One of the biggest challenges facing the personal trainers is ensuring the clients continue healthy lifestyle habits once they’re out of the gym. During personal training sessions, clients come with a lot of motivation, drive, and many questions on what else they could be doing outside of the gym to help them reach their fitness goals.
Fortunately, most of my clients are driven and self-motivated. They tend to follow (most of) my advice and rules. But I’m even more impressed when they go above and beyond to reach their fitness goals. If you want to impress me or your personal trainer, this would be a good start:
Get Rid of Your Weight Scale
Some clients obsess over stepping on the scale every day and watching their numbers barely move. I always tell them to go to the top of their house and throw the scale onto the street below. Weighing yourself should be done once every two weeks, maximum. Monthly is better. Weighing yourself too often kills your motivation when you don’t see expected results. I’m yet to hear anyone actually throwing their weight scale out the window or taking a sledge hammer to it, but most of my clients usually tuck it away somewhere or use it as I suggested.
Purge the Kitchen
Purging your kitchen of junk is a big and bold move. Not only it feels like you’re throwing money out the window, but some people have emotional attachment to their favourite chips, candy, cakes, and other body destroying, chemically loaded items that pretend to be food. Not only you’ll impress your trainer, but you’ll be impressed with yourself and how liberating it is to get rid of all that junk.
Read a Book
Pick up a book on nutrition, sports or anything else you find motivating. It makes the trainer’s job that much easier if you find inspiration and learn something new. Us trainers love to read and scope out the bookshelves for new material, diets and training methods. If you read something interesting, tell us about it. If you enjoyed the book, the chances are the rest of our other clients would probably enjoy it.
Get Proper Sleep
Sleep is one of the best things for your body; and you know that already. But why do you all neglect in in favour of late night TV shows, work or other responsibilities that just creep up at the end of the day? If you get proper sleep, that means you’ll reach your goals that much faster.
Get Extra Exercise
Personal trainers are always concerned with what their clients will do after they go home. Will they plunk themselves down in front of a TV with a bucket of ice cream or will they have a proper meal and get rest? What will they do between each personal training session? Trainers always advise and provide their clients with workouts they can do on their own. I’m always ecstatic when my clients are able to squeeze in a workout between our training sessions, but disappointed if I hear otherwise.
Compete
Sign up for a race or challenge your friends or family to a push-up contest. From my experience, working out makes people more competitive. Maybe they just want to show off their new physique, be able to do push-ups or just just run a race. When I see a competitive spark in my clients, I know they’re committed and motivated to adapt fitness to their lifestyle.
Discover Something and Tell your Personal Trainer About It
Stumbled across an interesting blog? Newspaper article? Myth busting research? New exercise routine? Tell your trainer about it. Good trainers are always eager to learn something new.
Learn to Cook
One of the favorite things I like to tell my clients is, if you want to lose weight, learn to cook. This is a big one. One of the leading factors to bulging waste lines is dining out. It’s much harder to monitor what you eat and nutritional contents when eating out than cooking it yourself. In addition, you have no idea what’s in that food. When you learn to cook, your waist line will shrink. Learning to cook is another indicator that you’re serious about changing your lifestyle for the better.
Personal trainer’s job is a challenging one. Not only we want to make sure you do your best during the training session but we want to keep you motivated between each session. If you want faster results and impress your trainer you need to do more outside of the gym.