Here are my eight steps I take with my online personal training clients.
- The very first step I take with online personal training clients in my 1:1 program, #Commit2Fit is I send them a form to fill out so I can get to know them, but also so we can create awareness around their goals and current habits.
This step is crucial because without awareness we cannot make changes. You must become hyper aware of your goals and why they are valuable to you. For example, you may think you want to lose 20 pounds, but really the thing that is actually important is that you can fit back into your smaller clothes because that makes you feel good, you love those clothes and you know if you are living in your dream body you will feel secure in your own skin to make the decisions you need to make to get a better job or define stronger boundaries.
Or you know you want more energy, but the reason this is truly important for you is because you want to be active with your grandkids to show them what health truly looks like and to develop new memories they can cherish their whole lives.
You also need to be fully aware of your current habits. So you won’t know if you need to eat less until you track your food and understand how many calories you are actually consuming each day. Or you can’t know that you necessarily need to change your training program until we look deeper at what you are doing for your daily workouts, how much you are lifting, etc.
2. You may need to take steps to decrease inflammation in your body. Inflammation isn’t necessarily bad, unless it’s just unnecessary. This is a super easy one to help get you quick results. Perhaps you are drinking a glass or two of wine every night.. that can be omitted to get some results quickly. Perhaps your omega 3 to omega 6 ratio is poor because you are eating canola oil based dressing on your salad every day (again.. awareness.. you need to read your ingredient labels.) Perhaps you just are doing too much cardio and your body isn’t recovering and that is promoting excessive inflammation.
I will look at what you are doing to see if we can change some of your habits to get rid of excessive inflammation and do things to decrease it like add in a fish oil supplement, make sure you are eating clean eating foods, getting enough water and rest, etc.
3. Creating a habit of daily movement. If you are not doing daily workouts currently, I really don’t care about the details of what you are doing – you can walk and dance every day at first, it’s really just about creating the habit. Once you have that nailed down, then we can get into the details of what those daily workouts look like.
4. Making sure you are getting enough protein is huge. So many women I work with just don’t get adequate protein, and this is so important. Protein will keep you full longer, protein will balance your blood sugar, and both of these things help you fight cravings. Protein helps your muscles recover from strength training. Protein really isn’t stored as fat either, so getting about 1g/ pound you weigh is key to losing fat and building muscle.
5. Getting you set up on your clean eating meal plan. I’m not too concerned about the details of your macronutrients until you have mastered the first four steps. If you are drinking wine every night or eating fast food once a week, your macros just don’t matter. Or if your gut is super inflamed you may have digestive issues that won’t allow you to absorb your micronutrients, so the first four steps are mastered first.
Then we can look at your goals and needs to get you set up on a clean eating meal plan based on your calories burned in a day, your schedule, foods you like, etc.
6. Setting you up on a customized workout program. Once you have mastered daily movement, we can begin to hone in on the details of your daily workouts. Perhaps you can get to the gym three days a week to lift – awesome. We will do that and add in 2 – 3 days of bodyweight conditioning workouts. Or perhaps you are lean but want to build muscle – we can get you doing two leg days a week to help speed up the process. This all comes down to your specific body type, goals and time and equipment you have access to.
7. Ensuring you are taking recovery measure each day. Yes, foam rolling and stretching are great recovery tools for your muscles but what else are you doing? If you are constantly on the go, your body perceives this as stress so taking time to get into a parasympathetic state each day will be so helpful.
Activities like breath work, nature walks, yin yoga, meditation, journaling, etc will help your body recover. If you are not getting adequate sleep, hydration, calories, etc you cannot expect your body to get the results you want it to get, period.
8. We may need to look deeper. If we have mastered all eight steps but changes still aren’t happening, perhaps there are larger issues at play and we may need to investigate those. For example, if you have digestive issues, maybe we can do an elimination diet to see if that will help, which ultimately will help you absorb your nutrients better so your body runs more efficiently and fat loss will be easier. Or perhaps, there could be an imbalance in your thyroid due to adrenal burn out and we need to take down your cardio or add more carbs post workout to help you heal faster to get back into fat loss mode.
Ultimately these are the steps I continuously toggle through with each of my 1:1 clients in my 12 week training program, #Commit2Fit.
If you are looking for a program that approaches health and fitness holistically, this is your program.
Head to commit2fitcoaching.com to learn more and join.
Your Coach,
Kyra