A Comprehensive Approach to Personal Training

First, once and for all, as a fitness professional, delete and for evermore banish the terms “weight loss”, “lose weight” and “diet” from your vocabulary and conversations with clients or with anyone who queries you for “tips”.

Your work, if a comprehensive approach is taken, i.e., body, mind and spirit, changes lives! Your goal for each client should be body shaping/contouring, better body, mind, spirit health and increase longevity by making healthy lifestyle changes”.

To do this, you will need to change your focus a bit to include all three aspects of healthy living, Body, Mind & Spirit, which many personal fitness trainer are still hesitant to do.

The Five aspects of personal training that encompass a total approach are as follows:

1. Proper Nutrition and Supplementation by follow the Harvard School of Public Health’s “New Food Pyramid” and the Daily Value for all vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and, suggest a daily pro-biotic supplement.
2. Proper Exercise/Fitness tailored to your client’s capabilities and limitations.
3. Sleep at least 7 hours of sleep per night. Research the benefits for this aspect of health and fitness. It’s everywhere on the web.
4. Visualization techniques abound and should not have to be explained. If it is utilized by military experts it should be utilized by you. They work. Have your clients use them!
5. Meditation is the “fear factor” for many fitness professionals. Get over it and learn about this if you need to. Then, introduce and guide clients through a few sessions. They need to start a program of regular meditation, gradually, with 10 minutes every other day and working up to 30 minutes per day. This is simply re-connecting to your "Spirit", “inner self” or “innate intelligence” which reduces stress and the sense of being separate from everyone, a major player in promoting total health and well-being.

For most people, making multiple lifestyle changes all at once will overwhelm them and their body, and most probably get them frustrated and negative. You do not want to introduce a massive shift from their current “normal”. You want to give them and the body in which they live the ability to accept a change easily and let it become a lifetime “habit-pattern”.

The fourth part of personal training is most often ignored simply out of the fear factor and left up to the yoga instructors. But more and more, we are reading about the deleterious effects stress has on the human body and psyche. So why not include it in your fitness programs for clients? If a client does not want it, they will let you know. Learning about it and having the capability to teach it is another feather in your cap.

Yes, there are those who will balk at this approach as too slow or too esoteric and cite “success” with some “magic” fast track weight loss or diet pill or program. Faux Pas! You know that ANY body/mind/spirit change, whether it is fitness, healing, attitude, etc., is an “inside job". You get fit, trim, healthy from the inside out. Changes happen inside the body first, then manifest on the outside. Any physician or exercise physiologist will corroborate this. Let this sink in. Then start your training program to incorporate all these aspects of fitness and let people start to hear about your comprehensive personal training.

Fitness professionals are most often the ones on the leading edge of helping people create healthy lives. “Healthy”, it must be remembered, has three parts to it. It is high time we stop ignoring that last but most essential part, Spirit.