Build your own workout
Friday, April 26, 2013 12:00 AM MDT
Paula McKee is a 43-year-old mother of three kids — two of whom are in their late teens.
If you find that hard to believe, you’re not alone.
“When I tell people I have three kids — one in college — they’re blown away,” McKee says with a chuckle during a phone interview from Los Angeles.
“I look better than some of these (20-somethings) who haven’t even had children yet and I’ve had three.”
Hey, she’s just being honest.
The founder of GymRa, a new online personal training website, credits regular exercise and sound nutrition with helping her to age gracefully.
“It’s just how you lead your life and what you incorporate in your life,” she adds. “I have always had fitness in my life and when you have that, it stays with you and you can see the difference in people who’ve been working out for a long time and people who are not.”
Of course, having three kids on the go — ages 19, 17 and 10 — can make for one busy mom.
That’s why McKee created GymRa, which features more than 1,500 easy-to-follow exercise videos designed by certified experts in everything from yoga, Pilates and dance to resistance training and high-intensity interval training (HIIT).
The website’s targetted demographic is primarily busy women from 18 to 55 — beginner to advanced — who are looking to quickly create a customized workout they can do anywhere.
“If you’re at home, at the gym or on the road, there’s really no reason not to exercise,” McKee explains.
“You can customize yourself a workout based on whatever your individual needs are or you can generate a workout easily by just picking out what you want to work on and how many minutes of time you have to work on it. It makes it simple and easy.”
GymRa workouts can be viewed on a computer, iPad, iPhone or Android.
There’s no shortage of personal training websites in the digital age. But McKee insists GymRa stands out in several ways.
For starters, it’s ad-free and costs just $5 a month.
“You can use our music, which was all originally scored, or you can upload your own music,” she adds.
It’s also accompanied by an interactive blog that helps “create community,” she notes. “There’s no reason not to have fitness in your life. Your life does not get better by chance. It gets better by change.”
McKee, now continually working to add new content to the site, maintains plenty of variety in her own workout regimen.
That includes spin class, Pilates, running and resistance training.
“I myself need to keep it fresh,” she says. “I don’t want anything to be stale.”
To fuel her varied workout program, McKee eats a clean diet divided into six small meals a day.
“Mostly fish and chicken, and lots of vegetables,” she explains. “No red meat, no bread, no rice.
“I like to be tight and hard. That’s why I work out really hard. … It (GymRa) gives you what you need to keep yourself feeling good, feeling tight and hard, and happy.”
