Healthy Inspirations from home

Sylvie Jackson is making and uploading exercise videos from home.

With most of us either working from home or hanging around home filling in our time during lockdown, a growing number of people are trying to keep up their daily exercise.

Healthy Inspirations Napier's lifestyle and fitness consultant Sylvie Jackson is reaching out to clients and any women interested in keeping up a level of fitness at home, by posting a daily routine filmed from her home in Central Hawke's Bay.

Sylvie has worked at Healthy Inspirations since 2006, where she mentors, monitors, encourages and cheers on members.

Although the exercise component at Healthy Inspirations is a 30-minute resistance /cardio based circuit designed to work the whole body top to toe — tone muscle and burn stored body fat — Sylvie's experience running boot camps, motivational circuit classes and tummy thigh and butt classes with her workmates, is a role which has set her up well for fronting her home-based exercise clips.

"I came up with the idea to tune into our website daily, demonstrating a different exercise to do and at the end of the week put them all together to form a small routine."

When lockdown is over, she is hoping clients would have maintained a good level of fitness and have a collection of exercises at their disposal to use at home.

"The idea was born out of wanting to stay fit myself — not let myself go — but also to encourage our members to do the same."

Sylvie says offering encouragement in these uncertain and stressful times, supports others to keep to healthy routines of good eating and exercise.

"This is all good for physical health, but also mental health. Tuning in every day for a short time allows members to be diligent in sticking to a routine which may help with structure to their day."

She says for women to see her doing the exercises too and hear some words of positivity and encouragement might be helpful.

"The filming is very amateur and done from my little cell phone, but it does the job OK. It keeps it real, which clients will certainly see in the videos."

Sylvie says she was not a natural in front of the camera but found her way after a bit of practise.

"The first couple were strained with quite a few 'ums' and 'ahs' but the more I do, the more confident I am."

Exercise ideas are taken from exercises and classes done at the centre so clients will be familiar with them.

"I'm changing it up every week with variations of the same exercise and also new ones, plus increasing repetitions too."

So far she has received plenty of feedback which has encouraged her to keep it up.

"I guess it's something familiar to them in unfamiliar times and it's good for me as well as it keeps me involved in a job I love doing."

■ For more information log into napier@healthyinspirations.co.nz where owner Wendy is also available to answer queries.