NP fitness

This March will mark 5 years that I have worked full-time as a personal trainer.  If not for this job, I would not have had any chance to put exercise theory into practice.  It’s this experience that allows me to get better at coaching, training, etc.  Even to this day I still abide by the ‘Always learning, constantly improving’ mantra.  In order to give clients the best fitness service possible, I am always scrutinizing my programs, always trying to find a way to achieve the best results possible.  However, I am still puzzled as to why some trainers still do things that just don’t make training sense…

I have been wanting to write a post like this for some time now.  There seems to be a disconnect between trainers who say one thing, and do another which totally violates their supposed fitness philosophy.  Let’s take a look at some examples.

1. Don’t call yourself a “functional” trainer when you still have clients perform bicep curls.  In all honesty those exercises belong in a bodybuilder land. The only reasons I see those exercises being part of a real fitness program are for assistance work for chinups, or if a client just wants extra arm work for the summer.  Isolation exercises are usually a waste of the client’s time, and time equals money.
2. Any trainer can write a workout, but not programs.  This is an area I feel very passionate about because programs take time to develop, and workouts don’t. A workout is just a random selection of exercises put together by a trainer, usually right before the session.  A program has to take into account the assessment results and the client’s goal.  The key to writing a program is to work backwards. How much time does the client have? 12 weeks?  Then write a 12 week program. Break it down to four 3-week phases.  What rep ranges do you want to use? Sets? Exercise order? Exercise selection? Think it through and your client is guaranteed results.
3. Time to evolve core training.  Gone are the days of having people lay on a stability ball and do some crunches.  All the best research done on the spine shows that repeated flexion, AKA the crunch motion, will damage the spinal disks at some point down the road.  The only exception to me are straight leg situps which progress the client to performing Turkish getups.  Planks and their numerous variations are what we should focus on with core training.  Learning to stabilize the torso is the key to a strong core.
4. A huge majority of people do not know how to stretch correctly.  This may be just my observation, but almost everyone is inflexible from the hips out.  Only Yoga instructors and gymnasts have very little hip mobility restrictions.  The usual culprits are hip flexors (rectus femoris, TFL), lateral hamstring (biceps femoris), and deep external rotators (obturator, gemelli).  I feel that most clients need to know how to stretch these muscles themselves and not have the trainer stretch them out.  A few clients do need to be stretched passively in the beginning of a program, but just like strength training, stretching has to be progressed from beginner to advanced.  

I am sure there are other areas of training that I have not mentioned here, but I will in another post.  The take home message is that fitness is a way of life, something to engage in for as long as you live.  Hiring a trainer that understands the process of teaching fitness and exercise programming will go a long way to ensure that you will have positive results.