Relationships with fitness tend to ebb and flow — there are high-energy periods spent chasing new PRs, moments focused on maintenance, and stretches that feel uninspired. They may even include a brief break-up, which was the case for Casey Sines.

The Los Angeles-based 35-year-old grew up in a family of athletes; her mom a basketball star, her dad a golfer and baseball player. “They joke that I came out of the womb, and it was like, ‘Which one of the balls do you want?’” she says. She paved her own path, falling “madly in love” with volleyball in seventh grade and becoming a Division I athlete at the University of Memphis and Butler University.

Burnt out after college, Sines moved to the West Coast, got a job in finance, and went cold turkey on exercise. “I did almost nothing fitness-related at first,” she recalls. “I was just like, ‘Nope, nothing.’”

But when she noticed changes in her mental health, she found solace in group fitness. Sines realized she was more likely to push her limits when she worked out in a studio surrounded by others. It helped that it satisfied her thirst for a little rivalry, too. “I think many athletes love the showboating aspect of group fitness — you can have other people that you can compete with and kind of, like, show off with,” she admits. 

Soon enough, she had become a certified personal trainer, quit her day job, and leaned into a brand-new career — fitness modeling, filming workout classes for companies like TRX, FitBit, and NordicTrack, and ultimately coaching as a group fitness instructor at Equinox Hawthorne. 

Now in her mid-30s, Sines’ approach to fitness looks different from her days as a collegiate athlete. Since suffering a concussion earlier this year, she’s focused on moving her body in any way she can; right now, that means taking long walks. “I tell people all the time what a difference walking has made for me, whether it's mentally or physically,” she says. “I don't know, people really knock on walking quite often, but to set the time in your day to be like, ‘I'm going to go out for 45 minutes to get outside…’ Like, that has made such a difference.”

Sines is also focused on exercising “intelligently” — that is, strength training to bolster her body now and also fortify it for the future. “At 35, I feel like…it’s kind of the beginning of when things can become sort of problematic — noticing that joints just can’t take on what they used to without anything supporting them,” she explains. She prioritizes thorough warm-ups and full cool-downs, regularly takes Best Stretch Ever classes, and ensures her workouts are balanced; every push is paired with a pull. 

“I just want to be smart — for so much of my time, I have not been intelligent,” she says. “I look at injuries that I went through, and I'm like, maybe that could have been prevented if I wasn't so, like, maxed-out, 150 percent. That was so much of how I lived my life. And now, oh, my God, no. I don't need to do that.”

As she’s gotten older, Sines says she’s become less consumed with what other people think of her, too. Her current understanding of herself is fluid, but Sines says she knows exactly who she’s not (and that’s a future parent; she’s perfectly content with her cat). “I remember being 29 and you're told to compete against, like, 22-year-olds, whether it's with how you look physically, how you're acting — like you should still be super fun,” she says. “[You’re told] your expiration date is coming. And then when you get past that, you're just like, ‘Oh, my God, I'm just going to live. Who cares about the rest of that?’”

It’s a rosy moment in time for Sines, one that’s fueled, in part, by the expanding research into women’s health and the conversations about it that are becoming more normalized. “I'm excited to see that we have people that are becoming aware of what happens during our [menstrual] cycle and the things that we go through as women — and that we can talk about them,” she says.

Still, she’s making a conscious effort to be present in this season. “Recently, I kept on saying, ‘I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait,’” she says. “I don't want to say, ‘I can't wait.’ Even when there's exciting things coming up, I want to still be here — being in whatever I'm in now.”

Written by Megan Falk