Home Inspirational Prevention Athlete – Karen Wing

Inspirational Prevention Athlete – Karen Wing

Wednesday, 17th April 2024

As PEAK Coaches, we are passionate about helping athletes have Experiences Not Felt Possible. Part of this is helping athletes move out of pain and into a preventative mindset. We use our Prevention classes as a tool to help achieve this. Every hour of the day we have Prevention classes running and each class has multiple inspirational stories of athletes overcoming challenges and obstacles in order to better themselves.

At PEAK one of our core values is Choose Your Pain. We encourage ourselves and our athletes to choose the pain of discipline over dysfunction. This means choosing to prioritise time and energy each week to exercise and work towards your goals. We have some incredible goals written on our Dream Big wall in both our Arenas, including completing marathons, multi day endurance events and more. However, the majority of our athletes are working towards goals that are about improving their day to day lives or physical feats that are important to them and not necessarily fitting the stereotypical physical goals one might think of.

I would like to introduce Karen Wing. Karen is a long term Prevention athlete having attended her first Prevention class in 2016! Karen has worked with many PEAK coaches over the years and is currently attending Tuesday and Thursday classes with coaches Erica and Blane. Karen initially came to PEAK with a history of neck and lower back pain. She is someone who is modest about her achievements, however someone we believe is worth celebrating.

Karen Wing embodies what Prevention is all about. She began classes with the idea of preventing her neck and back pain returning and was more in a ‘fix it’ mindset. However, over the years Karen has transitioned to a more preventative mindset – this is exactly why our classes are called Prevention. Having started with body weight exercises and light hand weights, Karen has progressed over the years not only in her confidence in the Prevention space, but also in her physical abilities.

More recently, she has transitioned from using the kettlebell to using the barbell for her squats and deadlifts. This has been a big goal for her and she is now able to squat and deadlift over 55kg! We are so proud of Karen’s commitment to being her best physical self and choosing the pain of discipline over the years.

Not only has Karen noticed the difference in her abilities in Prevention but also outside of the Arena. Karen is an active person and when it came to retirement, she wanted to do it right! Part of this was looking after herself physically in order to be able to enjoy her passion for travel without the concern or worry of her body letting her down.

Karen Wing may not have achieved a marathon, however in our eyes she has achieved far more. She has proven to herself that she is capable of challenging herself and setting new goals that she thought were not possible. We couldn’t be prouder of Karen and hope that her story motivates and encourages others to think without constraints and to Dream Big.

Karen credits Prevention with strengthening her back so that she experiences less back pain and is keen to keep achieving better and better outcomes. She is confident that PEAK’s Prevention space will encourage her to do this and is proud of being able to deadlift and back squat over 50 kgs. She hopes that 2024 will be a year in which she achieves even stronger Prevention outcomes and in which she and her husband Rob achieve their long held goal of exploring the Norwegian fjords!