Why your personal trainer should practice what they preach

For me one of the most important things as a personal trainer is to practice what I preach-

That means-

1, Training with consistency.

2, Eating in a way that promotes health both physically & mentally.

3, Crafting a lifestyle that creates good health.

I would absolutely hate to feel like a hypocrite and if I didn’t do these I quite frankly would probably be a rubbish trainer.

Through my 19 years experience I’ve experimented with almost every modality of training, eating, and recovery methods to filter through what actually works and what does not.

The industry is full of so much contradictory information and it can be hard enough for a trainer to navigate this, let alone ‘Joe Public’.

I’ve always made myself my own guinea pig in my research and you can trust when I say I believe it is highly unprofessional to use methods with clients that I haven’t yet first throughly tried myself.

There are several reasons why this is important -

Training

1, From a training perspective if i’m not personally valuing the benefits of training how am I expect to preach the benefits to my clientele?

You definitely want your trainer to be “getting high on their own supply” in this context although this can be a careful tightrope to balance and an exercise addiction isn’t a good thing to strive for either.

My philosophy is to do work in the gym to make yourself stronger & more resilient so you are more capable of doing awesome stuff outside of the gym. The gym absolutely should NOT be the only place that you exercise and I highly encourage all of my clients to find other physical actives to do. Move a little bit each day.

Further to this, how am I supposed to properly coach a client on an exercise if I’ve not done it a lot myself? How would I know how it should feel, its challenges and common mistakes?

Eating

2, From an eating perspective I truly believe in what Hippocrates said: “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”.

Food beyond more immediate fuel is literally the raw materials you body will use to recycle its cells every few years. I’ll be blunt when saying if you eat crap you body will be built of crap.

I come from a family with a history of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. I’m not one of those guys who’s naturally in shape and muscle comes easily to.

I’ve had to bust my balls for every bit of progress i’ve made and I feel this has made me a more effective trainer as I can relate better to the average person.

I would feel like a complete asshole were I advising a person to eat a certain way whilst not following these principles myself.

That being said I am careful to steer people away from extremes of eating patterns & behaviours.

I really dislike the black & white mentality of many trainers labelling food as either ‘clean’ or a ‘cheat’, this type of black and white approach to eating will ultimately lead to disordered patterns of eating and potential disorders if not kept in check.

What I instead try and promote is primarily to emphasise FOOD QUALITY. That means as fresh and untampered with food as much as possible. If the food has loads of ingredients and a very long shelf life its likely not the best choice.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love a good dessert and slice of cake but if i’m going to have one its going to be fresh and made of good quality ingredients.

Mental health is an important a factor in overall health as any other area and having a poor relationship with food will certainly detract from all other areas of your life.

I know from personal experience having competed at a national level in bodybuilding and suffering at times with a much less healthy relationship with food.

One big dirty little secret with the fitness industry is that many trainers, especially the ones of who strive to stay ‘shredded’ year round have an awful relationship with food that goes through cycles of binge, starvation and over-training.

Lifestyle

Sleep and stress management are the two main lifestyle pieces of the puzzle to focus on.

Pretty much the better duration and quality of sleep you have the more stress you are able to recover from.

Training is great, but understand that training is also stress.

Now let’s visualise you have a life-force bar like in the video game.

You have daily outputs that take away from this being at 100 percent that for most people mainly includes work and family commitments. Training is also a stress and will take away from this life-force bar.

A student in their early 20’s who can steep in every day and has relatively few responsibilities is going to have a much bigger power bar for recovery compared to a 40 something busy professional working 50-60 hours per week whilst jugging being a parent to one or more children.

Any training that is added to a persons lifestyle needs to be dosed appropriately for each person to respect that persons life force bar.

Again from personal experience I’ve experimented with many different types, frequency and volumes of training so understand well how much the average body can handle.

I admittedly haven’t always gotten it right but I have learned from my own mistakes which has made me more effective as a trainer.

Wrap Up

In summary I would feel like a charlatan and a fool to recommend certain things If I hadn’t first throughly road tested them myself and as a potential client you should demand this of your trainer too.

If you want someone who is highly skilled and professional get in touch today.