January is a month where many people resolve to improve their health and fitness, but often those goals fall by the way side as the bustle of life intervenes.
Recent figures from ExerciseNZ show 31% of adults and 81% of adolescents globally fall short of the recommended physical activity levels.
New Zealand ranked among the worst for physical inactivity, with more than 50% of adults and 90% of children not meeting those guidelines.
Oamaru-based personal trainer and nutritionist Melissa Smith says it is with consistency where people fall down.
“It’s about habit building and being consistent with that, because your motivation can only get you so far.”
Mrs Smith is the director of Melissa Smith Total Wellbeing and, from February 1, the new leaseholder of the Oamaru Rowing Club gym.
This year, she is launching a sports academy pilot programme aimed at active year 11 and 12 Oamaru secondary school pupils with a focus on nutrition, strength and conditioning, general wellbeing and personal development.
She said the aim was not only for participation in sport but to build an active and healthy life.
The pilot programme was invitation only and comprised young sportsmen and women from Waitaki Girls’, Waitaki Boys’ and St Kevin’s College.
As a registered clinical nutritionist, sports nutritionist and personal trainer, Mrs Smith said the academy was a business opportunity for her to use her professional and personal experience to support busy and active teenagers to feel better and perform better.
As the mother of three very active and sports-mad young sons, she wanted them to grow up seeing how that was possible, and to have their own role models.
Sport has been a life-long passion for Mrs Smith, a former St Kevin’s College pupil who was a silver medallist in discus at national secondary school level, played netball for Otago B and also got a Rebels trial, although an injured ankle curtailed that.
At the University of Otago, she completed degrees in physical education and science, majoring in nutrition, before moving to Southland with her husband Craig — now deputy principal at St Kevin’s — when he got a teaching job in Invercargill.
During six years in the South she had various roles, including active lifestyle co-ordinator for Sport Southland, working for the Southern District Health Board’s Healthy Eating, Healthy Action programme, community development officer at the Gore District Council and at the Department of Internal Affairs in Invercargill supporting groups to gain funding.
The couple returned to Oamaru at 2016 when Mr Smith got a job at St Kevin’s. By then, they had their eldest son, Louis, and it was a good chance to be close to family.
Mason followed and then youngest son Albie was 6 months old when Stacey Pine started the Movement Hub, a health collective in Oamaru’s heritage precinct, in 2021.
She was looking for someone to provide nutritional support and so Mrs Smith did some additional nutrition training to become a registered clinical nutritionist.
She got mentoring through that and gained the confidence to start using her own knowledge and degrees again. It was also great being able to fit her hours of work around her young family.
She also offered personal training and, while she started “super small’, growth followed, and she ended up outgrowing Movement Hub, which was limited in terms of equipment available for her personal training clients.
As much as she loved the environment of the Harbour St premises, many of her clients had progressed to a point where they needed different gear.
Latterly, Mrs Smith has been working out of the rowing club gym and, when the current lessee decided not to renew the lease, she saw the opportunity to take it on.
Already familiar with many of the members, she said it was a good facility and she liked how it was a quiet and comfortable environment.
Some of her clients had never previously set foot in a gym, or had never done any weight training or strength and resistance work.
It was all about getting the technique right — “and not ego lifting” — and doing it properly. She was particularly passionate about improving women’s core strength, saying it was so important as they aged.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic began, Mrs Smith reckoned there had been an increased focus on health. Most of her clients were female, although she did have some men, and many were farmers.
Mrs Smith also went into schools to talk to pupils about nutrition and healthy eating and how to fuel themselves better.
Many kids were very active, often doing three or four sports in a season, and she noticed some were not eating as they should, particularly rowers, whose training was so intense.
Often people got fixated on what they should eat before they trained or played, but if they were not eating properly all seven days of the week then that sport specific nutrition advice did not matter.
It was about “fuelling for life” and, if they were doing that, then they were also fuelling for their sport, she said.
With her academy, about 20 young people would take part this year. It was a hybrid model, meaning it was both online and in person. While many of the teens played different sports, many of the training principles were the same, she said.
This year’s intake were her pilot teens – “they are my co-pilots basically” – and she wanted to develop the programme together, incorporating feedback from parents.
She was keen to expand the academy in the future and potentially look at sponsorship, particularly from the community, for participants.
Diagnosed with type-1 diabetes when she was 12, and then as a coeliac a decade ago, Mrs Smith said her own health challenges definitely had an impact on how she worked with people.
It was all about longevity and, while it might be hard for children to comprehend the need to build strong bones when they were so young, it was about helping them understand that what they did now made such a difference to them when they were much older. It was not about just having a long life, but a quality life, and strong bones and muscles were needed.
