As with any job, there are a myriad of pitfalls PT’s fall into when they first get started.
Basic professionalism aside (check out my previous post on that), the area that seems to cause most trainers to trip up is overcomplicating everything.
It seems there’s a right of passage every trainer goes through when they start their career.
They go from knowing a little to thinking they know it all.
They then eat some humble pie, realise they don’t know it all and become happy that they know a little bit more than they used to.
During the ‘I know everything’ phase, PT’s overcomplicate everything they do.
Their programmes for 50-year-old mums of three look like something an aspiring Olympic would struggle to stick to.
Their exercise selection is a cocophony of what they think will make them look the smartest on the gym floor.
And their meal plans look like a daily tasting menu from a three star restuarant in Paris.
One of the best pieces of advice I was given by an early mentor was KISS:
“Keep it simple, stupid.”
Programmes don’t have to be complex for the average gym goer.
I’d say they simply need to tick these boxes:
- Make them specific to your clients’ goals and realistic for their lifestyle and time constraints;
- Make sure you’ve got a nice balance of exercises across the main movement patterns (push, pull, knee dominant and hip dominant);
- Address areas of weakness for the individual;
- Make sure there’s some ‘fun stuff’ in their based on the individual’s needs and wants.
As a quick case study, let’s take a 45 year-old mother of three young kids who works from home full-time.
Let’s call her Sarah.
Sarah weighs 70kg, wants to lose 5kg and perform a bodyweight push up.
She reckons she can comfortably fit in three hours of exercise per week and might be able to sneak a fourth in “on a good week”.
Because she works from home, she struggles to hit 5,000 steps per day. However, she accepts she could get up from her desk more often and could go for a walk on her lunchbreak.
A very simple training programme for Sarah might look like this:
Monday: Full body resistance workout
Wednesday: HIIT workout
Friday: Full body resistance workout
Saturday: HIIT workout (*on good weeks)
The restistance workouts would be based around strengthening her core and upperbody, and would be geared towards progressing her towards a bodyweight push up.
Outside of her training, I’d ask her to aim for 8,000 steps per day during the week and 10,000 at the weekend.
That’s it.
Nothing fancy. Nothing overcomplicated. Just a simple programme and a gentle nudge towards a more active daily life.
From a nutrition perspective, my advice to Sarah would be entirely dependent on her dieting history and her relationship with food.
Let’s say she used to track her calories and weighed herself one a week.
She felt trapped by the contstant need to track and felt like crying everytime she got on the scales.
I’d probably ask her to eat three servings of protein per day and to weigh herself every day for a month.
And that’d be about it for the first month.
My hope for Sarah in month one is that she’d achieve an understanding of the importance of protein for satiety and recovery. I’d also hope she’d learn that bodyweight fluctuates too much daily to attach too much importance to it.
I’d ask her to take her weight on day one and day thirty and use those two figures as a barometer for progress, rather than a daily reading.
After the first month, we’d build upon what was achieved – both in terms of physical progress and Sarah’s knowledge and understanding – and potentially push the boat out a little in terms of complexity the following month.
Another great quote and piece of advice is:
“No one knows how much you know until they know how much you care.”
– Theodore Roosevelt
This quote exemplifies why I like to keep things simple in the beginning.
As you build a relationship with your client(s), you can start to challenge them more.
Every client is going to start off a little skeptical as to whether “it’ll work” or not. Afterall, it’s likely they’ll have tried and failed to make progress in the past.
As they make progress under your guidance, their trust in you will grow. When it does, you can begin to make things more complicated from a training a nutrition standpoint.
Going ‘all in’ at the start is a surefire way to cause paralysis by analysis and ensure your new client chalks up another loss on their health and fitness progress record.
