Women In Fitness: Dorathy Olali

Her childhood sprinting career was cut short by a heart disease and Asthma but Dorathy Olali says, she's been inspired by testimonies of how fitness had helped others overcome certain health issues. Dorathy Olali was sharing her inspiration to joining the fitness game, so far it's been a worthwhile journey and her dream of “looking twenty five at the age of sixty five” is on track. 

Dorathy Olali is a student geologist at the university of port harcourt. She is also a fitness trainer who has worked with some companies and at various events. I sat with her last week to discuss her journey, her routines and about women in the industry. 

Dorathy’s Workout Routine

Dorathy works out at mornings from 6am to about 9am. She says she never misses it and does this up to three or four times a week. She loves using the tracks where she does up to eight 400m runs and keeps track of her timing and distance covered. She also loves to use the stairs/steps where she says one can build all parts of the body. She later demonstrated over twenty steps workout she does which works on the entire body. 

Challenges Women Face in Fitness

Dorathy says the first challenge women face is a misconception about their appearance; “they are told they would look like a man”. This is not true, she says as masculine and muscular are not the same thing and however, there's a difference between looking muscular and being toned up. 

She also highlights other challenges such as the upbringing of females being quit different from males, “Men are fitness inclined while women are ‘teddy bear’ inclined”, which is a mindset women have to deal with if they are going to workout, one which is old school and should be thrown away. The other issues are the facilities available which are not female friendly and the fact that there are more male instructors than female trainers, she in fact would prefer to be trained by a woman rather than a man and some women also feel the same.  

Fitness as a Business

On monetizing fitness, she says one must go beyond the ‘cliche’ to get paid for fitness; “People think because they can run, lift a dumbell and do some funny things,they are into fitness, that is not the case”.  She advises that one must have a business mind to be able to monetize fitness, which is to say, you must have some formal or informal business aptitude.

 Advice to Beginners

According to Dorathy, working out is more of a mind game than a physical game. She believes one must be mentally ready for the changes and pain associated with working out.  She advises women to create time for it and also expect to grow slowly as there is no “quantum leap” in fitness.  She says what's required the most is consistency as most women tend to workout only to lose weight and then hope to stop after doing so. Fitness is a lifestyle that should be adopted as weight loss would be regained if you abruptly stop working out. 

 To watch the video of this discussion, see the channel here  . A follow up on this post will be shared on Dorathy’s over twenty step workout for all body parts. Stay Tuned!