Inactive Market/Inspire the World to Fitness Articles

Twenty-five years ago Debra Mazda, MEd, of Mazda Motivations LLC, visited a health club and experienced firsthand the feeling of not belonging. At age 21, she weighed over 300 pounds. Depressed and battling high blood pressure, she decided to reinvent her life. “I was the only seriously fat person in the gym,” she remembers. Undaunted, she sweated her way through ae...

When IDEA member Nancy Norris was 4 years old, her mother did something that set her life in motion, literally. “She enrolled me in a dance school, and I fell in love with dance,” says Norris, who lives in Grand Blanc, Michigan. Dance fulfilled an exercise niche way before fitness was “cool,” and Norris danced and taught dance classes until age 37, when something new caught her attention: aerob...

Former college football player and New York City firefighter “Coach” Rich Carroll considered staying fit part of his job description. Exercise came easy to him, and he often rose early in the morning to squeeze in a routine, occasionally interrupted by an alarm. In these instances, he would get “a life-or-death, high-intensity workout.” This was simply part of his life and Carroll relished it, ...

Linda Dunn, MA, became a fitness professional by default. The Tuscaloosa, Alabama, resident couldn’t find a local group fitness class she liked after her regular teacher moved, so she decided to learn how to do it herself. More than 20 years later, and now retired from a job with the school system where she worked as a psychometrist and counselor, Dunn dedicates all of her time to fitness and w...

Nothing fires up fitness professionals more than the thought of helping others discover the joy of living healthy, active lives. Individually, we do phenomenal work to make a difference in our communities. Universally, however, we can’t do it all alone: we need to connect with each other to share knowledge and information and to brainstorm new ways to reach the people we want to serve. The fabu...

As a child, IDEA member Sonya Bruton, who lives in Apex, North Carolina, distinctly remembers buying clothes from the “chubby” section at Sears department store, and how painful it was. Today, people have a tough time imagining Bruton as an overweight little girl, but she is the same person who listens so well and offers sound fitness advice. It is because Bruton spent so many years devel...

Almost a decade ago, IDEA member (21 years and counting) Molly Lynn had a pivotal discussion about the specialized health and fitness needs of people in her age group (mid to late 70s and older). Lynn, who lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and a friend agreed that fitness professionals offered very few programs for much older adults. They decided they would be the ones to meet the challenge. ...

A study conducted by The American Physiological Society has raised interesting questions about why some people seem to be born to move while others prefer to hibernate like sleeping bears. Apparently, being a couch potato may be hard-wired into the brain, according to the researchers’ findings, which were published on the society’s website (

inspire the world to fitness...

Nancy Jerominski hasn’t always been the healthy powerhouse she is today. When her clients share setbacks with her, large or small, she gets it. She really gets it. The Seattle resident and owner of NLJ Fitness and Wellness Consulting has taken the long road to wellness herself. While Jerominski got a head start in the fitness industry in the late 1970s, she took an alcohol-...