The 51-year-old says she is in the best shape of her life. She replaced sweat training for strength training.

• Natalie Bushow, 51 years old, has always been active, growing.

• She began to go to the gym more regularly a few years to become a mother.

• She said strength training and receiving some physical assessments helped her adapt.

Growing up, Natalie Bushow was always active. In high school, she played basketball, dropped the track and became a cheerleader to drive the bus with her boyfriend at the time, now a husband. At college, she fell into lifting weights, reaching 155 pounds and breaking the bench press record in the school fitness.

Then life was put on. In 2003, Bushwow gave birth to boys who have had health challenges and required more than 30 procedures and surgery over the years. After her sons were preschoolers, Bushwow wanted to start sports more regularly.

“I was just”, find out who you were, Natalie, get back to Natalie, who you remember who was glad to train, who wanted to be healthy and fit and just to do it, “said the 51 -year -old Business Insider. In the same year, she joined the lifelong fitness.

Since then, Bushaw has been working in the gym, becoming Vice President of Public Relations and Corporate Communications for the brand. Now she goes to the gym six times a week.

Entry into a form has also become easier since Bushaw found the right treatment for the symptoms of perimenopause and thyroiditis of Hashimoto, an autoimmune disease that causes the immune system to attack the thyroid gland and can lead to weight gain.

Bushow said that when she remains in accordance with her medicines and finds the right workouts, she feels “more abdominal and metabolically the most healthy I have been.”

Less cardio, more power training

For years, Bushaw has felt that the most effective workouts are the most demanding. “I wanted to get hot and sweat and get exhausted,” she said.

Shortly after joining Life Time, she received a personal trainer who made her an active metabolic evaluation to measure how much oxygen she takes and how much carbon dioxide breathes while training with different intensities. Bushaw wore a fitness assessment mask as it moved on a treadmill and learned its heart rate and VO2 max, a heart measurement that can be used to measure longevity.

The test also taught her whether she loses fat or carbohydrates during various exercises. Some people are “sugar burners”, burning more carbohydrates than fat during workouts. Knowing which one can help you change your diet and workouts to achieve your goals better, such as weight loss.

Bushaw has learned that mostly carbohydrates during high -intensity workouts. “So when the scale will never move, it is because I was training too intensively,” she said.

She changed her workout routine to focus less on fast-growing cardio and more on strength training known for burning fat. She said she noticed a gradual weight loss during the year, which helped her “muscle shine.”

“It’s a change of mind because you don’t burn so many calories with a less intensity,” she said. “The focus is not the number of calories; this is the type of calories. I had to burn more greasy calories.”

Now she usually starts her fitness sessions with 20 to 30 minutes of cardio (using the treadmill, staircase, elliptical or comb). It then goes to several power exercises for one to two parts of the body that day, using both bar and dumbbells from 15 to 45 pounds.

It continues to challenge itself

Bushaw said “progressively overloaded” – a term to gradually increase the intensity of her workouts over time.

“I think it’s really, it’s really important that we don’t always get the same thing or to lift the same weight, because the change will not happen then,” she said.

Every six weeks it will increase what it lifts by 2 to 5 pounds, depending on the exercise.

She also sometimes picks up barrel classes to switch which muscle groups work. Although Barre usually uses far lighter weights than it is used to, they feel “much larger because you just use your muscles in different ways,” she said.

To get more cardio throughout the day, not just in a morning workout of 5,000 steps, she bought a pedestrian pad for her office last year.

“I easily started hitting 10 to 12,000 steps and felt so better, mind, body and soul,” she said.

She does not overcome

When Bushow first started training again after she had twins, she had to stick to a strict morning schedule as a working mother. She would work from 5:23 to 6:26 pm every day so that she could return home and

However, sometimes she would not go to bed in time to get a full night on vacation. Instead of worrying about the quality of your sleep and talking from a workout, Bushaw “will just pretend to not know how to say time,” she said. If she went to bed at 11:30 pm, she would be mentally behaving as if she was going to bed at 10:30.

“I was going to go, but it happened,” she said. This helped her avoid the slippery slope of the missing fitness sessions when plans are not aligned perfectly.

Bushaw said the key is not to overcome her workouts, such as worrying about how they fit into the life of her children or work tasks.

“If you overcome all things, you will go crazy,” she said. “If you just make a commitment, like” this is what I do, it’s part of my routine, “You can go through things much easier.”

Read the original Business Insider article