Finding Balance: How Training Enriches Your Life

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Meet Jani Dittman, a personal trainer who is turned her passion for health and fitness into a full-time career.

Jani's workouts are fun, creative, and deliver effective results. For her, personal training is so much more than just getting your daily workout. For Jani, fitness is a lifestyle and her goal is to get her clients fall in love with fitness.

She aims to make her clients live a healthy active lifestyle that makes them feel strong, confident and free to do the things that they love!

In an interview recently she talked about her fitness journey, her experience with FitBudd, and more.

What was your first step towards fitness?

"Well, it was quite a while ago. Growing up, my family was active, we did a lot of snow skiing and water skiing and I was in gymnastics.

I didn't really play any team sports but I was in gymnastics and then going into college I decided to study health promotion just because I really like that topic.

This helped me learn how to help others stay healthy, keep myself healthy and just promote health and wellness, you know in my own home and then you know others as well.

Then I got my degree in health promotion and then right out of college I started out in an all women's gym as their fitness director and started teaching group fitness classes.

I also helped develop other instructors and helped them learn how to teach and maintain their group fitness program. I was there for 10 years and then I moved to another gym where I kind of do the same thing for a few years now.

It's called the YMCA which is a national chain.  

I’ve been there ever since. I just teach a few classes there now, I don't work there full time. I just teach as an instructor.

And so I just love group fitness and I've also done one-on-one personal training."

What is your preferred method of training?

"Group fitness is my preferred method of training just because I feel like there's more energy in a group.

A group of people just, you know, working toward a common goal and sweating it out together. about the music, and it's just, it's just fun!

It also helps me stay healthy and in shape because they're expecting me to show up. I've got to be there and help coach them through.

It's been like 30 years that I've worked in the fitness industry and been teaching and training, that's basically three decades of life which is like a huge chunk!"

Who is your fitness inspiration? Or, any person you look forward to, or any role model in the fitness space?

"No one particular person. I've had like mentors along the way that kind of helped me get into group fitness and a fitness scene, but I don't really have like one person.

I know there are lots of like fitness influencers now online and I think, wow, they're pretty amazing.

But honestly, what keeps me inspired is, just as I'm getting older.

I turned 50 back in July and I still have a 10-year-old at home, so I was almost 40 years old when I had my last child and just being able to grow up and be healthy and still be involved.

I've never wanted to be that mom who just sits on the sidelines and watches. I wanted to be able to engage and we're a very active family. We do lots of mountain biking and skiing and snowboarding and wakeboarding.

I'm getting older so I want to be able to do that for as long as I can and I know that in order to do that, I'm gonna have to take care of myself and continue to train and fuel my body with nutritional food which will add more life to my years.

So, like, according to my experience, also like fitness is something that's actually, you know, makes you feel alive, it gives you that rush, yeah. To show up to your work and to actually look forward to your family as well.

So there's a lot of skills and all, which is learned throughout journeys, and you know, throughout working out and also, I feel Yes, definitely."

What was your motive behind naming your particular brand page FitDitts?

"My last name is Dittman, and my husband obviously has always had the last name Dittman. When I got married, I took on his last name and they used to call him Ditz, you know, growing up, in sports and stuff.

It was like short for Dittman and when I was starting way back in the fitness world, and the world of the internet, I came up with an email address, and I was like well let's just do FitDitts. And it is kind of the name that I've just always, identified it for."

How has been your experience with FitBudd?

"So before really the pandemic and all, I thought about maybe getting into online coaching just to be able to reach more people rather than just train people locally, like in my gym and my classes.

It's (online training) been able to open up such a broader spectrum of people from around the globe that you can help and so when I heard about FitBudd, they reached out to me, and they showed me their platform, I was like, wow, this is really cool.

And I'm seeing the potential of what we could do and how to really create workouts and like custom workouts for each client.

I just really saw the potential in being able to reach a broader spectrum of people around the globe and I thought that would be amazing, so that's why I hopped onboard.

During the pandemic, lots of people were looking for some online training programs to stay healthy.

I've done a couple of challenges now with the platform and have been able to help and influence several people. I think I had 50 people sign up for each challenge from all over the world, not only just the United States, but from India as well.

FitBudd is just a great platform to be able to expand your reach."

How were you managing your clients before FitBudd?

"Honestly, I have never really set up an online training platform before FitBudd. But, yes, I was training in the gym one-on-one. You're trading one man-hour for one client and, you know, the rate of return is not max out a little bit like and then with group fitness, I can only physically teach so many, especially as I'm getting older."

What is the USP of FitBudd?

"You can now also upload an exercise library. Especially since I was using all of my own, now you have a library base already there, which is huge.

At first, I was uploading all of my exercises and it was a kind of an investment in time, but now that it's there, I feel like I can be so much more efficient in creating workouts and custom plans for other clients and support them. "

If you could have a billboard, what would be written on it and why?

"I thought about this, there are a couple of things that I think we're going to go with.

"There's more to life than training, but training puts more in your life."

This is because I feel like some people are into the big biceps or the six-pack abs or, well, that's cool and all, but there's more to life than just the six-pack abs and the big biceps.

It's really just being able to do the things that bring you joy and so that's why I continue to train because I feel like it's going to add more joy into my years.

And, that's a wrap!

The line at the end beautifully sums up Jani's entire journey. Only a person with so many years of experience can tell these precious lines of wisdom.

Like Jani Dittman, many other fitness trainers are now using the power of their own fitness app to expand their fitness business and train people worldwide.

Stay tuned because we'll come up with many more interesting stories from fitness professionals from different parts of the world.

Click on the play button to watch the entire interview!