Rick Kaselj: Hey this is Rick Kaselj from exercisesforinjuries.com. Today, I have another interview for you and we’re going to talk about challenge workouts and what challenge workouts are. So I have Shawna Kaminski on the line and I will get Shawna to introduce herself.
Shawna Kaminski: Hey Rick, great to talk to you. My name in Shawna I live in Calgary, Alberta. I am your fellow Canadian. I’m just a long time fitness enthusiast really, I was a catholic school teacher for 20 years, but always did some training, you know always training people.
In 2007, I made a jump to full-time fitness and started fitness boot camp. I felt I couldn't help enough people just in my boot camp. So I went online and I started a program called Female Fatloss Over Forty. Then I also started my challenge workout program because really that’s who I am.
I really enjoyed doing challenge workout, and so then, challenge workout was born. I’ve been online since 2009 or 2010 helping people internationally. And yeah, challenge workouts are pretty much of who I am.
I’m a long time athlete. I competed nationally in two different sports. Training is like breathing for me and so it’s been awesome that I’ve been able to parallel in that into a career because it doesn’t seem like work. It really is my passion, to be able to share it is even better.
Rick Kaselj: Okay. Why you took that step from doing boot training one-on-one? I know you’re used to do that. And then doing boot training and then now spring boarding to online?
Shawna Kaminski: Well, yeah I did do like one-on-one and small group up to 12 people and then went into a larger group of 20 to 30 people. Even then, I already have people emailing me, phoning me, asking can you set me up on a program.
A lot of these people initially would be women in my age demographic. Women over 40 and they are just struggling and I just can’t reach out to these people. They can’t come to my boot camp. How can I get to them?
There’s a lot of women struggling out there with no kind of a road map. I thought, you know what, if I made a program for them, if I could reach them remotely then I could maybe help them with their problems and that's how it got started.
My passion really is challenging workouts as that’s just really who I am and what I do. And then I said, you know what, I should do the same in an instant and inspire people to challenge themselves.
Some of my clients that were my female fellows that were super fit they just needed more of the challenge. They always ask me, what do you do? And so, that’s how this got started.
Rick Kaselj: Okay, we’ll take a little bit of step backs and then what are challenge workouts? What is this thing called challenge workouts?
Shawna Kaminski: Well honestly, the way I got started is one Sunday morning, I woke up and I thought you know what I finally caught what I can do because at one time I did this composition called the Toughest Calgarian Alive and one of the 8 events is pull ups.
At that time I can tell you, I did 27 pull ups and I trained for it. I haven’t done any training, really like specific training, just my regular training. I’m going to film how many pull ups I can do and I put it in my blog just to tell people that you should challenge yourself. And at that time, I think I did 30 pull ups, so I’m pretty happy with myself having not really training for too much.
Then I spoke to my mentor, we got talking about turning it into a program, helping people with pull ups, push-ups and get challenging workouts.
So that kind of helped me back up for and it really is, it just go on how I got training. It’s a bit challenging myself and challenging others not to compete against others so much but compete against ourselves.
Rick Kaselj: Okay, so that kinda of explains how this challenge workout thing got started. And so you write a blog on challengeworkouts.com4/blogs, so who is the blog for and who are these challenge workouts for?
Shawna Kaminski: Actually, I am very surprised with my audience because I have a little bit older audience than what I anticipated which is an audience between 20 and 60.
Anybody with that mentality of wanting to challenge themselves. What can I do to beat myself to make myself better than I were yesterday?
I’m turning 49 on Sunday. For me, my goal is to either maintain or beat some of my lifts and challenges that I have done in the last 10 or 5 years ago. And to me, that’s winning!
As you age, most people’s fitness level is pretty much declining. But for me to be able to maintain my fitness level from when I was 20, that’s my goal. That’s challenge workout is all about.
And so it’s all about that mentality of just maintaining and pushing yourself. Maintaining a fitness level to push yourself a little bit further in time.
So it’s really just for anybody with that mentality that I just want to go hard in a safe way. I don’t want to bash in a program, but what comes into mind control the high water, I’m gonna get this lift.
It’s not a competition and I am not thrill with that because form is compromise and who am I talking to exercises for injury. I am talking about programs that people don’t really care if they get injuries as long as they win. That’s not what it is about.
My challenge workout is all about life time fitness, training safely and still challenging yourself.
Rick Kaselj: Okay, by pushing yourself and trying to beat how many pull ups you did before and trying to maintain your fitness health challenge level throughout the years. Very cool!
Shawna Kaminski: Right, Yeah exactly.
You can check out one of the other parts of this interview here.
Rick Kaselj, MS