Personal Trainer
Registered Kinesiologist
From the Field to the Gym: What Am I Training For?
Being an athlete is more than just a lifestyle; it becomes a huge part of your identity. You spend years of your life training in the gym or on the field, driving countless hours to and from practice and competitions. You build relationships with your team and coaches who ultimately become family. You become completely immersed with life as an athlete, it’s everything you know, and then in the blink of an eye, it’s over.
Transitioning out of competitive sport is a major milestone that can feel liberating for some, but also devastating without a plan for what’s next. From a young age, athletes become accustomed to structure. You’re surrounded by an infrastructure of support: coaches, trainers, therapists and team members, who provide constant guidance on what to do, when to do it and how. You’ve made sacrifices in other areas of your life in order to push yourself to your limits. You’ve dedicated a huge part of your life to strive for excellence in your sport; it’s been your purpose, and has now suddenly ended. So, now what?
The End of Your Athletic Career is the Start of a New Journey
The end of an athlete’s career doesn’t have to mean the end of training. Rather, it’s the start of a new journey where your motivations and goals are shifting to become sustainable long-term. Many athletes struggle with this transition as their training regimen and goals have always been clear and specific. After sport, you may deal with physical, social, mental, and emotional changes. You may feel like you have lost a sense of comradery, support, motivation, leadership, and direction and the path forward doesn’t seem so clear.
I know this experience all too well. I was a very active kid who grew up playing all kinds of sports. I competed in artistic gymnastics up until the age of 14 and then competed at the provincial and national level in track and field into my second year at Queen’s University. At 19 years old when my formal athletic career ended, I felt lost. I had trained my whole life to get faster and stronger to beat my competition and then suddenly, the competition was gone. Luckily, I had learned the basics of the weight room from my track team’s strength coach which inspired me to really begin lifting and my new competition became myself.
Finding Accountability and Structure in Weight Training
One of my current clients, Julija, found herself in a similar situation to mine at the end of her high school career. I met Julija over 10 years ago at East York Gymnastics, where I also trained and then went on to coach. I never directly coached Julija there, but I always knew her to be an exceptional athlete. Julija is a tenacious competitor with her biggest competition being herself; she is continuously driven by beating her previous performance. Throughout her gymnastics career, she battled through numerous injuries but never let these stop her and continued to train hard and show up. Even with a broken ankle, she would still come in to train and do conditioning on her own. After gymnastics, Julija went on to compete in diving and wrestling. However, the pandemic cut her high school athletic career short. Subsequently, she found herself missing the structure, accountability, and push of competitive sport.
Julija reached out to me in Spring 2020 when she saw that I had started personal training at Body + Soul Fitness. She told me that she had always wanted to start weight training and was missing her usual active schedule. She came into the gym, and without hesitation was ready to get started. First, we addressed some lingering back pain, that she had been dealing with for a while, with an initial structural balance program. This four-week program focused on rebuilding her core strength and endurance while correcting lower body strength imbalances. From there, we developed strong and clear goals moving forward. One of her goals was to be able to do pullups again, and after working hard for two months she achieved it. The athlete in her shows in her training. She is extremely coachable, determined, and hard working. She always asks for more – more reps, more weight, and more workouts. Julija has put in the work over the last few months with me and has made tremendous progress. She no longer deals with back pain and she’s found a love for training that she can sustain for life.
It’s All About Finding New Motivations and Goals
Transitioning out of sport and into the gym is about finding new motivations and setting new goals. It’s about finding sustainable ways to exercise and continuing to seek out ways to challenge yourself outside of sport. It’s important to recognize and apply your skills from sport to your training so that you can stay active, prevent injury, and continually improve your fitness throughout your life.
Many of the aspects of sport that athletes find themselves missing can be fulfilled with a community at a gym like Body + Soul Fitness. A personal trainer can help to give you a sense of direction and support, create new, meaningful goals and hold you accountable to them. Training can give you the structure, direction, and social support that you may be lacking after your athletic career ends. If you’re looking toward what’s next for you in your fitness journey, contact us to get started with a trainer today. Let’s find exactly what you’re training for now.
Begin Your Journey with Us
If you’re finding it challenging to get started on your journey, feel free to reach out to us for a complimentary consultation. We would be more than happy to offer some guidance to help you move forward. Sometimes taking the first step is the hardest, so don’t hesitate to get some help to kickstart the process. We all start somewhere.