27 Mar Fitness Olympia Champ Whitney Jones’ Tips to Staying Fit
1. Don’t Be Afraid to Try Stuff
Ask Whitney Jones to list all the injuries in her life, and you will be listening for quite a while. “I’ve broken one ankle three times,” Jones begins. “I’ve broken the other four times. I’ve torn my rotator cuff twice. Had surgery on both knees. Broken both wrists multiple times. Broken both elbows, broken some ribs. Had four back injuries, six concussions, 14 surgeries…” And just how did she manage to rack up more wounds than a Hollywood stuntman. “Being fearless, honestly,” she says. “Just trying stuff.”
Jones spent her childhood in the hot Arizona sun, trying to keep up with her two older brothers and performing any physical challenge they dared her to do. She also played sports. Like, all the sports: soccer, basketball, softball, track, swimming, diving, and volleyball. “I even tried to play football,” she says. “But my parents wouldn’t let me.” She was resourceful, too. To learn to do flips, she just placed a pool raft on the lawn and started flipping. (Note: Don’t try this at home.) “You’d eat it hard a lot of times,” Jones says. “That’s where some of the concussions came in.”
In high school, Jones was naturally—the flier on her cheerleading squad. This meant more falls. “They’d throw me up in the air and then this girl was supposed to catch me, and she didn’t always catch me,” she says. “So that’s how I broke a lot of my bones.” Later, at Arizona State University, Jones performed on the dance team. This led to, you guessed, more injuries. But Jones has no regrets about any of this activity. The falls built character, she says, and instilled grit. “I learned to be pretty tough, pretty early,” Jones says. “I learned how to fight. I learned how to handle injuries and keep on kicking.”
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2. Have the Courage to Switch Careers
After college, Jones put her business communications degree from ASU to use at an advertising agency. She was making good money, but she was ultra-stressed, spending all day in an office, and not a happy camper. She was also skipping the gym, packing on weight, and feeling lazy. “I went from being active my whole life to work, work, work,” Jones says. “I decided,‘I don’t like this. I want to get back to being active.’”
After the birth of her second child, which required a torturous three-month stretch of full bed rest, Jones put a fork in her advertising career and became a full-time personal trainer. She loved it so much, she ended up partnering with a friend and opening her own gym. Today, that gym, Pro Physiques, is the largest personal training facility in Arizona, complete with 20 coaches who train everyone from teens and older folks to pro athletes and amateur fitness competitors. But it didn’t stop there. Building on the success of Pro Physiques, Jones launched three other businesses: the Pros, an online training company; the Glute Pros, a gym equipment manufacturing company; and Fearless by Whitney Jones, a fitness and apparel line.
Good move to quit the ad agency? We’d say so.
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