Marlene Suarez
NOW THAT I AM RETIRED I WORK OUT AT LEAST 6X A WEEK WHAT I ALWAYS DREAMED OF DOING WHEN I HAD THE TIME AVAILABLE. I WOULDN’T HAVE IT ANY OTHER WAY.
What does being part of the ThiBod Fitness Community mean to you?
It is my daily medicine, physically and mentally! It makes me feel the best I can at 61. It is my fitness family, a welcoming friendly place that keeps you coming back for more every day and it never gets old! I am so grateful I found it 7 years ago, it was the gym community we were looking to find no intimidation. It has taken me to my present fitness level at 61 years old and reinforces my future fitness goals. It keeps me motivated to keep working out daily and wanting to work out to maintain what I have developed!
It keeps me feeling young it truly does! It energizes and inspires me to stay in shape. I have been 100% involved in workouts since mid-May 2012. We were empty nesters at the time, thinking about retirement, and wanted to seriously take our fitness to the next level. I was closely approaching my 55th Birthday and my husband and I wanted to find a gym to join and even get involved with Boot Camp workouts and really focus on working out more and consistently. We found Crissy at a local gym, it was a miracle and her energy and welcoming personality, made you feel comfortable, along with all the others in the class, it was so addictive, everyone was friendly and encouraging, it radiated during every class! I started doing her Zumba classes on a regular schedule and haven’t stopped in 7 years. I took her class as often as I could after work which was about 3-5 days a week including Saturday classes and blended in Yoga and Body Pump classes. A few years later I added Joe’s Boot Camp 3 times a week and it was about that time that Thibod Fitness was born and basically bumped up my workout routine to 6x a week with Boot Camps, Zumba, Yoga.
Now that I have retired I work out at least 6x a week what I always dreamed of doing when I had the time available. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I do Crissy’s personal fitness 3x week, followed by the 24/7 on my own 2x week, Zumba 6x, Yoga and Stretch 3x. I have kept this schedule for about 2 years now. Working out at Thibod is my daily preventive dose of medicine to combat the ills of aging. Thibod Fitness Community is my inspiration to maintain a healthy fitness lifestyle even at 61, I have fitness friends 30, 20, 10 years younger but we all have the same fitness goals!!!
What are your 1 and 2-year fitness goals?
1 Year Goal: Continue to stay on track from the 2018 photoshoot prep and maintain a base level. Even on vacation enjoy some free time but always work out in another gym and stay in check with macro counting. My goal this year is to do another photoshoot prep and plan on even more transformation results. I am excited about this year’s Status photoshoot because I will be starting at a different fitness level. I really want to step out of my comfort zone and have even more visible definition in my muscles and be more natural in my photoshoot since it will be more familiar.
Since I am retired I have a weekly fitness schedule that I follow every day along with macro planning. I have traded my daily commitment to going to work every day to working out!
2 Year Goal: Continue working out and maintaining the base from the previous year’s success. I just want to feel good and look good at 62. Age is just a number and I want to step beyond that number and continue to feel as good as I did when I was in my 20s/30s/40s!
AGE IS JUST A NUMBER AND I WANT TO STEP BEYOND THAT NUMBER AND CONTINUE TO FEEL AS GOOD AS I DID WHEN I WAS IN MY 20S/30S/40S!
What do you feel Crissy and Joe do that sets them apart from all other trainers?
They are both just the best, truly genuine, and dedicated fitness trainers and professionals. They love what they do and their passion is visible every day. They truly care about all their clients individually and want us all to succeed in our fitness journey, training and advising. They make everyone feel like family, push us to our limits, making it fun and committed. I love how their classes are a balance of training and camaraderie. I have known Crissy & Joe for the past 7 years and their love for fitness radiates every single day. Every day is an exact fitness repeat at the top energy level!!!
How did you feel about being a part of the Stats Fitness Magazine Team Feature shoot?
I am excited to have this great opportunity and feel like it’s an accumulation of all my fitness goals in the last 7 years. Definitely a rewarding and awesome experience for someone who is approaching 62.
What was it like working and shooting with Warren?
It was an amazing experience working with Warren, I have never done a personal photoshoot before and was a little scared. I didn’t know if I could be natural and if it would show that I was nervous. My husband and I both did 1-hour shoots and we blended a few pictures together with a theme. Warren worked with both of us at the same time and it was a great experience. Warren makes it such a comfortable natural experience. He really makes you feel special for that 1 hour of your life! Warren is really great, I can’t find the words to describe his genuine love for what he does! He must change lives daily, every time he shoots. He loves what he does and it shows in his work!!!
Roy Suarez
THE THIBOD FITNESS COMMUNITY IS WHERE MOST OF MY FRIENDS ARE AND WHERE MY SOCIAL, PHYSICAL, AND MENTAL HEALTH ARE MOORED.
What does being a part of the Thibod Fitness Community mean to you?
Keeping one’s feet on terra firma is what defines being part of the Thibod Fitness family. The Cambridge English Dictionary defines “Terra Firma” as dry or solid land when compared with the sea or air. Carl Jung wrote in more poetic terms that it is the ease with which wind can carry us off of solid earth and onto uncertain waves and that it is, therefore, good to keep one foot upon terra firma. I couldn’t agree more.
The Thibod Fitness Community is where most of my friends are and where my social, physical, and mental health is moored. It’s where I go to get a dose of a reality check or to a shot of encouragement on those days that I feel threaten by the forces of gluttony, laziness, and apathy. It’s also where I go when I start believing in myself too much. Because having one’s foot in terra firma means that I understand that while I might be able to reach a goal by myself, that doesn’t mean it’s the best or easiest way to achieve a goal. Friends help.
Knowing that there are others who are fighting the same fight is often the only encouragement I need to not give up on myself and those words of encouragement are often all the inspiration I need to be there with a few words of encouragements for others when I feel they may need a short respite from the rigors of the fighting their own demons. Thibod Fitness is a building but it’s the Thibod family that keeps my feet firmly set in terra firma.
What are your 1 and 2-year fitness goals?
My fitness goals? That’s a question that would have been so easy to answer in my younger years. At one time that my answer to that question would be to lose weight and fit back into size 36 pants. But that was then and this is now, and I know today that it’s not just about fitting into a pair of pants. If my fitness goals were merely about losing weight and I achieved that goal but lost my health would that have been a worthwhile endeavor?
Today at my age it’s so much more complicated. I really only have one goal and that is to live a long and active life as I can and to achieve that goal I have had to add many objectives. Currently, my goal has been about increasing muscle mass but for me, it’s not so much about how I look as much as it is about the physical strength that comes with that. There’s an old saying that getting old is not faint of heart and while there is no cure for aging it has been shown that muscle mass and strength do enhance the life we live.
For me, this has been as much of a mental voyage as it has been a physical one. If I could reach a goal quickly then I’m likely to not appreciate or value that accomplishment fully enough to recognize its true worth. And I know my body well enough to know that accomplishments come slowly for me and that I have to be in it for the long haul.
With all that being said, my second fitness goal is to balance my physical health and fitness with all the other aspects of my life. I don’t work out just to look good, I work out so that that I live a full life and that means that I have to nurture my social life as well. I don’t live just to live. What’s the point of living a long life if you’re confined to live at the gym? So, it’s not about the length of life but the quality of the life. If my fitness goals have had to evolve to accommodate a correlation between what I do at the gym to what that gains me in all the other aspects of my life. Put into simpler terms, it’s not just about fitting into a size 36 pants anymore but where I go and what I do in those size 36 pants.
…WE KNEW THAT WITH CRISSY’S AND JOE’S HELP FITNESS WOULD BECOME A NEW WAY OF LIFE FOR US.
What do you feel Crissy and Joe do that sets them apart from all other trainers?
I recognized a long time ago that everyone needs to exercise and for the most part I tried and tried but gym memberships were expensive and personal training was even more expensive. My objective was always the same, to lose weight. In between bouts of running I purchased and used most of the popular exercise equipment sold on TV from rowing machines, to NordicTrack ski exercisers, to various types of weight training benches and of course a Step Master. I had varying degrees of success with each, and of course, the weight always came back.
Then in May of 2012, my wife and I joined a gym and walked into one of Crissy’s Zumba classes. We had decided to take a week off and dedicate that time to exercise and fitness in order to kick ourselves into fitness mode for the summer. One hour later we left that class and our old lives behind. A short while later Crissy and Joe opened Thibod fitness and we changed gyms, even though it meant leaving behind a sizeable deposit. We wanted no part of our former life and we knew that with Crissy’s and Joe’s help fitness would become a new way of life for us.
It’s hard to explain what they do but whatever it is that they have, it is infectious. They pass it on to everyone in the Thibod family and it goes viral from there. It’s carried from one person in the family to another until eventually everyone is infected by this motivational force. Eventually, it develops into an epidemic of positive thinking. Soon it’s not just Crissy and Joe but the whole social network of positive thinkers that they created who become this force. In the time that positive energy becomes the panacea, you need to make it through another day at the gym and it’s the thing that keeps you coming back for more. What they have is like an infectious disease. I don’t know how they do what they do, but if I could, I would bottle and sell it.
How did you feel about being a part of the Stats Fitness Magazine Team Feature shoot?
When I first learned that I was going to be in Stats Fitness Magazine Team Feature shoot, I thought about a line from the 1986 comedy called Short Circuit. In that movie, a scientist who speaks English with a thick accent sees something shocking and says to his partner, “I am standing here, besides myself.”
And that pretty much sums up my reaction. I am beside myself. I honestly never believed that I would ever be involved in a fitness program for as long as I have, much less be featured in a fitness magazine. I was always the slowest runner and I had the reflexes to match. My tortoise-like sprints could only be matched by my total lack of coordination. When I played baseball I was always the pitcher because I couldn’t catch or hit and even as a pitcher I sucked. I was basically the go-to guy when a team desperately needed a ninth player.
To make matters worse, I grew up at a time when people actually believed that “Muscle Binding” was an actual thing and kids my age were cautioned not to take up weight training or to use extreme caution with weights because we might end up as a tragic tale of the crippling effects of muscle binding.
So to have survived all that and be a part of a fitness magazine photoshoot is simply shocking and it has inspired me to work even harder on myself. I’m seven years into this health and fitness experiment and I’m still going strong. Being in Stat Fitness Magazine’s Team Feature shoot just proved that the results can come at any age if you put in the time and effort.
What was it like working and shooting with Warren?
I loved working with Warren. Like most people, I had never been a part of a professional photoshoot, especially one for a fitness magazine. So naturally, I was a bit excited and nervous. Fortunately, Warren has a professional laid-back way of shooting and an eye for getting just the right shot that can hide the imperfections while accentuating the positives. And at my age that’s important. The results were more than I expected.
