Episode 3: Lee Kennon, How Teenagers Can Stay Healthy in Today’s Society

Alexis:

Hi there, and thanks for joining us for the Prepped and Polished radio show. I’m your host, Alexis Avila, licensed guidance counselor, private tutor, and founder of Prepped and Polished LLC, Tutoring and Test Prep in beautiful South Natick, Massachusetts. The Prepped and Polished Radio Show is your education insider. Our show is brought to you by Prepped and Polished, LLC, where I am the principal educator. To learn more about our firm, please visit Preppedandpolished.com.

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Our Guest

Joining our show today is Lee Kennon. Lee Kennon is founder of Kennon Fitness, based in Newton/Wellesley, Massachusetts, where he helps people of all ages reach their fitness potential.

Lee Kennon is a certified personal trainer from the American Counsel of Exercise with a Bachelor of Science in business management from UMass Boston. Prior to this role, Lee Kennon served four years in the Marines where he learned to push himself to new limits, both physically and mentally.

Lee Kennon is a competitive athlete in Brazilian jujitsu and running and has competed in grappling tournaments all of New England and has run countless races from 5K’s to our very own Boston Marathon. We are delighted to have Lee on the show. He is going to share with us his wisdom and tips for getting into better physical shape and teach us how to stay in shape for life.

Before we start, I want to make sure our listeners have our contact info. Our e-mail is Radio@Preppedandpolished.com. If you would like to submit a question at any time, you can use that e-mail address. Often our listeners will have questions as they are listening or afterwards, we always appreciate hearing from our listeners, so you can e-mail us at any time at Radio@Preppedandpolished.com.

Lee, are you on the line?

Lee:

Hello, Alexis, I’m on the line.

Alexis:

Thank you, thank you so much for joining us today. How are you doing today?

Lee:

I’m doing well, thank you for having me.

Alexis:

My pleasure, my pleasure. So, Lee, I’m not sure our audience knows that in addition to the grappling, you also compete in some mixed martial arts and boxing competitions.

Lee:

I do, yeah.

Alexis:

So, what’s your record?

Lee:

My amateur boxing record is actually 1 and 0, so undefeated with one match, and mixed martial arts I just do that recreationally and I do training with that. With grappling, I’ve gout about 34 bouts under my belt and I am about 22 and 12 with that.

Alexis:

Wow, that’s great! More wins than losses is always a good thing.

Lee:

There you go.

Alexis:

Lee, can you start out by telling us, what is Kennon Fitness, and how you came up with your company?

Lee:

Yes, what I do is I do personally training as a private industry between the Newton, Wellesley, West End and Needham areas, and I worked for the Beacon Hill Athletic Club for about five years as a trainer and group exercise instructor there, and simultaneously started branching out on my own to do a private business where I meet people in their homes and their home gym set-up and help them work out and design exercise regimens, as well as I do group training sessions at public parks and tracks in the surrounding areas as well.

So, essentially I go from house to house throughout the course of the day with all my clientele, and help them basically better themselves physically and have a better outlook on health and fitness. Some people, it’s just who want to get into better shape overall. Some people are very, very out of shape and need a lot more assistance with something very specific, and some are half-beats who just want to fine tune or more efficiently structure their exercise regimen.

I came up with the concept just because as far as traveling around, there are also a lot of people who don’t have time to go to the gym or don’t belong to a gym or have a better set up in their own homes, or also prefers to have somebody come, not wanting to be in front of other people. You name the reason, but it’s a very convenient thing to have a trainer come to your house if you have the time.

Alexis:

Excellent, yes, definitely, especially in this fast paced world.

Lee:

Absolutely.

Alexis:

So, here’s just a question I came up with. Why fitness, Lee? Why is it important for people to stay in shape. Are there benefits outside from just making you feel better just physically?

Lee:

Well, absolutely. Your body essentially is your temple, and you only get one body to carry around with you for the rest of your life, so as far as just trying to look good or just feel good, there is also a lot of health risks that you reduce by staying in as good a shape as you possibly can along with your day to day lifestyle. I mean, especially with like the younger population now.

Over a third of child and adolescents are considered obese or overweight by our national average, and that’s the highest it’s every been. Over the past 30 years or so, it has just about tripled in it’s number. So due to this, being obese and having a sedentary lifestyle has an increased risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, several different types of cancers, just to name a few. Depression, overall mood, by just having a much better outlook on your health and fitness, as well as your lifestyle, it affects everything.

It affects your entire life, life expectancy, diseases later on in age, so it’s not just feeling good. That’s like honestly just one of the smaller parts in terms of staying in shape and being healthy.

The reason I got into it, when I was in the Marine Corps, I really enjoyed the fitness aspect of everything we did with the training and the conditioning, and I really took a liking to it, so I started my training and my studies while I was actually in the Marine Corps, for the last year of my service and applying coming back to Massachusetts. At the age of 23, I actually got started as a personal trainer.

Alexis:

Wow, so it sounds like the Marine Corps, the philosophies there really inspired you to continue the work outs.

Lee:

Absolutely.

Alexis:

It sounds like you kind of answered some of these questions already, but I’m just kind of curious. Have you seen from your experience working with people collectively, are people starting to get more in shape now, as opposed to like five to ten years ago, or are people a little more sedentary? What do you see? What have you been seeing?

Lee:

What I’ve seen personally, and this is just from my own experience, not based on any national averages or what anybody else would say, is that I have seen an increase in physical activity lately, within the past five or ten years. Because a lot of the health risks, they are no secret any more, and people are very aware of them. Just about anybody knows somebody who has been affected by a health risk or a disease due to having high blood pressure, high cholesterol from smoking, from not being active, from being overweight or not eating well.

So, it’s definitely seemed to catch on lately and people are starting to kind of turn the corner. It’s moving in the right directly from my knowledge and from what I have been witnessing, at least in the Greater Boston area. So, it’s very encouraging in that respect. But, it doesn’t speak for the entire country, other regions demographically. There are some areas where it has been declining, but not so much up in here.

Alexis:

Right, right. So, I’m sure you are pretty busy, because in New England a lot of people are usually on the go.

Lee:

Absolutely.

Alexis:

It’s really valuable to find someone who can really kind of help them get motivated.

Lee:

That’s my job.

Alexis:

Definitely. Since a lot of our audience members are teens, can you tell us a little bit, can you tell us why it may be important for say, a teenager, to start exercising at a young age?

Lee:

Absolutely! Well, as far as a teenager is concerned, actually a lot of kids participate in sports, but not all do. Participating in a recreational or competitive sport is very helpful to be physically active and to be moving around and to prevent and reduce a lot of these risk factors of a lot of these disease and all these issues caused by not being active.

But, it’s great to start as early as possible, at a younger age, because it reduces a lot of the risk factors later on in life. So typically speaking, children and teenagers who are obese or sedentary, these lifestyle factors and these habits spill over into their adult life as well. So, by systematically changing that pattern and those habits at a younger age, it does help to reinforce later on in life a healthy lifestyle, an active
lifestyle, as well as not having to try to play catch-up in your 40s or 50s when it’s almost too late, and your doctor told you that you are in a really bad place physically and now you have to do all this physical activity and try to basically reverse as much of the damage done in your lifestyle as possible in a short amount of time.

So, by catching it early on, it’s ideal and it doesn’t have to be over the top or crazy. The American College of Sports Medicine’s recommendation is that at the very least you need to have, everybody needs to have, at least 30 minutes of physical activity on most days of the week. So, that four days a week range. And that’s just a bare minimum, that’s just to reduce the risk of a lot of these life threatening diseases.

And a lot of people do get at least that, and physical activity can be anything from playing basketball, outside walking around, anything of that nature, jogging, etc., dancing. But the younger you start, the better, ideally.

Alexis:

Right, right. And without giving away all your tips and secrets, can you kind of like paint a little picture of what you might do during a session with say, a teenager, to keep them kind of motivated, versus like working with one of your adult students.

Lee:

Definitely, and the younger the age, the more different it has to be, because like with children for example, it’s very difficult because you have to make any physical activity seem like play. You want a child to grow and develop the right concepts about being healthy and having a healthy lifestyle without pushing them into thinking it’s a chore, and they will lose interest and not want to do it. So, it’s always like play with kids.

With teenagers, it all depends what their personality is like and what they enjoy doing. There are tons of different ways to do cardio, tons of different ways to strength train, different ways to do flexibility training. So, some people like to play basketball, some people like to run, some people like to ski, some people like to swim, etc. Some people don’t even know what they like because they are not physically active enough.

With teens, I introduce as many different activities as I possibly can and try to find out what sticks and what they enjoy the most, and that has the highest rate of success. So, trying to get somebody to do something they absolutely dread and hate on a day to day basis is very, very difficult, and is not a realistic long term solution to being physically active.

Alexis:

Absolutely. Yes, that makes a lot of sense. In kind of looking at some of the older demographics and getting them to work out, what are some tips you have for people who say, might struggle getting off the couch? We have so much eye-candy out there with the reality television, just kind of sucking you onto that couch and watching for hours. What would you suggest?

Lee:

As far as…taking the first step is the hardest part. Getting into an exercise regimen, a fitness routine, the hardest part is the beginning. Once you basically start maintaining and getting the momentum moving, it’s a lot easier to carry on and you basically train your body and your mind to get used to the physical activity. So, that first step is literally, just getting off the couch.

The whole concept, like couch to 5K, once you get started, the hardest part, the first four weeks is generally the hardest part, and after that it really does start to get easier. You start to feel better on a day to day basis. Your mind, your whole attitude towards things changes, and when you start to see changes and results, especially in your emotions, it really is encouraging, as well as in your body.

So, it really is just that first step, walking in the right direction, even stepping foot into a gym or going outside on a walk. Never try to bite off more than you can chew or do too much too fast. Easing into any type of regimen is the best way that has the highest rate of success, and sitting on the couch for extended periods of time really is the American Way, and it’s absolutely awful and something we really need to change.

Alexis:

I’m sure that you’ve given tips to some of the more sedentary clients that you have, so do you offer them, the people who are kind of like working until the late hours and don’t really have that exercise time, do you offer any tips for what you can do just in your house? Like in front of the TV or something?

Lee:

There’s a lot of different things that people can do, just with a little bit of space. The number of exercises, the number of workouts you can do in a small amount of space is limitless. One of the things with not having enough time, and this is something I hear a lot, people not having the time to work out, it’s a very common excuse. Because most people who don’t have time to work out due to their work schedule, have time to do a lot of other things that are not related to them actually being at work.

People have time to watch television, for example. People have time to go to sporting events and people have time, you know Patriots game, Red Sox game, which is great, and I enjoy that, too. But, a lot of people also can wake up earlier, just a little bit earlier, just half an hour earlier can be something just to get a body moving.

People who go to work until very, very late, that is understandable as well, but even during lunch, if you have a two hour lunch break, there is no reason why you can’t put on some sneakers and go outside and do something. As far as the space in your house goes, trying to get just some full-body workouts in, in a living room is still something that can be done, just with some of the furniture that is around you and is accessible to you. So, more times than not, with people who don’t believe that they have time, if you really reevaluate your work schedule, you can find ways to squeeze in half an hour here and there during the week.

Alexis:

That’s really inspiring to hear. In the whole talk about people making excuses, it’s so true. I mean, there is 24 hours in a day, right?

Lee:

Absolutely. I mean we can all make excuses, every single one of us.

Alexis:

Absolutely. Okay, well that sounds awesome. I really, really appreciate you coming on and sharing your expertise with everyone. Thank you so much, Lee!

Lee:

My pleasure, Alexis. Thank you for having me.

Alexis:

Sure. Okay, well this wraps our show today with Lee Kennon of Kennon Fitness. Please visit Kennonfitness.com. I’m going to spell this for the audience, it’s K-E-double N-O-N fitness dot com, to learn more about Lee’s company. And if you want to change your life in a dramatic way, where you will feel healthy both inside and out, I highly recommend calling Lee Kennon. Thank you for joining us on the Prepped and Polish Radio Show.