1. Who You Are Determines the definition, and the Kind of Training You Get
On South Whidbey, and at Vibrant Fitness, we are generally NOT training elite athletes or bodybuilders.
Elite athletes or bodybuilders would require very different training experiences than:
- Someone in their 40’s, 50’s or 60’s who has been Pretty Darn Sedentary for some years or decades.
- A 65 year old competitive tennis player
- Youth athletes, good at their sport, but having had little or no professional strength and fitness training.
- Weekend warriors who are ready to be more safe and more consistent in their exercise habits
2. Professional Fitness Training is a Highly Developed Movement Science
Professional fitness training (both personal and group) has come a LONG way since Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1977 film Pumping Iron (some of the movements and form errors shown in this film make me cringe). The last 10 years have brought huge evolution and improvement to the quality and effectiveness of professional fitness training.
- The best strength and fitness training today is first about good body mechanics. Important aspects of using or developing good body mechanics include:
- Providing higher-level “operating instructions” for YOUR body to use, specific and customized for you.
- Pointing out where you have misalignments and poor posture and then using the right exercises to begin to correct them. Some of these issues will change very quickly, some will take more time.
- Learning how to move correctly, with good alignment, breathing, and effective body movements. Once established, you can safely and effectively increase your strength, endurance, neuromuscular efficiency, balance, etc.
- Proper joint positioning and contraction of the right muscles at the right time (e.g. in out Workers Injury Prevention Program, there are)
- Improvements in balance and agility
- More graceful movement as you you age
- During professional fitness training you start a journey and undergo a process of getting to know your own postural alignment, movement misalignments, and begin to correct them. (Consider the metaphor here: you’re finding where you are bent, in terms of your growth and movement patterns, and straightening them out).
- Often, during professional fitness training remarkable changes happen to you, such as losing a back or joint pain you had come to live with. You might even get a little taller.
- Ultimately, you become overall healthier from professional fitness training.
3. Functional Fitness Training with a Fitness Professional is Not (Primarily) about Losing Weight.
Losing weight is great. And it will always accompany your training, if it is one of your goals. However, consider that:
- Many markers of health and well-being can be hugely improved long before someone gets any where near their target weight.
- Very often you will get strong before you get lean. This is a good thing. Being strong feels good.
- Someone like my 72 year old neighbor Bob, told me after just 3 good workouts, “I feel more lust for life.”
- Boosting your exercise boosts metabolism, and the support of a fitness professional can hugely boost your chance of successfully losing weight.
- “Vanity Goals” – i.e. looking good in that bathing suit – can be an important and motivating part of your fitness and health improvement program.
- Looking good can boost your self esteem, which is healthy.
- Functional Fitness Training with professionals is about becoming healthy
4. Group Personal Training is NOT the same as Group Exercise Class (like Zumba, Piyo, Ripped, Yoga, Barre, Spinning, Body Pump, Bootcamps, etc.)
These kinds of classes can be great. But if you are not moving well, with stable joints and good body mechanics, they can lead to pain or injury.
Professional Small Group Personal Training offers specific, individualized, hands-on attention to you.
5. What You are Paying For in Professional Fitness Training
When you invest in professional fitness training, you are upgrading your human-body-operator’s license. Here are some final thoughts:
- Improving your body mechanics and fitness is like transitioning from a student driver to a fully licensed operator. Or from a licensed driver to a novice race car driver. Or from a Desk Marshmallow to a Weekend Warrior, or from a Weekend Warrior to Clark Kent.
- Through professional fitness training, you gain life skills that serve you from Day 1 on a daily basis, and for the rest of your life.
- This includes increasing the skill and effectiveness with which you sit, walk, do housework or yard work, play with children or grandchildren, as well as how you eat and sleep.
- The Delivery of The Service: Professional fitness trainers provide these body-mechanics upgrades primarily in two ways, both requiring your participation and commitment:
- Training of effective movements through specifically selected exercises, and corrective stretches
- Providing inspiration, motivation, structure and schedule to insure you practice (train) with enough frequency and intensity to bring the changes about, and to upgrade your quality of life
- It’s about gaining energy, getting stronger, increasing your muscle mass, balance and cardiorespiratory health, and feeling better and better every day as the process continues.
And the final, final thought is … there’s No Down Side!
Think about it. Through the oversight and care of a professional fitness trainer who prevents injury through proper body mechanics, you get healthier. Healthier as in a measurable change at your annual physical. Healthier as in you feel good, and your loved ones notice that you feel and look good.
You live longer, you live better. No down side!