Is this question as strange as it sounds? What are the biggest barriers to your client’s results? As a trainer, it is important to not only consider properly structuring the work your clients do in the short time they are with you, but equally to encourage and support their behaviours for all the time when they are not.Well delivered ‘coaching’ in good habits can be persuasive in influencing how your clients manage their day to day nutrition and activity habits.

I’m going to take a glass half full approach and assume that you know this and have no doubt considered the question ‘what are my clients doing outside of their sessions with me?’ You have probably asked them about it and may or may not have learned all that much about their behaviours beyond the 45 minutes where you are boss.

Nutrition, as we know is a huge part of their success and with the right qualifications and insurance you can provide this service. Otherwise identifying a qualified expert for referrals is a smart way to expand your service offering with high quality qualified advice.

The other critical piece of this is your client’s daily movement habits. Sure, you can train them, set them a program to follow in your absence which may or may not be followed. But aside from this, I am talking about the hours that they sit; the average Australian adult sits for 8.8 hours a day and their screen time habits – a survey conducted by R U OK? showed that respondents spent an average of 46 hours a week looking at a screen. If your clients spend long periods of their day sitting, do they opt to take the stairs or walk and move around as much as they can during the day?

This consistent movement or lack thereof contributes enormously to an individual’s health and well-being and supports any training activity that you deliver. The Move More Sit Less study found that out of 1000 survey respondents, 67% incorrectly thought that exercising for 30 minutes a day was enough to keep them healthy, even when sitting for long periods.

This barrier, which could be referred to as the ‘office chair’ could well be one of your biggest hurdles to success with client results.

Current day language and even government policy is now including the need to improve our ‘physical literacy’. Just consider for a moment the idea that as a society we have forgotten how to move to the point where we need to be taught or even re-learn ‘physical literacy’. In other words, as a society we do not move adequately as a normal part of daily life in order to maintain our general health.

In a fitness context this is significant, given that most clients are not glossy stage managed social media ‘influencers’, but rather part of the broader population who spend huge amounts of their time sitting and not moving. These are the ones who frequently fail to see the sorts of results from yours and their hard work because through their everyday life, they fail to support it with ongoing movement.

Yes, the core business of a fitness professional is pure fitness, however as a shift towards more wholistic coaching of clients emerges, why don’t we focus more on the consistent movement and activity that can completely change people’s health? It’s well worth asking yourself how you are encouraging and supporting your clients to broadly live a more active life. I’d suggest that a well-thought-out service here could be very lucrative.

On Thursday November 23, Bluearth Foundation, the parent not-for-profit of PAA is holding a ‘Move More Sit Less Workplace Movement Evolution Forum’ exploring ways and ideas for rebuilding activity into our everyday lives.

It will be a great opportunity for you and your clients to investigate smart ways for engaging movement into our everyday lives, supporting the training that you do and contributing to a healthier community.

References:

www.movemoresitless.org.au/sedentary-living
www.ruok.org.au/new-survey-reveals-aussies-spend-more-time-with-screens-than-quality-time-with-family-and-friends
MMSL_Exec-Summary.pdf