Fitpro Spring Convention 2011

This weekend I was at the FitPro Spring Convention at Loughborough University in the north of England – and it was an amazing event!

Spring Convention is a massive, annual fitness conference, with hundreds of sessions and classes and workshops led by leading PTs and instructors, and its crammed with people who live and love everything health and fitness.

TRX equipment in the sun at Convention

I came away realising just how much I think I know is only the tip of the iceberg. Two lectures in particular have really changed my view of exercise and how I train my clients.


Who’s playing the game?
Scott Hopson

I really enjoyed Scott’s lectures on biomechanics – it was a total eye opener into looking at exercise as full-body movement, compared to isolating body parts as with body building exercises and fixed resistant machines.

It’s amazing how many exercises you can come up with if you pick one ‘traditional’ exercise such as a lunge and manipulate the movements. For example, lunge around an imaginary clock face on the floor, with your leading foot touching 1 o’clock, 2, o’ clock and so on with a different variation at each hour:

Lunge to 12 o’ clock with a shoulder press
Lunge to 1 o’ clock with a bicep curl
Lunge to 2 o’ clock with a lateral rise

Such a simple exercise, but by manipulating the movement you increase the number of muscles worked, increased metabolic output and just have an opportunity not to get bored with your workout!

All my clients want to work their abs, and I came away with loads of exercise ideas featuring a bungee rope: I tie the rope around their waist creating momentum to pull them back or to the side forcing them to use their abs and core to stabilise themselves. They love it!

What is balance within the body?
Douglas Heel

Doug presented a great lecture that opened my mind to movement. He spoke about a sphere of movement and the importance of having correct posture and balance within the body to create strength.Your sphere of movement is when you take a lateral, sagittal and posterior lunge and reach as far as you can. Imagine this to be a dome around your body with the highest point being how high you can reach or jump. I now look at the sphere and what movements (exercise) I can create within these boundaries.

I can’t wait for next year’s Convention!
In the meantime, check out powerclubs - just one of the demos in the trade show.

Beach body bible

Summer is coming. If your clients are looking for the Daniel Craig beach body or worried about getting into their bikini on their summer holiday, then this is the blog for you!

To get your clients’ beach bodies ready, they need to follow four simple steps:

1) Perform compound exercises
2) Increase their cardio
3) Eat a healthy balanced diet
4) And, most importantly, work hard!

Building skeletal muscle is half the battle. This will help to increase your metabolic rate and melt away the unwanted pounds. Squats, lunges, bent over rows, deadlifts, clean and jerks and bench presses are all excellent exercises for shedding fat and increasing muscle tone. Aim to be working out three to four times per week, performing three sets of 12- 15 repetitions with a minute’s rest in between exercises. 

Cardio is an important aspect of creating a beach body, as it improves muscle tone and burns fat. Start by choosing your client’s favourite cardiovascular exercise and performing it for three to four times a week for 30 minutes, increasing the time or distance slowly. Encouraging your clients to take part in sport is a great way to get gains in a fun environment.

You want to be pushing your clients lactate threshold; a great way to do this is interval training. This will improve their fitness and start to manipulate their metabolic rate. Interval training includes changing the pace and effort. This can be done on the treadmill by running at a pace clients are comfortable with, then increasing the pace to a workload that can only be maintained for a short period. Aim for two minutes at a comfortable pace, one minute at a hard pace for a 20 minute session.

Nutrition is very important in getting a beach body. You are what you eat. Try to follow these three simple steps to a healthier diet:

1) Reduce your clients’ intake of simple carbohydrate: chocolate, white bread, pasta, rice and cakes. Suggest they try to eat complex carbohydrate: wholegrain bread, rice, pasta, couscous and quinoa.
2) Ensure your client is eating five fruit or vegetables a day.
3) Stick to fixed meal times. If your clients get hungry between meals, then ensure they are snacking on healthy food.

I hope this helps, good luck!

Dom 

Motivation magic

It is important to keep clients motivated in order for them to get results, enjoy their personal training sessions and ensure they don’t lose interest in your services.

Three early signs of clients losing motivation are

•       Lack of enthusiasm and zest for working out
•       Cancelling sessions without valid reasons
•       Regressing into poor eating and exercise habits

Keep an eye out for these early signs before it progresses to a complete lack of interest in personal training. Are you seeing these signs in some of your clients?

A great way to keep your clients motivated is to focus on goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timed (SMART). Every client has goals they want to reach through personal training and using the acronym SMART gives a clear and measurable timeline to reaching goals.

Whatever your clients’ goals are, ensuring they are visible is a great way to increase motivation. Do they have an old picture of themselves at their desired weight or perhaps of them winning a medal from a sporting achievement? If so, get a copy and display it where you work out with them.

Repetition in exercises is just plain boring; it’s going to make even the most dedicated fitness fanatic unmotivated. Changing exercises is a great way to make sessions fun and create new stimulus. Be attentive to your clients and listen – if they don’t like an exercise, don’t make them do it if there is another option.

Keeping in touch with your clients during the week so it’s not just a weekly one-hour workout is a great way to keep motivation levels up. Get in touch; find out how your client’s workouts are going during the week. Do they need new programme plans? What have they been eating? These are all great conversation starters.

Is your client training with a friend or partner? If not, it’s a great way to increase motivation, plus gives you the option to charge more if they both train with you!

Hope this helps. What do you do to keep your clients motivated?

Dom

Perfect posture

One of the most common questions I get from my clients – after weight loss of course! – is about posture. This is a term used to describe body shape – whether good or bad. Good posture is maintaining muscular balance throughout the body to ensure there isn’t an excessive curvature in the spine.

Posture is very important when taking into consideration lower back pain. A common disorder causing lower back pain is lordosis. This is an inward curvature of a portion of the vertebral column, normally found in the lumbar vertebrae. Lordosis can be treated by strengthening the hip extensors and by stretching the hip flexors. Strengthening the posterior chain will also help to treat lordosis and flatten the lumbar vertebrae.

Useful exercises are stiff legged deadlifts, supine hip lifts and supine single leg hip lifts. Exercises that strengthen the posterior chain without involving the hip flexors in the front of the thighs will be beneficial in treating lordosis. This will help to create a posterior turn in the pelvis and flatten the back.

A large reason for lower back pain is often lifestyle. Are your clients sitting at a desk or in a car for a long period of time? If so, their body will adapt to these positions and create muscular imbalance. I re-enforce to them the importance of keeping good posture, not only during exercising but in daily life.

The majority of my clients who suffer from lower back pain spend the majority of their day in a seated position. I ask them to check they are sitting correctly in an upright position, maintaining a neutral spine and not slumping. I enforce this during our sessions by performing exercises, such as the seated shoulder press, in a seated position. Make sure your client is pushing their lower back against the back support and that this is transferred into their daily life when sitting. 

I hope these tips help!

Dom

The early bird

Thinking about training in the mornings? I would definitely recommend it – it’s a great way to wake up!

Some clients do find it hard work when it’s really early so I remind them why they’re training. I reinforce the weight loss, how well they are doing and how good they will feel for the rest of the day.

The biggest problem with training in the mornings is when clients have low energy levels if they haven't had enough sleep or not consumed the right nutrition.

When training in the morning it’s important to increase blood sugar levels and have enough glucose to fuel the workout. To do this make sure you have sufficient carbohydrates before training. Due to the short time available to digest food in the morning it is important to have a light meal that will give energy but not make you feel so full you can't work out.

Fruits and sports drinks are good to have before working out in the mornings, followed by a more substantial breakfast after the workout. I tend to have a banana and sports drink before I train so I have energy but don't feel uncomfortable. Most sports drinks will take time to provide energy so should be consumed around 20-30 minutes before training.

I start clients off with a hard exercise as I find it wakes them up! We normally start with a run/warm-up then go straight into some hard complex compound moves, such as the clean and jerk.

Early morning is actually my favourite time of the day to train – I find I always end up having a really productive day. I love it!

Dom

The black and white of it

Did anyone spot my letter in UltraFit magazine (Feb/Mar 2011)?! It's in the purple feedback box. I wrote in response about an article they ran on working in the fitness industry, and talked about my experiences (as I've been blogging here, in fact).

Delivering a marketing knockout

Isn’t it a great feeling when everything comes together with a client? I’ve been training someone new twice a week using some of the skills I picked up on the Outbox™ course I attended. We get along really well and she’s really enjoying the boxing – so much so that she asked me to help her get the right gloves, bags and wraps for her to use both in her own time and during our training.

Going on the Outbox course was really helpful in making the boxing sessions more fun and professional. Having the online videos is also a big help for referring back to teaching points and how Adam Booth and David Haye are coaching.

To try and make sure that I get more new clients – hopefully as nice as my new boxing client! – I’ve been hitting my marketing hard. And, just as I tell my clients to, I’ve been keeping a log to mark all the key points on what I have been doing every day to market myself and my company.

Over the last week I’ve made a few changes to my website to make it more visually appealing, I've contacted different groups on Facebook and have got in touch with a WeightWatchers® meeting to see if I can give a talk on health and fitness.

It really is like anything that you want to do – having set goals clearly written down really helps. I recommend all personal trainers begin keeping a log. We tell clients to write down their goals so we should practise what we preach!


Dom