Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Hyderabad
Dance to health
|
An obsession with exercise drove Jennifer Hicks over the brink, only to return with a vengeance with a balanced workout technique
|
Photo: Bhagya prakash k.
HEAL THYSELF Jennifer Hicks: ‘Our philosophy is through movement we find health’
She was in the city to promote the Non-Impact Aerobics (NIA) technique. She is slightly on the heavier side. Dressed in fitted clothes, she walks in confidently, puts on music and starts to demonstrate her work. Her moves look like a mix between danc
e and aerobics. The moves are designed to work out the entire body, yet does not look very taxing. With the music you can also hear her inhale and exhale loudly. That is Jennifer Hicks, a trained speech pathologist who has been working with people with brain damage people for 10 years. Now she is passionate about NIA, which she says is for exercise freaks.
Damaging
“Exercise can be damaging if not done well and right. Five years ago I got into a situation of doing too much exercise and ended up being anorexic! I became obsessed with losing weight, got aggressive in my fitness regime and it was very dangerous. So dangerous that I ended up with liver and heart problems. The doctors advised me to stop, but I had this strange compulsion to keep exercising!”
Her problems did not stop at that. The compulsion to exercise was so strong that no matter how exhausted she felt, she found herself back at her work out sessions. Finally, her fatigue affected her work so much that she was asked to go on disability leave.
“It was during that time that I made my first trip to India looking for unconventional methods to heal myself, because conventional medicines were just not working.”
She learnt yoga and Reiki before returning to her country. Then she met a couple that was into a new style of exercising, NIA.
Our philosophy is “through movement we find health. We believe in the power of self-discovery through movement. NIA empowers people to make their own movement choices by offering a flexible structure that they can personally modify to suit individual needs,” she explains. This technique was developed in 1983 by Carlos and Debbie Rosas, both successful fitness instructors, she adds.
“NIA is also an expressive movement form that allows individual creativity. Today it is taught in 26 countries. Like in karate, we too have belts. I have a white and a blue belt. White is where you are trained in the basic and blue is the advanced training where you are taught how to create an atmosphere in a class and how to communicate,” adds Jennifer.
NIA, she says, is suitable for people of all ages. “I have students aged between 15 to 80 years. I also teach cancer patients. It can be modified and my advice to people is to follow your own body ways. Do things that feel good. What works for someone else may just not work for you and vice versa.”
Does she use yoga too? “Yes, to tune in and to cool down after exercise,” she says, and blames the media and the fashion world for promoting wrong notions of beauty. “As a result people have a lot of eating disorders and use alcohols or cigarettes to keep their bodies thin! But that just damages your body. One should have a positive body image. That was my major problem. I was not happy with how I looked and I wanted to lose weight and be thin. But now, I am happy with how I am. This is the heaviest that I have let my body be. I am not ashamed and I like to show off my body and am not embarrassed. It’s a big shift even in my thinking, thanks to NIA. My life is different now,” she smiles.
Jennifer Hicks can be contacted on www.jennhicks.ca or jenniferhicks@rogers.com
This column features those who choose to veer off the beaten track.
SHILPA SEBASTIAN R.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Hyderabad
|
