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With 33 years of experience under her belt, fitness instructor Elizabeth Brooks said she believes building strength is a vessel to help the people around you — a lesson she hopes resonates with her students.
“Fitness is not just something that we do to look pretty, although we like to look pretty,” Brooks said. “It’s something that we do to be strong so that we can continue to contribute to society in the way that we want to.”
Teaching kickboxing, boxing and Pilates classes at GW, Brooks told me about her years of experience practicing fitness in D.C., pivoting from her undergraduate studies in English to competing in exercise competitions like Ms. Fitness USA, acting as a personal trainer and teaching classes at gyms across the District. Looking through her website, I found she also cofounded the exercise education company Effervescence, produced and participated in workout videos and created “The Thinking Correctly Podcast.”
Brooks spoke passionately about her students, exercise expertise and full-throttled belief in the power of fitness. Here’s what she had to say.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Cavanaugh: Can you give an overview of your career trajectory and what led you to teach at GW?
Brooks: When I first started thinking about going to college, I thought I wanted to be a doctor, but the math was killing me. Calculus, I wasn’t getting it. I was really struggling at the time. I had professors even tell me women can’t do math, and so it was really discouraging to me.
I stopped pursuing the health field, and I went after my second love, which was English. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but whatever. I was like, “Just do something you love, and you’ll love the rest of your time in college,” so I did. I finished with an English degree, and then I started taking an exercise class because I don’t know if you know any English majors, but we love to read, we do a ton of writing, and eating goes really well with that.
I started taking an exercise class in Georgetown at this place that is now gone. It was called Suissa, and it was a Haitian instructor, and I was honestly the only Black person in that class, and everybody else looked like they had this amazing ballet dance experience. They were amazing movers, and I was the only Black person in class, and I was heavy, and it was just a disaster. The first class was crazy.
But during that class, I was so inspired by the instructor, who was Haitian, and she was incredible. I mean, she had complete command of the class, her choreography was out of this world, and I felt at the time that God told me that, “This is what I want you to do” — and so I started pursuing it. I started taking that class a few times a week, and after a year, I lost 25 pounds, and she came up to me and said, “You are doing so good, I want you to join our competition team.” And so I started competing in exercise competitions. I later became a bodybuilder, and then I just started teaching exercise classes more. I later became a certified personal trainer, and I decided soon after that to do this full time.
Cavanaugh: How did you hear about the positions at GW, and when did you start teaching here?
Brooks: For about eight years, I practiced Jow-Ga kung fu. I competed in kickboxing competitions, and my coach at the time was teaching classes at GW, and they were looking for instructors, and he recommended me to the school and to the director of the program. So I applied, and they were like, “Yes,” and the rest is history. I think I’ve been teaching classes with GW now — this is going on six or seven years.
Cavanaugh: Can you describe what some of your classes that you teach are like and what techniques and skills you try to teach your students?
Brooks: The boxing class that I teach is traditional boxing, so I really try to follow traditional boxing techniques — it’s not like MMA. Most of the students who take my classes have never done a boxing class, so I start with the basic fundamentals. You can’t punch if you can’t make a fist, so we start with that. We add on all the punches, by the time the semester is over, most students feel like they’re proficient in boxing.
In my kickboxing class, the approach is different, because kickboxing — you see a lot of kickboxing in the MMA style — but I really try to teach it from a self-defense perspective. There’s nothing that I teach that you can’t use to protect yourself, and I really believe in just that agency that we have for our own bodies and to protect your body. I have so many students who have taken my class, stories of people who are my clients who were attacked and injured badly, and I just want people to feel like, when they go out, that they’re able to protect themselves, and it starts with really the fundamentals. Paying attention to what’s going on around you.
When people are doing mat Pilates, there’s a stigma around mat Pilates, that it’s really for ballet, for people who have a ballet history and that kind of thing. And that’s a real fallacy, so I try to explain to people that Joseph Pilates — the creator of Pilates — he was an athlete. When he was in Germany, the Nazis were trying to hire him to train their troops, and he didn’t want to be a part of that. And so he came to United States, and he started teaching in an area in New York where there were a lot of ballet studios, and that’s kind of how there’s this connection between Pilates and ballet, but it’s really not what he was trying to train people to do. He was trying to train people to be strong, and so all of his principles are around that.
Cavanaugh: What would you say is something about you that most of your students wouldn’t know?
Brooks: I’m a mom, I’ve been married for 33 years. I feel like I’m an everyday person, and I just happen to have all these skills behind the things that I do. There are millions of stigmas. We think of exercise, we think of boxing instructors as looking a certain way, or we think of kickboxers as looking a certain way or Pilates instructors as looking a certain way. And I think I kind of fall outside those typical platforms or the way people like to define things.
We have these expectations in our head, and I love the idea of just kind of blowing people’s minds with that. There’s no mold. You can do whatever it is you want to do, and you don’t have to be limited by how people see you.
Cavanaugh: What would you say has been the most notable part of your time teaching at GW?
Brooks: I love working with young people. The majority of the people that I work with out in the world, in the corporate environment, are adults. All the people who take my classes are adults. They pay to belong to the gym, they pay to take my classes. And at GW, these students are exposed to whatever discipline I’m teaching them in for, whatever, 14, 16, weeks. And I want to give my love for exercise and my enthusiasm for the care of the body to them, and I hope that it translates into their life after the class.
This is the most amazing time to get into exercise, and it’s also one of the most challenging because everybody has a heavy workload, and there are a million other priorities and responsibilities pulling on students. And I want them to see exercise as that refuge, that place they go when they need a little extra energy, when they need to be revitalized and get some new energy going after they exercise, and then hopefully that’s something that they will tap into all of their lives. So the students are absolutely my favorite thing. I have four classes in a row. It’s crazy, but I feel a lot of energy when I’m working with young people.
Cavanaugh: What new perspectives have you gained from your time here and from connecting with your students?
Brooks: People have very different learning styles, and when I’m teaching, yes, I’m teaching whatever it is that I’m trying to get across, but I am also learning. I’m learning how to be a better teacher. I am learning each individual student who comes to me — they have a knee injury, or they have asthma or they have these issues. It helps me be a better teacher when I deal with people who are — everybody is so different.
