This weekend, I had the amazing opportunity to attend Kayla Itsine’s NYC Bootcamp and it was amazing.  There was something so simple, but so inspiring about the whole event.  First off, it was 100% free.  Not a single one of those 4,000 girls who attended had to pay a dime to enter.  I find that amazing.  All too often, I find that high-profile fitness instructors charge an arm and a leg for everything they do.  Their websites are built around websites that provide recipes to meals that only reference their specific brand of protein powder, they highlight endorsed products on their Instagrams, they create their own line of clothing that they wear in all of their pictures and promise girls they will look just like them if they dish out $100s.  It all seems so fake to me and misses the whole point of what fitness should be about.  This brings me to my favorite part of the workout: what Kayla said.

The workout itself was intense.  Intervals of some of her guides favorite moves; jump lunges, jump squats, and the oh so dreaded burpee mixed with ab exercises all rounded up at the end with 5 minutes of high intensity work.  I had a great time at the bootcamp, but mostly because of the inspiration I was left with.  Kayla seemed so genuine in everything that she did and said.  She wanted to see us work hard and most of all, she wanted us to work as a team.  She stressed this over and over.  It was so much easier to go through the exercises when you knew everyone around you was struggling just as hard.  And it struck me that these 4,000 girls might not be surrounding me physically every day during my workout, but they are surrounding me in spirit.  That’s the beauty of Kayla’s instagram community and all of the wonderful, inspiring girls that do the BBG.  We all go through the same exercises in that guide and we all struggle through them, no matter what your fitness level.  It is that mutual pain that bonds us even though we may never meet.  Having that support system is the most motivating thing in the world and gets me going each and every day.  There is a reason I haven’t missed a BBG workout in the 19 weeks I’ve been doing this crazy thing and it’s because of the support system I log on and see everyday.

I left the bootcamp with a new sense of purpose and gratification.  I had been gifted the opportunity to workout out with so many like minded individuals.  It’s not the easiest to get people around you to grasp that you actually enjoy getting up at the crack of dawn to completely exhaust yourself, so when you find people who actually understand this and live this same way, you feel right at home.  And that is a feeling that money can’t buy.

-sj