Many people focus on the physical benefits of a healthy lifestyle, but for Marianna Heder of Erda, leading a healthy lifestyle also helps emotionally.

“I’m a mother of seven kids; I don’t have an alternative,” Heder said. “You either stay fit so you can handle the task physically and emotionally or you go crazy.”

Heder believes fitness is an integral part of well-being and you have to decide to work with your body on both physical and emotional levels.

Active in her youth, Heder, 42, played sports in high school but had never been involved with a constant exercise program. About 13 years ago she set foot in a gym to reshape her life.

“Once you get involved with a program it changes your life, not just physically but literally,” she said.

Heder is a personal trainer and has been for more than a decade. She runs boot camps for women and estimates she’s helped thousands of women throughout the years.

“I was overweight and not feeling well about myself,” Heder said. “That’s how I got into fitness, and thought if I felt this way so did a lot of other women. You think that you’re alone but we’re so much alike. We can help each other.”

In Heder’s boot camps, she helps her clients build muscle for the first four to five weeks with very little cardio. Then she switches to more cardio intertwined with weight training to lean out body fat around the muscle.

Just like many others, Heder has days when it takes the jaws of life to get her to the gym, but she has her own philosophy about how to tackle that problem.

“Get yourself involved in a program,” she said. “Decide on a goal and keep trying new things until you find something you love to do. You never know when you’re going to find something you love to do until you’ve tried it.”

Heder personally enjoys kickboxing and said she finds herself motivated to keep going to the workout because she likes it so much.

She said she also likes to shake up her exercise routine frequently to avoid boredom and complacency.

“I never do the same thing for more than a week, and I don’t do the same workout twice,” Heder said. “You need change in order to make your body change. Your body needs to be challenged.”

As Heder has grown older, she values the sense of self-discovery that she’s found through exercise and she feels strength is more than just lifting weights.

“Strength is absolutely a beautiful thing,” she said. “I didn’t understand when I was younger, but strength will change the quality of life as you get older and as the years go by.”

“Fitness is not a goal, it’s a journey,” said Heder. “When we make fitness a part of our lives rather than something we have to do, we come full circle and begin to see the benefits.”

compiled by Natalie Tripp

If you or someone you know would like to share their exercise habits, please contact Natalie Tripp at Natalie Tripp: ntripp@tooeletranscript.com