Fitness is not a one-size-fits-all approach. That’s what Sharon Bourke, a health and fitness coach from Potomac, Maryland, wants people to know.
Bourke is the executive director of Life Energy Fitness, a nonprofit organization that specializes in designing fitness programs for people with arthritis and other chronic conditions. She opened a studio in 2012 and teaches and coaches clients around the Washington, D.C., area. She leads workshops and seminars on health and fitness.
“[I want to] open [people’s] eyes that fitness isn’t just this thing you have to do … you can enjoy it,” Bourke says, adding that she counts chasing her young grandson around as exercise.
She didn’t always love exercise. Once an active child, Bourke had a bike accident at age 14 that left her with a broken tailbone. She then “hated exercise” after gaining weight during puberty. It wasn’t until after her first pregnancy that she started up again to lose the baby weight, something she says many postpartum mothers feel pressured to do.
Bourke, a mother of two, says she got into fitness “much later in life” than others in the field. In the early 1990s, there wasn’t a lot of guidance on how to physically train “unhealthy” people—Bourke’s first client had two frozen shoulders. So, she took matters into her own hands, creating her nonprofit.
More than three decades later, Bourke holds numerous personal trainer certifications, including specific certifications to train people with multiple sclerosis and arthritis. She does this work because she says the “power of movement” is key to everything we do on a day-to-day basis.
“When you give somebody the power of movement, you give somebody their function, their life, their energy back,” Bourke says. “I call my foundation Life Energy because if we don’t have energy, we don’t have function; not a lot is going to happen that is pleasant in our life.”
Bourke has her own experience with an autoimmune condition, which she says came on suddenly and depleted her energy: “You cannot think; you’re so tired.”
Her lived experience makes her want to help others even more. Before she founded her nonprofit, Bourke was hired to work with an elderly man in a wheelchair and helped him regain some mobility.
“[He] was very frail and very, very stiff, and his wife was helping him transfer from the couch to the chair or from the chair to the commode, and my job was to help him and get him stronger,” Bourke says.
She says although this client was unable to walk again, Bourke worked with him until he could wheel himself around the house and move from his wheelchair independently.
“He was much more self-sufficient,” Bourke says. “Now he’s not waiting for his wife to come help him or put his music on that he loves to listen to, or get a book from the table, because he could do it himself.”
That was the lightbulb moment when Bourke decided she wanted to pursue this work as a nonprofit trainer and medical expert specialist, rather than for profit. She says she loves helping people and allowing them more independence, which benefits her clients not only physically but mentally as well.
“I love helping people, whether it’s helping them find the right outfit when I used to work in fashion, or bringing their health back,” Bourke says.
Bourke has advice for others who may struggle to find the fun in exercise like she once did.
“Start small, do one thing and consistently do it,” Bourke says. “Even if it’s walking just five minutes every day or whatever it is that is doable and sustainable.”
