For starters, this isn’t a pitch about why you should quit your job to start calling yourself an entrepreneur and sell shampoo out the trunk of your car because you’re finally living the life of financial freedom. This is about how a method of exercise gave me the mental clarity to live a life I’m happy with and realize working out doesn’t have to be a chore or something you do fit into a certain jean size. I started seeing changes in my body when I stopped listening to what everyone else told me to do and started tuning into my own body, my hope is that it helps you to do the same.

One year ago I was working a corporate job and pretty much living life on replay. Wake up, go to work, come home, workout, make dinner, go to bed. I would come home exhausted and wake up dead tired each day. It felt like I couldn’t get any energy back no matter how many hours I slept. 

I began to distance myself from social events due to being so exhausted and basically started to live in my own little world of wake up, work, go to bed, and repeat. I was miserable and couldn’t figure out why because on paper I was doing everything right. I graduated, got a ‘big girl job’ (kind of hate that term, but that’s how society puts it), was making a good amount of money, and living my life just the way the world told me I was supposed to, but I was beyond miserable and going through life like a zombie.

I was doing all the workouts everyone told me to (strength, crossfit, bootcamp, HIIT), all the diets trainers recommended (paleo, keto, vegan, counting macros, etc.) and wasn’t seeing any real changes in my body over the course of years. None of it made sense–I was doing everything right, but wasn’t seeing the changes I wanted in my physical body or the happiness that was promised by following society’s perfect formula that I was abiding by to a T. 

I blamed not seeing physical changes on having an eating disorder from the age of 16 to 21 and told myself that my lack of weight loss was just due to my metabolism getting back on track. I did the work required to learn how to love yourself at any shape or size, it was hard ass work, but I did it. Yet, even though I was content with what I saw in the mirror, I just wasn’t happy with the direction my life was going in. 

I felt stuck, tired, and mentally exhausted. So, when I got home from work I started blasting my favorite jams and just dancing it out. Soon, these dances turned into cardio sequences that combined my love for shadowboxing and plyometric moves. Around the same time, I started to discover the incredible changes low impact movements can have on the body (due to being exhausted from work, this about the only type of workout I could do for awhile), got my pilates certification, and began to incorporate fun sequences that were developed to help me tap into different muscle groups that I was never able to reach with strength training in the past. 

For the first time ever, I actually felt energized after a workout. The fog of exhaustion had disappeared and I was able to think clearly for the first time in a long time. I was actually doing a workout because it was so much fun and allowed me to just let go for 30-45 minutes of my day–which I so desperately needed. I essentially learned how to recharge my batteries in a new way that working out had never done for me before. To be honest, in the past I was working out to exhaust my body, not to recharge it.

My days before had been filled with so much f*cking work. I worked my ass off at my job for 8 hours, went straight to the gym and worked my ass off for another hour or two. I just needed a small portion of my day that wasn’t about work and was just about having a good time and moving my body.

I was tired of seeing workouts obsessed with marketing guarantees of weight loss, how much weight you can push, how hard you’re working, and how the female body is supposed to look. I’m so sick of talking about how the female body is supposed to look. It’s just been done so many times, yet there’s a large portion of people in the world who are unhappy with the results their workouts are providing. Finding a workout that was simply about having fun and moving your body seemed like a lost cause at the time, so I decided to create one.

Mils Method is about recharging your batteries and giving your mind a mental break, a second to breathe, and just be. It’s about getting in tune with your body to get back the mental clarity that large amounts of stress can sometimes overtake. I hope that these workouts make you feel proud of just getting up, moving your body, and taking on the day. Thanks for reading and I hope you too can fall in love with simply moving your body. xx

To take a class or learn more about Mils Method, visit my site.