Hands up if you recognise this cycle:
Step 1 – Overindulge at Christmas (we all do it – no judgement here!)
Step 2 – In the week between Christmas and New Year, start talking about all the things you’re going to do differently from January 1st
Step 3 –Announce multiple ‘New Year Resolutions’ often including ‘this is the year I’m going to lose x number of stone’ – Join a new gym, maybe even hire a personal trainer. Re-join some sort of diet club (slimming world/weightwatchers)
Late last week, I got an email asking for some advice about staying fit and healthy during the Christmas season. The client wondered if I had any ideas on how to avoid the almost inevitable Christmas pounds. You know, those extra few pounds that creep on over the couple of weeks leading up to Christmas and then the week between Christmas and New Year?
Over the last few months, I’ve been considering how quickly the fitness industry is changing from the development of the professional body REPs (Register of Exercise Professionals), to the companies that are responsible for developing and training Personal Trainers and ultimately how individual trainers work with their clients, the range of PT’s you can choose from is huge.
You only need to randomly select 20 trainers to follow on Twitter or Instagram to start seeing the differences in how each professional approaches things.
With so much variety to choose from, the big question is; what should you expect from your trainer? There are so many different training systems and significant variation in the types of course and how each trainer will have been trained themselves, I went back to Ben Newbould at Velocity PT where I did my own training and asked him what every trainer should have as standard if they want to help their clients progress. Here are his thoughts…
So in the last two blogs, I’d taken you through my own story and explained just how much my life has changed in the last six years. The bit of the story that I didn’t get to tell you about, was the most valuable lessons I learned over the course of this journey and all the support I had along the way that have made those changes sustainable.
Here are the five most important lessons I learned as I got fitter and healthier:
So in the previous blog, I’d let you in to what my life was like back in 2010, the things I was struggling with and just how unhealthy and unhappy I’d become. Some of it wasn’t easy to read and crikey, it wasn’t easy to write. But…I did also say that the story ends well, so here we go, here’s part two of the story.
While I was in America, I had my ‘Aha’ moment – I thought about how much money I had wasted on a holiday that I couldn’t really enjoy. There needed to be some big changes and if I was going to make such a big effort, the focus would have to be lifestyle changes that lasted the rest of my life not just another attempt at a diet.
The trouble was though; I didn’t know where to start.
