Episode 267: Today I'm speaking with Jenna Doak, the Co-Founder and Head Trainer at Body Positive Fitness. We talk about Jenna's journey as a personal trainer and her own relationship with exercise. We also cover common topics of discussion with clients: abstaining from exercise when it’s needed, finding joy in movement after a compulsive and compensatory relationship with it, finding joy in movement for the first time in your adult life, psychological flexibility with exercise and lots more.
Jenna is the Co-Founder and Head Trainer at Body Positive Fitness. She has worked in the fitness industry from a young age and started as a trainer over a decade before starting body positive fitness. Jenna is on a mission to help people discover and appreciate their body’s goodness – how it is, what it does, and what it CAN do.
Jenna’s approach to fitness is based in an anti-diet and Health at Every Size® perspective. She believes in joyful movement and creating inclusive spaces for all – especially anyone who hasn’t felt at home in mainstream fitness spaces.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 267 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at www.seven-health.com/267.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist and a coach, and I help clients stuck in quasi-recovery restore their health and end eating disorder behaviours so that they can regain their period, sleep through the night, improve body image, and have a peaceful relationship with food and exercise.
Before I get started with today’s episode, I want to mention that I’m taking on new clients again. Client work is the core of my business and is the thing that I actually enjoy the most. After working with clients for 15 years, I feel confident in saying I’m very good at what I do. So if you want to get unstuck and reach a place of full recovery, I would love to help. You can head over to www.seven-health.com/help, and there you can read about how I work with clients and apply for a free recovery strategy call. At the time of recording this intro, there are five spots available. The address, again, is www.seven-health.com/help, and I’ll put that link in the show notes.
On to today’s show. This week it is a guest interview, and my guest today is Jenna Doak. Jenna is the co-founder and head trainer at Body Positive Fitness. She has worked in the fitness industry from a young age and started as a trainer over a decade before starting Body Positive Fitness. Jenna is on a mission to help people discover and appreciate their body’s goodness – how it is, what it does, and what it can do. Jenna’s approach to fitness is based in an anti-diet and Health at Every Size perspective. She believes in joyful movement and creating inclusive spaces for all – especially anyone who hasn’t felt at home in mainstream fitness spaces.
I’ve been aware of Jenna for a while now. I first heard her interviewed on Summer Innanen’s podcast and really enjoyed hearing her personal story with fitness and what Body Positive Fitness is all about. So I wanted to invite her onto the show and have a conversation with her. As part of this episode, we talk about Jenna’s entry into the fitness industry at a young age and how exercise and changing her body became the dominant feature of her life. We talk about the breaking point and what her subsequent recovery looked like. Jenna talks about being a personal trainer as her body changed and how she dealt with this. We cover her breast implant and explant surgery. She talks about the genesis of Body Positive Fitness and how this has grown over the years. And then we talk about many issues that come up with clients, like abstaining from exercise when it’s needed, finding joy in movement after a compulsive or compensating relationship with exercise, finding joy in movement for the first time in adult life, psychological flexibility with exercise, and lots more.
For listeners of the podcast, Body Positive Fitness has a special offer for you to try out. You can save 50% when you get the Flexible 5 Class Pass. You can go to www.bodypositivefitness.ca/promo, and then at the checkout you can use the promo code REAL45. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well.
I really love this conversation, and I could’ve talked to Jenna for many hours. I’m glad that there are personal trainers like her out in the world. Without further ado, here is my conversation with Jenna Doak.
Hey, Jenna. Welcome to Real Health Radio. Thanks for chatting with me today.
Jenna Doak: Hi. Thank you for having me.
Chris Sandel: You are a personal trainer and you run Body Positive Fitness, so I definitely want to talk about this and the way that you do things today, but this is very different to how things were done before and your beliefs around health and fitness, so it would really be great to talk about your whole journey with this and how this has evolved over time.
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Let’s start at the beginning. What was your relationship with exercise or movement like as a child?
Jenna Doak: As a child, I don’t recall having any relationship with movement or fitness or my body, but as a young teen, that’s definitely where it started. I guess that is childhood. My family owned a few gyms when I was growing up, so my first job ever, when I was maybe 14, was folding towels at a gym, cleaning the mirrors at a gym. Then I just worked my way up in the gym industry. I’ve worked in a gym my whole life. So I was introduced to what he fitness industry looked like at a very young age, which immediately sent me down a spiral of needing to have a certain body.
Chris Sandel: Outside of that, were you someone who was playing soccer or Little League or anything along those lines? Were there any sports for fun as a kid?
Jenna Doak: You know what, now that you say that, I did. I played soccer. I was never an athlete. My brother is an athlete, a super athlete. And my sister was a track runner. My sister’s older than me, my brother’s younger than me. I’m the middle child. I was not athletic. But I was put into soccer at a pretty young age, and I think I enjoyed it until I was almost hitting puberty, and then I got so self-conscious.
I remember when I had to wear a bra for the first time because I was one of the chubbier girls, so I had a training bra, and you could see the outline of it through my soccer jersey. I remember being so insecure about that, even. I think as soon as I started to develop, I shied away from sports because then I was suddenly uncomfortable.
Chris Sandel: I think that’s such a pivotal moment for so many people hitting that teenage years and hitting puberty and having their body change. Were you someone who was quite self-conscious before that as well?
Jenna Doak: Yeah, I always did notice that I was bigger than my siblings in a sense. And now, of course, looking back at pictures of me when I was 10, 11, 12 years old, I am just a little kid. But to think that I was already in my head, that I noticed I was bigger than my sister and my brother, to have realised that so young – and that is before I was even introduced to the fitness industry.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. Even when you reference your brother, you’re like ‘he’s a super athlete’, and you talked about your sister – it feels like you saw them more as athletes or more as enjoying sport, and you were less able at doing that or less capable at doing that or less enjoyed doing that, and that maybe had an impact on your sense of self and body image?
Jenna Doak: Yeah, absolutely. It was elementary school that my whole family would go to the track meets to watch my sister run, and I was always a spectator. I never made any track teams or had a sport I excelled at. That definitely played a role in how I felt about myself.
Chris Sandel: Was there pressure – I mean, pressure that you put on yourself or pressure from your parents – because they owned gyms and there was this gym within the family? Was there any like ‘I know this from a young age, so I have to be a certain way because this is what our family does’?
Jenna Doak: I don’t think there was pressure from my parents. The gym was owned by my uncle, so it wasn’t a directly in-the-house owned business, but I do remember that was always the one who would go for walks with my mom in the evening or go for runs, and I think they did try to encourage me to be active, but not in a negative way. My brother and my sister definitely never went for runs or walks with my mom in the evening. And I don’t know if that’s because they got their sports in during the day. I don’t know why that happened that way, but I don’t recall there being any negative pressure put on me. I think I quickly learnt how to put that pressure on myself.
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Chris Sandel: What about your relationship with your body as a kid? Was that fine and that then started to change again around puberty? Or actually, when you think back, there was something that was a little off there as well?
Jenna Doak: There was definitely something that was a little off there early on. I recall lying in bed at night – and I was pretty young – I would lie on my side and see how much fat I could pinch on my belly when I was lying on my side. I remember so distinctly doing that and trying to take mental measurements of how much fat there was or wasn’t there. I would probably put myself at like 10 years old doing that. So yeah, there was definitely something off there very early.
Chris Sandel: Was that coming from the household? Like, can you remember that coming from relatives or friends or anything along those lines? Or it was more society in general?
Jenna Doak: It was probably more society in general. I do have one memory of one of my little cousins, who’s a couple years younger than me, calling me fat when I was like eight. That stuck with me. And I think I was obviously one of the bigger kids, but not even by a lot. It’s just wild that that is in kids’ minds so young, even for my cousin, who was probably six years old at the time, calling me fat at eight, and then that sticking with you. But this is like early ’90s, so I’m sure it was all over the place. It still is, but it was probably worse then. Like magazines and TV and the advertisements around us. It was just in your head so young. But yeah, I think it was probably outside pressures more than family or friends.
Chris Sandel: It is amazing how much one comment like that can just stick out, where there is this thing that happens, and if you mention it to the cousin, I bet you they don’t even remember that situation happening, but for you, it’s this really pinnacle moment.
Jenna Doak: Yeah, I remember where I was. We were at the cottage, we were in the water. I remember what my bathing suit looked like. Like, I remember what bathing suit I was wearing. Absolutely for sure, that’s the only thing I remember about probably that year of my life. So yeah, it’s pretty wild how that has such a huge impact.
Chris Sandel: What about food in your household and food growing up? What was that looking like?
Jenna Doak: We didn’t have the most money growing up, so I always wished that we had all the cool snacks that the other kids had, like Fruit Roll-Ups and the little luncheons that everybody had. I always wished we had those things. I realise now the reason that we didn’t was because we couldn’t afford to have those things. So our food was pretty basic. Peanut butter sandwiches, crackers and cheese. I don’t think that my parents were very absorbed in diet culture at the time; I think it was just the simple snacks that met the budget that came into our house.
My mom always went to the gym on a regular basis, did fitness classes on a regular basis, and would strive to eat healthy – or in her mind, what was healthy – and I do remember there being encouragement for me to eat healthy over my siblings. Like, there was more mind paid to it when it came to me. But compared to some of the other stories I hear about what families were like with diet culture back then, I don’t think it was that bad.
Chris Sandel: I guess, though, if you already have this feeling that ‘my body is bigger’, if there’s already this feeling that ‘I’m not as good at sports’, and then there’s this feeling that ‘I’m getting a little more attention about what I’m eating’, all of these things can very easily compound.
Jenna Doak: Oh, absolutely yeah.
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Chris Sandel: You said you then started working in a gym from fairly young. What was that experience like?
Jenna Doak: It was intimidating at first because I already had these insecurities, and the only reason I got the job was because it was a family business. It was like, there’s a position for this teenager to work. It wasn’t necessarily because those were my interests or that’s where I wanted to be. So I felt insecure right from the jump. I felt like maybe I shouldn’t be standing here at this front desk. Looking back, it’s so funny because it’s adults that are coming in to work out and I’m literally this little teenager. For sure nobody thought much of me. But I was so surrounded with all the fitness magazines and the protein shakes we were selling and people getting their measurements done and people being weighed and people being sold personal training. I was so surrounded by that right away that it’s all I paid attention to. It’s all I thought about.
Chris Sandel: And via osmosis, being at that young and impressionable age, there’s this feeling of ‘this must be important’ or ‘this must be something that I should care about’. So at what point did you then actually start using the gym and start participating?
Jenna Doak: I started using it on my own right away. After I finished my shift at the gym, I would go get on the treadmill or the elliptical, the machines that I could figure out how to use. But as far as weight training goes or any steady programming, I think I was 16. I think I was in grade 10 or 11. We were having a three-month competition for the members, and then the staff had their little side competition. It was basically a weight loss competition. It was you do all your measurements at the beginning of the programme, and your weight and your body fat, and then you bust your ass for 12 weeks and then you do them again at the end. It was basically whoever had the most change in their body won a pot of money. The pot of money was probably like $300, but when you’re in grade 10, that’s a lot of money.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, for sure. Back in the ’90s, that’s a lot of money.
Jenna Doak: Yeah. So I signed up for the staff competition. I hired a personal trainer. I think I worked with the trainer three times a week, but I was working out like six days a week. I still have my laminated before and after pictures from this competition, and there’s literally – you cannot even see a difference in my body at all, but I had lost, I don’t know, 15 pounds or something. I was so competitive in that and got so into it, and that was the start of the very disordered relationship with exercise and food, for sure.
Chris Sandel: There’s just so many things wrong with that on so many levels. You at that age – I’m not advocating weight loss for anyone, but you at that age should not be going down that route. You’re developing, you’re going through puberty. This is a time where even if your weight is stagnant, that can often be a problem. There’s a huge red flag that that was being encouraged for you.
Jenna Doak: Yeah, and it was so incredibly celebrated. Everybody in the gym was encouraging each other and so impressed by each other and checking in on “How much weight did you lose this week?” That’s when my body checking became very obsessive, too. I’d be sitting in class in school and feeling my body here and there, again, trying to take these mental measurements of what changes were happening. It was just so celebrated, and I was so young.
Chris Sandel: Outside of that, did you have a sense of self? I’m wondering where else you were getting validation, whether that be internal validation or external validation. Did you have that in other areas in your life at that point?
Jenna Doak: No, zero. That continued for a very long time. The gym became me and I became the gym, and that was my only redeeming quality as far as I was concerned, and the only thing that I felt celebrated for, for a very, very long time.
Chris Sandel: Was this the thing that fuelled you then to becoming a personal trainer?
Jenna Doak: Exactly. I became a personal trainer as soon as I could. You have to be 18 in Canada to be a personal trainer. I continued to work at the gym, do reception, sell memberships, work out every day, and then when I was 18 I signed up for the course and got certified.
Chris Sandel: Was it just personal training that you qualified in or did the certification in, or was it also looking at people’s diets and getting into the food side of things?
Jenna Doak: No, I never got into nutrition. That being said, doesn’t mean I didn’t cross the line and tell everybody what to eat when I had no business doing that, like every other personal trainer does. [laughs] I did my personal training certification and then my fitness instructor certification, which is just group classes. But no, I never got a nutrition certification.
00:19:09
Chris Sandel: When you were doing this, what was going on in terms of your own relationship with food and exercise?
Jenna Doak: Oh, it was all I cared about. This is like 17 years ago now, which is wild. I was still working reception at the gym and then starting my personal training business at the same time, so I would have a couple clients here and there, but then the rest of my hours were filled with working the front desk. I worked the evening shift for a long time. It was from 2:00 till 10:00 p.m.
Later in the evening, the gym was pretty quiet, and I would spend my time Googling bodies and finding the ones that I liked and printing them off and laminating them. First of all, sorry to my uncle. [laughs] I probably used so many of your supplies. Laminating these bodies that I liked. I had a binder, and I would put them all in the binder and I would write my programmes and plan my meals.
The gym at this time was attached to a grocery store, and I would go to the grocery store to get my lunch or my dinner and I would get just deli meats and mustard. No bun, no cheese, no other sandwich fixings. Just meat and mustard because I knew that mustard had like no calories. I used to eat that daily for lunch. It wasn’t even about nutrition at the time; it was really about ‘what can taste kind of good that has no calories?’ I was just obsessive, constantly planning what my body was going to look like.
Chris Sandel: With the goal of what? What were you hoping to achieve by having that body?
Jenna Doak: I think at the beginning of my career as a personal trainer, it was that I wanted to look like a personal trainer because I thought I would do better as a trainer and have a better career and have more clients if people looked at me and went, “I want to look like her.” So a lot of it was that. And then of course, the compliments and the praise and the looks from other people, just that validation is what I was looking for. So a mix between making money in this career by looking a certain way and just people thinking I was attractive, I guess.
Chris Sandel: With those two, did you having a better body help you as a personal trainer? Did that actually come to fruition?
Jenna Doak: I got certified at 18; I stayed at the gym here in my hometown for just a year, and then I moved to downtown Toronto to work in the financial district at a gym. The people that work in the financial district have a lot more money to spend than people in smaller towns up north, right?
I don’t think that my body is what made me – I know now that my body is not what made me more money or made me a better personal trainer. Turns out I’m just really good at it. [laughs] I’m a good personal trainer. I care about people. That’s always been a strength. I listen to people. I’m fun to be around. I love talking with people, I love getting to know people. These are all the things that really create a successful career in anything that your career is based off relationships with people.
At the time, I probably didn’t realise any of those things and still thought “I’m being hired and these people are staying with me because I look a certain way or I can get them to look a certain way.” In time, I realised, no, it’s because I’m building relationships with these people and they like me.
Chris Sandel: That’s so nice that you’re now able to see that and to see that actually this is not about the aesthetics; you have these core competencies and skills, and this is actually what people genuinely care about. I think that’s great that you’re at that place now.
With the other thing you mentioned in terms of the external validation from other people, how much did that actually fill you up? Getting that compliment from someone, how much did that then lead to you internally feeling like, “Yeah, I’m worth it”?
Jenna Doak: Never. Nothing. Zero. [laughs] It made me more empty, because I was always striving to feel a certain way, and because I wasn’t feeling a certain way, it’s like I was always reaching for more.
So as time goes on and now I’m in my young twenties, I am not okay. I am angry, I am very jealous, I’m not a good partner, I’m not a good friend, I’m not a good family member. I exercise through anger. I was a big runner at the time, and I would listen to the angriest music when I went for my runs. It was all about this release of these awful feelings that I had all the time. Again, not realising until I look back – it’s like, it’s because I was searching for this validation and happiness and contentment through something that was never going to happen, because you don’t get that from other people.
Chris Sandel: That was why I asked this question, because I wanted to get a sense of did it actually make a difference for you. Because I think there is this real belief of like “Once I get this thing” – ‘this thing’ being that body – “then I’ll feel at home, or then I’ll feel worthy, or then I will finally relax or feel confident” or whatever it is. The reality is, it always is just out of reach.
Jenna Doak: Exactly.
00:25:35
Chris Sandel: So when did you reach the point of realising, “Okay, this is unsustainable” or “This isn’t doing the thing that I thought it was going to do”? What happened?
Jenna Doak: It was a long journey. Things just got worse and worse for me. My biggest goal in life in my early twenties was to be a fitness model and then be the youngest, most successful fitness model. Constantly – I had a personal trainer that I worked with five days a week, and I was a personal trainer, and I definitely couldn’t afford to have a personal trainer five days a week. Somehow I managed to make that happen. It was like fake tan, hair extensions, eyelash extensions, full face of makeup, jewellery, new clothes, perfect gym clothes, breast implants. I ended up getting breast implants because I figured that would make me better, of course. That’s a whole other story. [laughs] Don’t have those anymore and do not recommend getting them.
Anyway, it was this constant, constant chase. Then alcohol became a problem and drugs became a problem, and my temper and my relationships – it was so much building and building, and I was so unhappy.
Then I’d run out of resources. I spent all my money on various substances and whatnot. So I came home. I moved home, I left Toronto. I told my parents I needed six months at home to get my shit together. Coming home really healed me. Just being with my parents or being with my siblings, now, 10 years later. And just enjoying life in a calmer way, I guess, and being away from the city and the people I hung out with in the city.
Then I met my now-husband. At the time I was 26 when I met him, and he loved me from the second he saw me and he has never, ever made me feel like I needed to be something other than who I actually was authentically – which I kind of figured out in my time with him, because I had been trying to be something else for so long. I think that slowly started to undo everything I had thought and learned about everything. [laughs] Not just about myself and my body, about society, and like, what are we doing? I really feel like I came out of this brainwashing cult that I was in for a decade and got to look at it from a different angle. Probably because somebody loved me for me. Which sounds so cheesy, but it’s true.
Chris Sandel: No, I think that is true for so many people. There are many clients I’ve had where actually, them meeting their partner through recovery was a really important thing because sometimes you need someone else to help show you the thing that you can’t see on your own.
Jenna Doak: Yeah.
Chris Sandel: With this recovery and coming back to your parents and getting away from the city and all of these changes, were you continuing to work as a personal trainer throughout this, or did you stop as a personal trainer?
Jenna Doak: I continued to work as a personal trainer. Definitely I slowed things down on my end, on training myself. I continued to train on my clients. It just so happened at the same time – this is going to come back to the breast implants – I had a knee injury that was ruthless. I could hardly walk. I was wearing a knee brace and still working as a personal trainer. That made it hard. I was seeing all sorts of doctors and I was seeing an arthritis doctor, trying to figure out if it was arthritis. I ended up getting a cortisone shot in my knee, which took the pain away for a couple months. I could not figure out why my knee was so messed up, because all of the imaging, X-rays, ultrasound, all of that, there was nothing wrong with my knee; it was just reacting to something in a bad way, but nobody could figure it out.
I had a slightly sore breast at the same time, and then I was like, “I need to get this looked at.” It turned out, long story short – and this is a whole other thing – that I had a ruptured implant. Now studies are being done on implants that a lot of people are being diagnosed with arthritis and joint problems and all sorts of issues because of implants. So I ended up having my implants removed, and literally woke up from surgery from having my implants removed and all of the swelling had gone down in my knee, and I never felt knee pain again.
Chris Sandel: Wow.
Jenna Doak: So they were connected.
Chris Sandel: You’ve done a whole article on this as part of the blog for your site, and I read that today, and as I was reading through it I was like, this is just the perfect metaphor of everything you went through in terms of spending all of this time and all this money to get the implants, being way over your head in trying to afford to pay for these things, and then when you got them, them causing you all of these issues for many, many years until the point that you had to have them removed. And then things got better.
I was like, it feels like this is the exact same as what happened in terms of your relationship with exercise and the way you were a personal trainer and all of these things. I was reading and thinking, this is a really lovely metaphor for the broader thing of what happened.
Jenna Doak: Yeah, exactly. The timing also was exactly on, and it was a blessing in disguise because I didn’t want my implants anymore, but they were stuck in me. I was healing my relationship with my body and I didn’t like them; I didn’t like the way they felt. I wanted them out. But if there’s no injury to the implant, then you have to pay to get them out. And I didn’t have the money to get rid of them, so I felt stuck.
Because there was a rupture, the Ontario health programme will cover it. So it was covered by OHIP. That was a blessing in disguise, and I was so happy to get them out. The surgeon tried to convince me to get new ones in, and that would be covered too, I wouldn’t have to pay for it. I was like, “No, I never want these ever again.”
But anyway, that injury, the knee and then getting the implants out and the recovery and all of that, stopped me from working out completely, which was exactly also what I needed at the time. My training for my own body was on hiatus for at least a year. That allowed me to sit with the discomfort of like, “Who am I when I don’t work out? And who am I if I’m not actively trying to make my body smaller?”
My husband – we were only I want to say maybe a year or two into our relationship when this all happened, and I went from working out all the time with my implants and my makeup and my hair and all this stuff to gaining probably 50 pounds. I shaved my head, I got rid of my implants, I stopped wearing makeup. And he didn’t even blink an eye. To him, I didn’t change. At all. To me, that was like, “Whew, never felt this before.”
Chris Sandel: Nice.
Jenna Doak: So that played a huge role in figuring out who I was without all of the add-ons.
Chris Sandel: It sounds like – I mean, I don’t know how much the knee played the role in you having to take time off exercise, but that being forced upon you or you being able to make that choice, whichever one it was, was a really important part of this.
Jenna Doak: Yeah, it was huge.
Chris Sandel: Do you think you could’ve got to this place without taking time off?
Jenna Doak: No. Not at all. And it was forced upon me. I could hardly walk, let alone work out. So it was forced upon me, and I’m thankful for that now.
00:34:44
Chris Sandel: I have this conversation often with clients about taking time off, and I think there’s so much about how healthy exercise is and how important it is and all of that, that it becomes difficult for people to think “I should take some time off.”
But when I think about taking time off from exercise for the clients that I work with, it’s twofold. One is your body physically needs to have time off exercise. It physically needs to repair, and you’re just not able to do that if you’re continuing to exercise. But (b) the whole point with this as well is psychological flexibility. You want to have the ability to say, “You know what? Right now I’m not going to exercise.” And that could be, again, because of something being forced upon you, or it could be just “This can’t be my priority right now. I’ve got something else that I need to be focusing on.”
Reflecting on this, in November time I hurt my knee. This is the first time I’ve ever had an injury, really. I mean, I broke my wrist snowboarding and that kind of thing, but had something happen that was quite significant. I went to the trampoline park with my son and about 20 minutes in, jumping very normally, I jumped and heard this horrible popping sound and went kind of sheet white. Hilariously, that morning I’d been talking with my wife and she was like, “We’re going to a hotel this weekend. Please, nothing can happen at the trampoline park.” The year previously, we were meant to go to a hotel for our combined birthdays and she was thrown off a horse the day of it and tore her tricep from her elbow, and we then didn’t make it to the hotel. So we’re like, “This year we’re going to definitely make it.” So then I heard this horrendous popping sound, my knee swelled up, and I was like, “This is not good.”
Thankfully we did make it to the hotel, but it’s been now quite a number of months of me having to rehab and to not really be able to do very much at all. The advice I’ve had is, “You need to keep stretching it and you need to move”, so movement is good, but I’m pretty limited in my movement, or I was when I started. It’s been interesting to notice that yeah, I’ve been annoyed that I can’t do certain things – and actually, in the whole scheme of things, it hasn’t bothered me that much in terms of the fact that I can’t do exercise.
What has become crystal clear for me now is I really want to focus on mobility, on functional stuff, on how I can be doing things to prevent this from happening again and being able to have an injury-free life as much as I possibly can. But it wasn’t a tough thing for me not to be able to exercise, and I was really joyous that that is the place that I find myself in.
Jenna Doak: Yeah, I talk to clients about that often. Exercise, you want to get to the place that it’s something that you enjoy adding to your life, but you’re completely fine without it. You don’t rely on it. And people often stress, “Oh, it’s for my mental health, it’s for my stress”, but if that’s the only thing that you rely on for your mental health and your stress, that’s not a good thing either. You need to have other coping skills and to learn that maybe sitting down and doing a paint by numbers or colouring or knitting or reading – maybe all of these other things can also be a stress relief for you. It doesn’t have to be ‘go for a run’ or ‘go lift weights’. I think a lot of people do get caught up in the “I do it for my health or my mental health.” It’s like, that’s not good if it’s your only outlet.
It is really important to get to a place that, yeah, you actually enjoy it and you want to add it to your life, but you’re okay if you can’t. Things like that happen. Injuries happen. Sickness happens. What if you got into a car accident and you can’t release through your body like that for years? There are lots of reasons that movement and fitness can be taken away from you, and if that’s your only thing, then that’s a dangerous spot to be in.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I think for a lot of people who do find themselves in that spot, the exercise has morphed into something a lot more like compulsion as opposed to true relief.
Jenna Doak: For sure.
00:39:57
Chris Sandel: With the recovery piece, were you talking a lot about this with your family? Again, I know gyms are in the family; was this something that came up? Were they on board with your shift in how you were thinking about things?
Jenna Doak: I think so. It was kind of a slow progression. I was going through healing my relationship with fitness and exercise and my body and eating for a couple years before I started to really be open about it. I started blogging about it, and that’s kind of how Body Positive Fitness came about. I started with a blog and talking about my history with the fitness industry and my experiences, and then I started posting a little bit on Instagram about it.
I remember when I first started posting on Instagram about it, I actually made the account anonymous because I was afraid of what the people in the fitness industry that have known me for so long would think about what I was saying. It was anonymous for maybe the first six months, and then I think it was my husband who was like, “You need to show who you are, talking about this.”
As soon as I started to show face and be honest about who I was and where I was coming from, then it just snowballed so fast. It was kind of scary. It was like every news network in Toronto got a hold of me. Everybody wanted to interview me. I was on all of the evening news, on TV, on radio, on podcasts, interviews every week. It just blew up. It was this wild mix between people saying, “Oh, you just gave up, you’re fat now”, “You’re just making excuses because you couldn’t do it any longer”, “Why would anybody hire you as a personal trainer?”, blah, blah, blah, and then this overwhelming tenfold of support from people going, “Thank you for talking about this. I need a personal trainer like you.” It was way more support than it was negativity.
I would say my family was proud of me for coming out and being honest about it, but at the same time they were probably pretty sad. They didn’t know how much it hurt me. It was probably hard for them to wrap their heads around like, “Oh, we just thought you were a super fitness star. We were proud of you for that. But sure, if you don’t want to be that, then okay, we support that. But we didn’t know that it was that bad.”
So there was support there. But then I also think there was confusion, and some people probably that don’t agree with some of the things I say – which is expected, because everybody’s brainwashed about what our bodies are supposed to look like. But yeah, there was a good mix between negativity and teaching lessons and then a lot of people that really wanted to hear what I was saying.
And that’s when I ran my first Body Positive Movement class, which we now call a BOPO Move class. I did it from an art space. It’s called Artscape Youngplace, in Toronto. I rented a space there, and my whole goal was to teach people, you don’t need to come to a gym. You can do this at home – and this is way before the pandemic. You don’t need weights, you don’t need bands, you don’t need anything. Let’s just move our bodies. No measuring tapes. I’m not going to weigh you, I’m not going to talk about your body, and try to teach people this new way of fitness.
As healing as that was for the clients that wanted to come to those types of classes, it was healing for me to be able to take my work away from the place that ruined me. I was able to step away from all that toxic gym culture and just teach people in a friendly environment, let’s move our bodies for fun and not to try to look a certain way.
All of that happened very quickly, as soon as I started to be open about my journey, and then it just, to this day, is still snowballing every day.
Chris Sandel: Wow. How did you handle that tidal wave of people being interested? It’s one thing to have an anonymous account where you’re talking about your experiences; it’s another to be doing multiple podcast interviews, being interviewed with national news, all of that.
Jenna Doak: It was exhausting and exhilarating, and I was very proud of how I handled it because I wasn’t used to it and I didn’t know I could do it. But it was like, I can’t say no to these opportunities.
I had never gone into an interview and not been sick to my stomach nervous about it. I remember waking up at 5 a.m. to get downtown to a news station for 6 a.m. to do the morning news, and I’m just so jittery and exhausted. Nerves and excitement got me through all of it. But to this day, I still find it nerve-wracking. But I handled it, and I’m proud that I was able to, because it is an uncomfortable situation. Especially when you’re talking about something that is so vulnerable to you.
When I first started to get the negative feedback, it hurt me. I would read all of the comments, and it broke my soul. I would cry, I would feel sick about it, I would question myself. But you read enough of the same negative comments over and over again and it gets old. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: “Oh, this one again.”
Jenna Doak: Yeah, exactly. So that doesn’t hurt me anymore and I barely read them. But at the beginning it was hard. It was an emotional rollercoaster, for sure. But I knew that what I was doing was for good.
Chris Sandel: Did the fact that you were able to start doing the class – you said it was healing for the participants, but also very healing for you – was there a point where you were thinking, “I’m going to walk away from personal training?” and this then helped you think “Maybe I can navigate my way through it”? Or you were pretty confident from the beginning, “I will find my way”?
Jenna Doak: I was confident from the beginning that I will find my way because that’s when I learned, oh, no, people don’t hire me for my body. There are more people in the world, more potential clients that feel like they want a trainer like me than they want a trainer like every other trainer out there. There are more people in the world that feel shunned from the fitness industry than there are people that feel like they’re a part of it. So I very quickly realised, after that very first Body Positive Movement class that I hosted, there’s no shortage of work here. There are more people that would rather work out with me in a library than there are people that would want to work out with Joe at the gym. It was very eye-opening very quickly how many people needed what I was about to provide.
Chris Sandel: Maybe this had already happened as part of your own journey, but you were reading about Health at Every Size and getting into all of that material?
Jenna Doak: Yeah, I was well into that by the time I ran my first class. I had read all the books and done all the studies. Not all of them, of course, but I was well-versed in what I was about to teach people before I started talking about it.
00:48:14
Chris Sandel: What does the class or classes look like now? How are they different from the regular gym?
Jenna Doak: There is absolutely no body-related goals in any of our classes that we teach. Now we have a really wide variety of classes and a whole bunch of different instructors. But regardless of the class, there’s no – for example, we just started a class called BOPO Heavy, which is about heavy lifting, like doing big lifts, deadlifts, overhead press, bench press, squats. It’s about improving your lifts. When I was teaching the new instructor on how – I used to teach this class before the pandemic in person. We’re just coming back to it.
The instructor asked me, “Are we keeping track of what people are lifting, say Day 1, and then Week 6 and Week 8? Are we keeping track of their deadlift progression?” The answer to that is no. If that person wants to go home and write down what they did that day, by all means they can do that. We’re not going to stop them from doing that. But even when it comes to tracking how much you’re lifting, we’re not measuring any of these things. We’re not measuring these things because we don’t want you to get obsessed with a number, even if it’s not the scale or the size of your body. There’s also no reason to get obsessed with how much you can deadlift.
Some people enjoy lifting heavy and hitting these new PRs, and they can do that on their own, but as a personal trainer, we’re not pushing that on you. We’re not measuring how fast you can run, how far you can run, how much you can lift, how far you can stretch. Every single class that we teach is about enjoying what you’re doing and doing it for, yes, the physical benefits, because it makes you feel better and you’re stronger and you’re more limber and your cardiovascular system is working great. There are all these things, but they don’t need to be measured, is the main thing. We don’t measure anything.
Goal-setting is not a ‘let’s see what we can strive by this amount of time’. It’s a day-to-day check-in and teaching people that the way you feel one day is not the way you’re going to feel in two days or next week or next month. You’ll go forward and you’ll go backwards. It’s all about being fluid in your movement journey, not setting benchmarks and always chasing something. I think that’s the biggest difference in our philosophy of why we work out compared to every other fitness company out there.
Chris Sandel: Nice. I really like that. It sounds as though it’s a combination of the enjoyment of the process with the added benefit of like “I do feel better in lots of different ways outside of the gym, but I’m actually not really focussing so much on that.”
Jenna Doak: Yeah. It’s also recognising that it doesn’t always feel better, and it doesn’t always feel good, and it shouldn’t. There are days you’re going to come, whether it’s a weight training workout or a yoga class, that you’re going to go, “I’m not into this today. I don’t like it.” And the answer to that is, okay, that’s fine. Go home. Or shut off your computer if you’re doing this from home. We don’t want people to feel like they have to come and stay, ever, if you’re not feeling it.
And then not to be mad at yourself and not beat yourself up. There are going to be days and months and weeks and maybe years that you’re just like, “Man, this is not for me right now.” We support that, and not only support that, we encourage that. We want people to be honest with themselves about how they feel about what they’re doing.
Chris Sandel: Nice. I guess there are going to be times where you’re recognising in other people what was going on in you and suggesting, “Hey, maybe you need to be taking a step back from exercise right now”?
Jenna Doak: Yeah, absolutely. I have quite a few times. A lot of it is just talking about why they’re feeling that they need to do this. I have clients that have been like, “But I’m not even sweating, and my heart rate…” I’m like, “It’s not about that. We need to take it down a notch.” I’m often approaching people that need to step away from that mindset that a workout needs to be XYZ.
Chris Sandel: I know this is going to differ from person to person, but how is that typically taken when you’re suggesting this to someone?
Jenna Doak: It does definitely vary by how far somebody’s into their journey of trying to heal their relationship with exercise. Sometimes people will be like, “Oh, thanks for catching me on that. I didn’t realise I was pushing too hard” or “I didn’t need to add weight” or “I didn’t need to do five extra reps” or “I don’t need to come back on Thursday”, stuff like that.
Then there’s other clients that really don’t like it. They don’t want to be told not to do what they want to do, and then it turns into a conversation of like, “Why do you feel that way? Why would you sweating right now for this half an hour change anything about who you are next week?” Just digging into why there’s so much resistance and pushback to slowing down. It is just about them realising that they’re not where they thought they were, maybe, with their relationship to exercise.
So some people are more accepting of it, other people there’s a bit more of a pushback, but it always starts there. It always starts with the pushback.
00:54:16
Chris Sandel: With you, when you were going through this transition yourself, did you get therapy or counselling, or did you get outside support? I know you mentioned how loving your husband was, but was that coming from anyone with professional training?
Jenna Doak: Not specifically, but there were accounts and people that I followed and spoke to online who were going through similar journeys. There were other Instagram accounts or body positive activists, whatever you want to call them, that were also healing from the fitness industry specifically. They were people that I communicated with and watched their journeys unfold and got support from. But no specific therapist.
And that’s another thing. Even that’s hard to find, still, which sucks – a therapist who actually understands this stuff.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I think it is so tricky. I was just having an email exchange today with a client who has a therapist who is clearly not helping in this regard. It’s so, so tricky. There’s a part of me that is like, getting the right therapist is just so crucial and so helpful and I think is what is needed, and then there’s a part of me that’s like, I also know how much this can be messed up.
Jenna Doak: Yeah, and it’s such a fine line, too.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. If you had your time over again, would you think that getting that extra support – again, granted, if it was the right kind of person – would’ve been helpful for you?
Jenna Doak: I don’t know why, and I don’t think it’s common, but for some reason I was able to navigate this on my own pretty successfully. But I do think that it would be helpful for so many people. There are things people need this extra support for that I’m not qualified to give to them, even though I’ve had my own journey.
It sucks that when people ask me for recommendations, I don’t have any because I don’t know very many therapists that get this situation. Would it have helped me? Probably, yes. But I do feel lucky that I got to the point that I’m at on my own.
00:56:55
Chris Sandel: I know at the beginning you were saying you’re not the natural athlete or the person who enjoys moving their body. What does that look like for you now? Are you someone who’s like, “Yep, I’ve definitely found joyful movement”?
Jenna Doak: Before the pandemic, when I got back into working out, I loved weight training. I love weight training; I always have. But doing it in this new mindful way was really enjoyable for me. Then when the pandemic happened, it was interesting because we all got stuck at home, and my business went 99% virtual, and it is still largely virtual. I didn’t really have the motivation to lift heavier weights in my basement. It just wasn’t the right vibe for me. [laughs]
But I got into other things that I never thought I would do or enjoy. One of them is mobility, and that was just happenstance. I had to fill in for one of our yoga instructors, and I don’t teach yoga, so I taught a stretch and mobility class. The clients loved it so much that it ended up turning into a class that we put on our schedule, and now I’ve been teaching it for a couple years.
In doing that mobility training a couple times a week, my body has never felt better. I don’t do heavy weight training and I don’t do cardio. This mobility stuff has just been so good for me. I just feel physically better. And it’s not something that I knew I liked until I taught it by accident. So it was fun figuring that out.
And then I moved up north, so I’m away from the city, and we have tons of hiking trails around where I live. I have a dog that needs a lot of exercise, so I hike many times a week, and I really, really love hiking and never knew that I would love that as much as I do.
The enjoyments that I have right now are those two things, really, the mobility stuff and hiking. And like I said, that might change. There might come a time in my life where I’m back in a studio that has heavy weights and I get back into that. But right now, it’s those things that I’m really enjoying, and I don’t feel like I need to add anything else in.
Chris Sandel: Nice. We recently moved to Scotland, so I am also looking forward to getting into more of the hiking because it’s just absolutely gorgeous around here. You want to be – or at least for me, I want to be out in it. It’s not me trying to push myself and saying ‘you’ve got to’. It’s like, no, I genuinely want to be out in those kind of spaces.
Jenna Doak: Yeah. Like I mentioned at the beginning – not everybody knows this yet, but they’ll know soon – I’m pregnant, so my hiking has really, really slowed down. It’s also very snowy here right now, so you’re walking through thick snow. The fact that I’ve had to slow down so much is also super enjoyable in a sense because that’s new for me as well. I don’t measure how far and how fast and all these things; my hiking is just about getting out there and really focusing on body awareness and breathing and how you’re feeling, and even more so now that I have to care for my pregnancy. None of it’s about it being exercise. It’s literally just because I enjoy it. It feels good for me mentally and physically. So yeah, it’s cool.
Chris Sandel: Nice. Did you take some time off at the start of pregnancy? The reason I’m asking is for lots of clients, the first trimester is just horrendous and they’re like, “I feel so terrible, I’ve got so much nausea” – it just sidelines people. So they will often stop. If they are doing any exercise, it naturally comes to an end during that first trimester, at least for a month or a couple months. What happened with you?
Jenna Doak: Yeah, I was so sick. [laughs] I didn’t hike for probably two months, three months. Then my fitness classes that I was teaching virtually, I just did as little as possible. I ended up having to tell some people really early, like clients. I’m like, “This is why my morning class keeps getting cancelled every day, because I’m throwing up.” And then luckily I have a lot of great instructors that work with us, so I was able to get a lot of coverage at the beginning as well for my teaching. So yeah, I definitely slowed down a lot. And I’ve just started, within the past month or so, getting out to my walks more often.
Chris Sandel: I do think pregnancy can also be a time that helps you to readjust the way that you eat, to readjust the way that you move, because it is forced upon you. In a sense – I talk about this often with clients – there becomes these guardrails that are put on, because you can try and convince yourself you want salad, but really, the thing that you’re wanting is fish and chips or mac and cheese or something ‘unhealthy’ that you wouldn’t normally think about eating, but your body is telling you very convincingly that that is exactly what it needs.
Jenna Doak: Yeah, exactly. It’s like survival mode. [laughs] For a while, even if what you’re eating has no substance, at least it’s something. For a while for me, it was just saltine crackers and peanut butter. You start eating for just doing what you can rather than even enjoyment or nutrition.
Chris Sandel: Totally. It’s kind of acceptance. It’s like, “It is what it is, and given this is how it is, how do I get some food in?”
Jenna Doak: Exactly.
01:03:20
Chris Sandel: With the finding joy part with movement, how did you go about doing that? It’s something that comes up a lot for clients, and I guess with clients who’ve had this very tumultuous relationship with exercise, or people who are still in the depths of their exercise compulsion who can recognise that they don’t actually want to be doing what they’re doing, they don’t enjoy it, but they’re having to keep it up as part of their disorder, there is this fear of like “If I stop, I will never start up again. I will never find joy in movement.” So I just want to get a sense from you, what was that process like of finding joy again?
Jenna Doak: I think that before you can figure out what you actually enjoy, you have to actively practice getting rid of probably every single narrative you have tied to fitness.
For example, if you’re doing a dance class or a Zumba class and you are going absolutely as hard as you can trying to follow the instructor’s footwork to a ‘T’ and not taking breaks because the music hasn’t given you a break yet and you’re just pushing through it, then no, that’s probably not going to be enjoyable, right?
But if you were to take that same class and realise you can’t follow the instructor’s feet and their upper body at the same time, so you’re just going to follow the arms, and you really like this song, so you’re just going to dance however you want to, actually, during this song because you can’t figure out what the instructor’s doing and you just want to do your own thing; maybe you want to sing out loud; maybe you’re going to sit a song out because you need a water break or you don’t like the song or you don’t like the dance – if you start to make it your own and you’re able to accept that you did it in your own way and not follow the instructor to a ‘T’, then you might have fun doing it.
I think that a lot of people figure this out with virtual fitness because they had the space to do it on their own. And with our instructors, we would never be like, “Hey, what are you doing sitting down?” [laughs] But to actually give yourself room to make it how you would enjoy it is a huge factor. Probably any given fitness class that’s offered anywhere right now, if I did it exactly how the instructor wanted me to do it, I probably wouldn’t like it. So I think being able to give yourself permission and being in a space that gives you permission to do it in a way that feels good for you is key to actually enjoying it.
You’re not going to move your body the same way as somebody else, and if you try to, it might not feel good, so then you don’t like it. So one, give yourself space to make it your own regardless of what type of class or instruction it is.
Two, fitness does not have to be offered through a fitness centre. And this is coming from somebody who owns a fitness centre and makes my living from a fitness centre. Don’t come if it’s not your thing, if you don’t like it. Maybe you really like tennis. Maybe you really like hiking. Maybe you like swimming. Maybe you like ping-pong. Maybe you like throwing darts. Movement doesn’t have to be your traditional fitness class or personal training. Let yourself explore other things out there that maybe aren’t traditional fitness. It’s still movement, and it’s still good for you, and more importantly, you are doing something that you enjoy that is not work or home life. I think that’s more important than trying to find what type of ‘exercise’ you enjoy.
Chris Sandel: Nice. That second one is something I talk a lot about with clients as well: how do you get out of that very narrow idea of what is ‘fitness’ or what it means to move your body? There are so many options that are available to you. Are there things you used to like doing as a kid that you no longer do? Are there things that you’ve seen in a movie or you’ve heard that people do, but you’ve never tried it yourself? How can you really broaden your idea of what it means to move your body?
And that also includes ideas where it’s not about ‘does this create a sweat’ or ‘is this going to help me burn calories’ or anything along those lines. It could be going and doing a qi gong class. It could be going and doing something that feels like “I’m not really even moving my body very much at the moment”, but actually that’s something that gets you connected with your body and gets you to really enjoy that experience.
Jenna Doak: Yeah, absolutely. Another thing is you don’t need to have a specific something scheduled into your calendar, X amount of times per week every week, to be doing the right thing.
For example, yesterday I was in my backyard with my five-year-old nephew in a snowsuit, building snowmen, for two hours. That wasn’t scheduled into my calendar to do this week for my exercise. But what do you think is better for your mind and your body and your wellbeing: playing in the snow for two hours with a kid or riding your spin bike for half an hour at full tilt? When you’re out doing real-world activities, you’re moving your joints in so many different ways, and your heart is going and your blood is flowing and your mind is working, and you’re interacting. There’s all of these things that are so healthy for us to do that are not carved out exercise time.
So when you look at the grand scheme of your life, depending on what kind of lifestyle you live, if you have kids that need to play in the snow on a Sunday, then you might not need to schedule in that much extra activity.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. Or there are lots of activities that you don’t think of as being moving your body. I had a call with a client recently, and she also lives somewhere where it’s snowy, and she’s now having to shovel snow many days of the week just to get out of her driveway or get out her front door. She wasn’t realising how much of an energy use that was. So when she was trying to add in something extra and then finding that that was having an impact on her sleep, it’s like, no, you’ve added in this thing here that you’re not recognising how much of an energy drain this is for you.
Jenna Doak: For sure.
01:10:40
Chris Sandel: With someone who say has taken a break from exercise, and they’ve taken a break because it was either compulsive or they’re recovering from an eating disorder, and then they’re starting to restart it, are there certain things that you suggest? I know obviously we’ve just talked about the joy aspect of it, but are there any other ideas or advice that you have with restarting? How did you do it when you restarted it?
Jenna Doak: I think when you’re restarting, you should try various things to begin with, like very different things, too. For example, hiking, walking, a dance class, weight training, mobility. Try various types of ways to move your body to get a sense of what you enjoy the most or the least.
But also start very slowly. I don’t mean Monday you dance, Tuesday you do mobility, Wednesday you go for a hike. I mean Monday you dance, and then in like 10 days, maybe go for a hike. And then find a yoga class. Try things at home. Try things in a studio. Try things outside. Make them different and space them apart so you’re not getting into the mindset again of “I’m working out three days a week”, “I’m working out five days a week” or whatever it is.
For some people that’s the hardest part. I will tell a client, “You’re not moving again intentionally for 10 days. Take that time to just be and then try something else.” So those two things, starting slow and trying different things.
And then – and I have this conversation with clients – if in your mind you’re like, “Oh, I really liked the hour spinning class the most”, out of everything you tried, why did you like that the most? Because you sweated the most? Okay, we’re going to not do that one. [laughs] You’re picking it for the wrong reason. Sometimes you want to hear what mental notes they had during a certain exercise or type of movement.
So yeah, play with it. Don’t make it rigid. Take it slow, try different things. Challenge yourself on why you liked or didn’t like something. Sometimes the best thing for somebody is restorative yoga, where you’re barely moving. You’ll get people that are like, “It didn’t really feel like a workout. I enjoyed it and I cried a lot, but it didn’t feel like a workout, so I don’t want to make that.” It’s like, it sounds like maybe that should be the thing you do this month. So all of those things.
Chris Sandel: Nice. Two things I would say connected to that – and I agree with all of those things. One, the start slow piece is the conversation I have a lot with clients. And I encourage this for a long time. Even at the point where they’re going twice a week or three times a week, I suggest, have two weeks where you don’t do anything. Keep proving that you have that psychological flexibility. Keep proving that you’re in the driver’s seat. Because unfortunately, it becomes very easy to be like, “I love doing these things, and I’m really enjoying it”, and then at some point someone’s back in that place of “I can’t take a day off” and it’s really difficult and anxiety-provoking that they get sick and they can’t work out, as opposed to them truly being able to be the one that is dictating how much they’re working out.
So even six months, a year on, 18 months on – great, let’s try having some time off so you can constantly prove to yourself that you can do this.
Jenna Doak: Yes, absolutely. And I’ve had that exact conversation situation with clients. Sometimes it’s like, “I’m going on vacation. Can you write me a programme to do while I’m there?” It’s like, why? You’re on vacation. You don’t need to do a programme while you’re there. Challenge yourself to go on vacation and not work out. I’ve had that conversation with many clients. It’s like, okay, that’s noted, but no, you don’t need to do this while you’re away.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. Then the other one is trying to find something – we obviously talked about joy – but where you’re a complete beginner and a novice in it. I think part of this as well is that you’re then starting afresh with something new that is not connected to your eating disorder or not connected to the compulsion of what you were doing before, but it’s just a different experience when you’re new to it and how you think about that thing that you’re new to. It’s often more – I mean, it can be frustrating, but it also can be really fun.
I’m thinking of a client who had lots of different exercise that they did when they were in their disorder, and a lot of it was running or cycling or that kind of endurance type stuff. And then she and her partner got into playing tennis, and she was like, “Admittedly, I’m not very good at tennis and neither is he, but we love trying to have a rally.” It’s just a whole different story when she’s talking about tennis versus every other exercise she was doing.
Jenna Doak: Yeah. That just reminded me that my partner and I started trying to play tennis when I was in the middle of my taking a break from exercise, and I felt the same way. We had so much fun, and we were horrible at it, but it was so much fun.
01:16:43
Chris Sandel: What about someone who is trying to get into exercise maybe for the first time, or maybe trying to for the first time have a good relationship with exercise, because they’ve always felt insecure in their ability to go to the gym, or they were the last picked in class or whatever it may be? What is some of the advice that you have for someone like that?
Jenna Doak: Similar advice, because that’s where you want to be, that’s where you want to start: to try a variety of things and you find what actually brings you joy, and to not set expectations. Do not put a plan out for yourself that you’re going to do something X amount of times per week. Don’t set goals on how fast you’re going or how far you’re going or calories burnt or weight loss, any of those things. Do not play with numbers. Really listen to your body and do what feels good.
If it’s weight training, don’t try to go up in weight every time you pick up the dumbbells. Find a weight that feels good. Work with it for a while. Really pay attention to how things feel in your body rather than facing an end goal. If you are coming into fitness and movement to try to achieve something physically, you are going to be disappointed over and over and over again, so let’s not start off on a foot that you’re disappointed in yourself. Do it because you want to, not because you’re trying to be something different.
Chris Sandel: If you’re looking at the kinds of people who are coming to your classes, what is the make-up of those people? Is it people who are, like we just talked about there, they’ve never really found their place with exercise and they’re trying to now, and this feels like it could be the right thing for them, versus people who have had a not-great relationship with exercise, and maybe it was an eating disorder or that kind of thing? What is the make-up?
Jenna Doak: I feel like it’s almost an exact split. We have a lot of people who come from disordered backgrounds with fitness and eating and their bodies, and then also people who are like, “This feels like a safe place to try” that haven’t had a safe place to try. So it is those exact two demographics, I would say.
And then we also have a pretty big group of people who maybe haven’t done fitness for a long time, so they’re just coming back to it. I’m talking like 30 years. They’re older, and they’re like, “What do I do now? All these gyms are pretty girls on spin bikes.” [laughs] “Where do I go?” The older demographic. So we get that as well. I would say it’s a mix between those people.
Chris Sandel: With that – I’m just thinking about older demographic who are coming back to it. I know if you’ve been able to do something really well and then you haven’t done it for a long time, coming back to it, there can be some frustration with that. Is that what can happen? Or there’s been so much time passed and they’re in their fifties and this was when they were a quarterback in high school, they’re not really trying to recreate the glory days?
Jenna Doak: Fortunately, more of the latter. It’s people who did X, Y and Z when they were in their twenties, then they got married and they had kids and they had their career, and now they’re 65, 70, retired, and just trying to move their bodies again, and they’re not expecting to be who they once were. They can be surprised at how things feel now, but I do find that there’s a lot of acceptance that that’s just the stage of life they’re in now.
That being said, those are the people who have sought out Body Positive Fitness probably for a reason. If they were trying to feel like they were 30 again, maybe they would be going somewhere else. But I don’t find that we get too many people who are like – well, you do hear it – “When I was 30, I could do 20 push-ups from my toes.” But it’s joking. It’s like, okay, now you’re 70, so let’s try from the wall. [laughs] But no, I don’t find there’s too many people in that age bracket that are that hard on themselves, which is awesome.
Chris Sandel: How much of your classes are actual teaching of the movement or that kind of thing versus more of the education piece? Are you having conversations about, I don’t know, body image or Health at Every Size or more of that teaching side of things?
Jenna Doak: I would say that in our group classes, things are lightly touched upon, but it’s also a lot more encouragement about ‘do what feels good’. None of our group classes are a follow-along, follow-the-instructor class. It is “Here’s an instruction; here’s five different ways to do it. Try them all, figure out which one works for you, and then go.”
It’s more so in the one-on-one personal training and coaching sessions that there’s a lot more deeper talk about Health at Every Size and body positivity and letting go of these toxic norms that you’re used to. I think a lot of people who need more one-on-one guidance and instruction and discussions do the personal sessions. The group sessions are not that much – it’s more movement than it is talking. But things are definitely touched upon.
Chris Sandel: Do you do the one-on-one personal training now, or you’ve moved on from that?
Jenna Doak: Oh yeah, I do. We have a group of trainers. We all do.
01:23:07
Chris Sandel: I heard you on another podcast talking about the fact that you do options instead of modifications, and I really liked this explanation for it. Are you able to share this?
Jenna Doak: Yeah. I find that a lot of the language around different options for exercise is “Here’s a modification if you can’t do that”, and it puts you in this mindset that “Okay, there’s one way to do a squat, and I can’t do it, so I have to do it in the way that’s not as good”, whether that means you’re not going as deep or you’re not adding weight or you’re doing it from a chair or you’re doing a wall sit instead.
So instead of using the language “Here’s the exercise sitting on a pedestal and here are all the ways to reach it”, it’s more like, “Here are five or six different ways that you’re working the exact same muscles.” They’re just different ways of doing it. One day you might choose to do it one way, and then the next time you do that exercise, you’re choosing to do it in a different way, for various reasons – because your knee is feeling a little bit weird that day, or moving up and down is making you dizzy or nauseous, so you don’t want to be doing it in this way.
Just teaching that the way you might work certain muscle groups can change day to day, week to week, depending on all sorts of different circumstances. There’s not one way to do it that sits on a pedestal and then you’re just trying to do it that way. To teach people to just take the option that works for you today and go with it. And if it’s that option every single time, awesome. If it changes every single time you do it, awesome. It doesn’t matter. You’re working the same muscle.
It just gives people more freedom. That’s what I mean when I say, how do you enjoy a class? Once you start to learn these things and you’re like, “Okay, the instructor’s doing squats, but I was also taught that if I do a wall sit instead because that’s what I prefer, I’m going to work the same muscles, so I’m going to do this instead” – you’re choosing how you’re going to move your body. And if you learn how to do that, you will enjoy exercise a lot more.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. And as you say, you’re moving away from this hierarchy of like “Today must be a bad day because I’m having to do this modification” as opposed to just “This is where I find myself, and this is the thing that really appeals to me of these three options, so this is what I’m going to do today.” While not every day is going to be a ‘good day’ in terms of you feeling your absolute best, it’s not creating this false sense of “Today was a bad workout.”
Jenna Doak: Right. Also, you don’t have to not be able to do something to choose not to do it. Yeah, maybe you can do push-ups from your toes, but you don’t like to. Maybe you just prefer to do them from your knees. Maybe you just prefer to do them off of yoga blocks. Doesn’t mean you have to choose something because you can’t, but give yourself the freedom to choose which one actually feels the best. Doesn’t always have to be the one way. I think people aren’t taught that in fitness. It’s always like you’re striving for the ultimate movement, whatever that is.
Chris Sandel: I feel like, if I’m comparing it to intuitive eating, people who are like, “I want to do intuitive eating, but I want my intuition to always be telling me to eat broccoli, or to always be telling myself to eat these healthy foods” – it’s like, that’s not really intuitive eating; that’s you having some pre-set ideas about what is healthy and just wishing your body is always going to tell you to eat those foods, as opposed to truly having intuitive eating where, yeah, some days you’re feeling more like broccoli, other days you’re feeling more like ice cream. Whatever it may be is okay.
Jenna Doak: Absolutely.
01:27:28
Chris Sandel: This has been such an awesome conversation. I really do love what you’re doing with this movement. There must be such a market for it. As you said, there are so many people who really want this, and I imagine that there wasn’t much on offer when you started doing this.
Jenna Doak: No, there was nothing. [laughs] When I started this, there was really nothing. Toronto is a huge city and I was the only person in Toronto doing this. This is before everybody went virtual.
In a sense, it sucks, it’s sad, and it’s a little scary that the fitness industry has kind of caught on to this movement – Health at Every Size, body positivity, come as you are, no judgment – but they’re doing it in their advertisement, but then when you get into that space, it’s not what they’re advertising it to be, because they didn’t take the time to figure out why this is a thing. They just saw that it’s a thing and they labelled their advertisements.
So it sucks because people often get hurt that way. But it’s also good and it’s exciting that there is a shift happening in the fitness industry and in the world in general. People are starting to look at bodies in a different way, which is exciting. But then at the same time, it’s like, but do your homework because I don’t want people to go, “Oh, I found a body positive gym because it said ‘body positive’ on their ad, and then I went there and they didn’t even mention it.”
There wasn’t a lot of it when I started; there is definitely more of it now, but how much of it is legit is hard to say.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. You want it to be as you’ve described it, where you’re getting the real deal as opposed to just the buzzwords and the veneer of this as a way to get you to sign up to your 12-month gym contract where it is still then just the same as it ever was.
Jenna Doak: Yeah. There’s a body positive fitness company virtually, and then they have a class called ‘Tank-top Arms’. I’m like, what? [laughs] “Come to my body positive tank-top arms class.” What? No. There’s just so many conflicting things out there. It infuriates me. But yeah.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, and it’s hard because that is a very obvious issue for someone like yourself or I to see, whereas to someone who’s new to this, they might not necessarily know that, or they’re straddling both worlds of “I’m trying to do this whole ‘move my body intuitively’ thing, but I’m also still wanting to lose weight”, so it really muddies the water for them because they think that is doing it the intuitive way.
Jenna Doak: Right. It can be very confusing for people who don’t really know where they’re at with it.
Chris Sandel: I’m so glad that you’re out here and doing this, because I love your message, I love what you’re doing. What didn’t I ask you or what didn’t we cover that you want to mention, if there’s anything?
Jenna Doak: I think we covered all of it. I feel like that was such a great, thorough interview, and I enjoyed it a lot. I think we covered all the important stuff, anyway. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: Cool. The final question then is just where can people go if they want to find out more about you?
Jenna Doak: We’re all over the internet. Like I said, we do a lot of our work virtually; www.bodypositivefitness.ca is our website. @bodypositivefitness_ on Instagram. Body Positive Fitness on Facebook. Yeah, one of those avenues, you would be able to connect yourself to pretty much everything we offer.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. Are all the classes live, or there’s replays?
Jenna Doak: All of our classes are live. We do have a pretty robust virtual schedule, and you can also download a PDF in your time zone to see what it looks like at a glance in your time zone. A lot of virtual companies have moved towards the prerecorded stuff, but like I mentioned, our classes are so personalised; they are not a follow-the-instructor class. So it doesn’t really work for it to be recorded and then sent out because it really is tailored to the people that are there, and our conversation and we’re helping people. It’s not “Watch me and follow what I’m doing.” So prerecorded is not our jam, right now anyway. That would have to be a whole separate project if we did get onto that.
So all of them are live, but there’s so many classes that we hope most people can find some that work in their time zone.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. I will put a link to all of that in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on. This has been awesome.
Jenna Doak: Thank you so much for having me.
Chris Sandel: That was my conversation with Jenna. I’m so glad that she’s doing what she’s doing and that there are places like Body Positive Fitness. If you want to check it out for yourself, you can save 50% when you get the Flexible 5 Class Pass. You can go to www.bodypositivefitness.ca/promo, and then at the checkout use the promo code REAL45.
As I mentioned at the top, I’m currently taking on new clients and have five spots available. You can find out more by heading to www.seven-health.com/help. Again, I will put a link to that in the show notes.
I’ll be back next week with another episode, and I’ll catch you then.
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