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About Maggie Downie

Thank you for giving your time to stop and read my blog. I hope it encourages you to keep moving. Move and the body will be happier. And when you're moving you can hike, run, swim in Jell-O, race over non-Newtonian fluids, travel the world or build igloos--if that's your thing. If not, you can watch me do it. This is just a spot to try and feel good about life.
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Pysanky Party

Ukrainian lore claims that the fewer pysanky eggs made each year, the more evil there is in the world. Make more pysanky eggs and evil diminishes. With that in mind, Personal Euphoria will be hosting a virtual Pysanky Party. All proceeds will be donated to humanitarian efforts in Ukraine.

Maggie Downie, owner of Personal Euphoria, has been making Pysanky eggs since childhood. She will teach a virtual class in Ukrainian Egg dying. The $10 charge to join the class will be fully donated.

After the event Maggie will additionally auction off an egg and donate funds raised.

Whether you’ve always wanted to learn, think watching could be a meditative, or are just interested in Ukrainian Eggs or supporting the Ukraine, we’d love to have you join us.

To register go to Personal Euphoria. Click “register” or “log-in” on the top right. If you don’t have an account you’ll need to create one. Then click “online classes” top right, then “live virtual classes” and you’ll see a link to sign up for our Pysanky Party!

What: Ukrainian Egg Dying Class Fundraiser for Ukraine
When: Tuesday, March 21, 6-8pm
Where: Virtual via […]

Pysanky Party2023-03-08T09:58:47-05:00

How’s that New Year’s Resolution Going?

Do you make New Year’s Resolutions? No judgement either way. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don’t. This year, my resolution was simply to simplify (turns out that isn’t so simple). A friend, Tishler Coaching Services, also turned me onto the Winter Warrior—it’s not quite a resolution, but a commitment to walking 1 mile a day, outside every day in January. It helps me KEEP MOVING and meets some of what’s needed to help me stay active.

If you are still sticking to your New Year’s Resolution, you should feel like a rockstar as most people have already given up on their fitness resolutions. The day most people stop is January 19th. If you never make a resolution, you might be thinking, “yeah, what’s the point?”

The concept in theory is good. We want to start fresh. Get ourselves on a healthier path. But to increase our chances of success, we need to rethink how we structure our resolutions (when it comes to fitness anyway).

We need to consider all we have to GAIN from adding more movement into our lives. And then let GAIN serve as an acronym for ensuring that what really motivates us to move is tied together […]

How’s that New Year’s Resolution Going?2023-01-29T19:07:19-05:00

Exercises to Relieve Holiday Back & Neck Pain

Have you ever spent a day baking cookies and your back aches halfway through? Tis the season of back aches and neck kinks. There’s a lot we look forward to this time of year, but much of it comes with a lot of prep work. And even if we enjoy that, it can add to the time we spend hunched over. This hunch (kyphosis) can aggravate our back and neck.

But not to fret. There are moves you can do to counteract that forward bend. First remember, our low back and neck can move much easier than our midback. All those pesky ribs protecting our internal organs makes it a little hard to get mobility in the mid back. So, when we hunch over a lot, bending back becomes harder and harder to do from the mid back and we do more and more from our neck and low back. So, while it is okay to bend back at the lower back and neck, you do want to be mindful that you move from your middle when you want to counteract the slump of a long workday or baking marathon.

Moving from our middle […]

Exercises to Relieve Holiday Back & Neck Pain2022-11-21T21:16:10-05:00

The Shortest Workout You Need!

The shortest workout you need sounds too good to be true. It sounds like a gimmick, but there is research that supports its effectiveness. But while it’s short, it will be challenging.

Professor of kinesiology, Martin Gibala, and his team have shown that a specific 10-min, intense interval workout three times per week was as effective as 30-minutes of moderate exercise four times per week. What’s great about that news is that it means if you’ve said in the past, “I don’t have time to work out,” now you really have no excuse. Ten minutes can provide great impact on the body and your health.

Equally effective meant people seem to have very similar results in multiple health markers, including insulin sensitivity, VO2 max (how we utilize oxygen during exercise), and at a cellular level our mitochondria responded similarly.

Just to see those numbers a different way—30-minutes of high intensity interval work throughout the week yielded the same results as 120-minutes of moderate work throughout the week. It’s just a quick way to fit in exercise. It doesn’t mean that one way is better than another. Moderate and vigorous exercise challenge the body in different […]

The Shortest Workout You Need!2022-12-14T11:16:38-05:00

You Are Not Complaining

With my private clients, my first question to them is almost always, “How are you feeling,” or “How is your body?” As you can imagine the answer can vary greatly from person to person and day to day. But often when someone has pain somewhere and they tell me about it multiple weeks in a row, they start to apologize.

Even in my group classes when someone informs me of something going on in their body, if they are still bringing it up a few weeks later, they will often apologize. I’ve done this myself when I take classes. No one wants to be seen as a whiner. And none of us wants our body to hurt.

But I can’t preface enough, you are not whining. You are not complaining. I need and want to know what is going in your body. It helps me help you move better. The more feedback the better.

I’m not sure where this apology comes from—a desire to please (thinking any pain or injury makes us less pleasing), a frustration in the discomfort itself that we’d just like to will away, the fact that in our society we […]

You Are Not Complaining2022-08-26T12:14:54-04:00
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