Sutherland Shire-based health and training professional Shari Bremner has been in the fitness industry for almost two decades, but she found her true calling – training tweens and teens – seven years ago.
Shari trialled a six-week fitness and education program for parents and their children at her Taren Point gym, and she discovered a passion for demonstrating the advantages of an active lifestyle to a younger client base.
But it took a foray into a children’s sporting franchise for Shari to learn that she was particularly passionate about helping teenagers and pre-teens transition from team sports into fitness more broadly, recognising that there is too often a gap between school-aged children quitting weekend sport and later joining an adult gym.
“I was at my gym that I was working at, and we started something called Fit Family Focus, and we had kids and parents do a six-week program together. We did a mixture of exercise classes, seminars, family workouts, and I just discovered right then and there that I needed to work with families in health and fitness,” Shari said.
“Because the franchise that I bought [was] sports and fitness, as I went through that I realised that sports was not my passion, but fitness and health and nutrition and mindset was.”
The result of her epiphany? Fit2Shine, a fitness program based out of Caringbah aimed at keeping children aged 10 to 17 active, strong and acquainted with proper gym techniques.
“We specialised in teenagers for two or three years, and the idea is that we're teaching kids correct movement patterns in their body suited to their age group and their growth spurts and their different shapes and sized bodies,” Shari said.
“Just this year we started the pre-teen classes, which is like year four, five and six at primary school… and the idea is that kids at that age particularly [are] starting to either move away from team sport or realise that they're not naturally good at team sport anymore, so they're starting to become inactive, so they just need a place to go to stay active and have fun and be safe and not get hurt; and they're definitely too young to go to a gym.
“We want them to be able to have a good strong movement pattern in all areas, so more well-rounded, and then we can actually give them that fun environment that's like a gym, but much more suited to kids.”
During the classes, which are separated for ages 10 to 12 and ages 12 to 17, students run through the six primary movement patterns of a full-body workout – squat, hinge, lunge, core, push and pull – mixed with conditioning, cardio exercises and plenty of games to keep them entertained.
“You need exercise to be fun and engaging for kids … they don't even realise how much they're using their strength or their fitness and cardio during the game,” Shari said.
“Because we focus on strength training and weight training, probably 50 per cent of [teenage students] really want to join the gym and their parents know that they're too young, so they want to learn and lift weights safely … and that's what we're going to teach the kids.
“We just love having fun … and then the workout is where they really learn how to safely move their body, and hopefully as they grow up and want to join a gym, they've learned all the correct techniques and they won't get hurt as an adult.”
With 125 students signed on this term at Caringbah, it was clear to fellow Fit2Shine coach Lee Bailey – who is also president of Helensburgh-Stanwell Park Surf Club – that the program would likely be just as popular in the Illawarra. So they trialled the program at Helensburgh during the winter school holidays.
“There just seemed to be a need for a program like that down here and, [after] talking to all the parents, just chatting at the school gate and the sporting fields and whatnot, I went and spoke to Tenielle at Burgh Healthy Hub and said, ‘Look, this is what we do, is there room or scope for us to come here?’ – and they were pretty pumped,” Lee said.
“We've had a lot of people who are excited for it, and I think it's needed in somewhere like Helensburgh because there's nowhere else around here that does what we do.
“In the school holidays we had hour-and-a-half classes for each age group, and we had 55 kids all up go through that.”
So far, the team has received tonnes of positive feedback and overwhelming interest in the program and are committed to keeping the classes running until at least the end of the year.
“I was really blown away and I was pretty excited to have 55 come through a holiday program, and they've never seen anything of us necessarily,” Shari said.
“To start week one of a brand-new program… with 32 [students] – that's huge.”
Shari and Lee are most excited to see their Helensburgh students come out of their shell.
“Physical health and mental health go hand in hand,” Lee said. “We've seen a lot of kids up in the Shire; their mental wellbeing has just got through the roof since they've come into our program and they're getting fit, they're getting stronger, they're showing a hell of a lot more resilience just in normal life.”
“What we really focus on is it's going to be a fun way that you want to be active, so you want to come because it's fun, and then you accidentally just get strong, fit and healthy,” Shari said.
“We're probably more focused on fun, confidence; obviously everything's taught correctly, we're all qualified and we are teaching them all these things, but it's almost like that's secondary.
“We just want to have the kids feel good about themselves and have good self-esteem and we just use exercise as a vehicle.”
Fit2Shine run classes at 5pm and 6pm each Monday at Burgh Healthy Hub. Visit the website for more info.
