerial training: Cross training instead of only doing one sport. I started to do more strength training at the gym, pole training 1-2 times per week (definitely want to increase this amount, once I got used to all that training), hand balancing 1-2 times a week, stretching after almost every cardio sessions and training at the gym and sometimes I added a hoop or silk training.

The outcome of my new training habits

I noticed that my pole dance skills improved a lot from training more different sport without training more pole dance.  A trainer at my gym told me that cardio is good for static strength moves like Iron X, Flag, Planks and so on, and he proved to be right. I loved to see those moves improve although I haven´t worked on them for a while. It also had a positive effect on my shoulders. A lot of aerialist have problems with their shoulders or at least overstress them a lot. I haven´t had any problems since I strengthen them at the gym and I can even do my lifts on the pole on both sides now which always felt weird with my weak arm on top. Suddenly it felt good and a lot easier.

Last thing which made a huge difference for me was that I just went training when I wanted to and my work sometimes had to wait until afterwards. I didn´t feel guilty anymore as I noticed that the training made me feel so much better.

But as you might know, nurtrition is also super important if you want to lose weight, define your muscles and also to stay fit for your training. Read part two if you want to find out what changes I made to my eating habits: Part 2

Any questions left? Don´t hesitate to comment and ask me!