One of the challenges to people who are looking to improve
their fitness is staying motivated until they reach their
fitness goals. With about 9 in 10 people wanting to change
their appearance (make that: lose weight) as their primary
objective, getting all the way to the target weight and
keeping those extra pounds off can prove to be much more
difficult than some had originally bargained for.
One of the big obstacles that people face is the fact they
have been out of shape for years when they decide to
finally do something about their fitness, and once they do
start working out, the fact that the results that they seek
may take awhile and can feel like hard work will test their
motivation to the limit. One of the big reasons people
hire personal trainers is that, in addition to the
education they can receive from a professional instructor,
the trainer can create workouts that are consistently fun
and engaging as well as an atmosphere of support. And this
can keep a person taking on their fitness motivated all the
way to the finish line.
As a personal trainer myself, I believe that one of the
best tools to keeping a person really motivated all the way
to their goal and target body weight is to set very
specific guidelines as to what that goal is, and have the
person working out be very excited about what reaching that
goal can mean to them. If a person wants to lose 20
pounds, we will discuss in detail what losing 20 pounds can
do for their life and how they will feel and be different
when they get there. And we come back to this reason over
and over again during the period of working toward that
goal.
One thing that I found, though, in my career as a trainer
is that frequently just having a goal about weight loss is
insufficient to keep a person motivated all the way to the
end. The reason is that the process of weight loss in a
healthy way can be a slow one. Even if a person had a great
week of training and eating well, their body may not have
changed a lot anyway. That can leave them with a feeling of
being unsuccessful, even though everything that they did
that week was positive and will benefit them in the long
run. So, I was left with the problem of having a person
doing everything they need to be doing really well and
actually feeling like they were successful even if they
hadn't lost a lot of weight in a particular week.
The key is to get all people in the process of improving
their fitness thinking like athletes, even if on a smaller
scale than someone training for the Olympic Games. I
believe that all people have the ability to experience
their athleticism on some level, even those that have been
out of shape for some time, and when they make a connection
to their bodies that allow for this, they can get hooked on
that experience and want more of it. They will see that
improving their fitness itself feels good and can be fun on
its own, and that it would be something they would enjoy
doing whether they were losing weight doing it or not.
Once a person gets to this level, the irony is that they
will lose all the weight they want anyway because they are
actually at a point where they will stick with the exercise.
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to be a trainer in a
couple of "weight loss" competitions sponsored by a local
TV station here in Phoenix. Each of the two years that I
participated, I worked with a person who was competing
against three others to see who could make the biggest
successful lifestyle change over a 5 month period. What
the other trainers and I found over the length of the
competition was that the people who ended up losing a
significant amount of weight were the ones who got to the
point that they realiozed that the weight loss was actually
secondary in motivation to them feeling fit, athletic and
healthy for the first time in a long time. All of the
trainers worked with their clients using some techniques
that were athletic in nature, similar to how an athlete on
a sports team would train, with jumping and running drills,
using medicine balls, playing basketball, etc. All of the
successful participants said that once they realized they
like feeling like they were athletes, they knew they would
stick with the program for the rest of their lives.
I use the term "inner athlete" to describe this way of
thinking, and I know that it works. Rather than having a
client do just cardio, we may set a goal to have them do
their first ever 5k road race in 3 months, and their cardio
trains them for that in addition to helping them lose
weight. Or they want to do a great hike in the coming
summer, or their kids are now playing sports and they want
to be able to play with them, so I do sports drills with
them so they build the skills that any athlete at any age
would want to have. These are the things that people like
having whether they are losing weight or not, and the fact
that this type of exercise helps them lose weight makes it
all the better.
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Chuck Carter is a personal trainer and President of
http://www.LiveLeanToday.com , a website that provides
fitness and nutrition instruction as well as nutritional
supplements and fitness equipment for sale at
http://shop.liveleantoday.com .
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