Personal Trainer and Coach Upper & Lower Hutt │All Active

Yes, traditional methods offered by many gyms and personal trainers are becoming widely ineffective at improving your health, fitness and waistline.

Let’s face it. You already know that you need to exercise and eat well in order to lose weight and get fit right? So why don’t you take action?

I am guessing that the obstacles facing you are lack of energy to get started, shortage of time, being confused about which foods are healthy because of all the conflicting advice and most importantly your THOUGHTS.

I often come across clients that have tried every diet known to man and are exercising regularly and say to me that their goal is to attain a certain weight. The trouble is that very quickly they get frustrated and hear themselves saying “I can’t lose weight” or “I will never reach my goals”. When we have a negative mind-set that focuses on “I can’t lose weight” etc then guess what-you are right, you can’t and you won’t. Changing your thoughts, self-talk and past experiences is crucial before you even start doing any exercise. You wouldn’t build a house without the foundations right?

Usually (there are exceptions), when you go and see a personal trainer, you discuss your goals and they may weigh and measure you at the first session, perhaps give you a food diary (if you are lucky) and then throw you straight in to an exercise programme. What’s the problem with this?

Firstly, if this is a person that has been battling with their weight for years, there is clearly an underlying issue here that exercise/diet alone will not solve. It’s like going to the doctor for chronic headache and the doctor prescribing you a drug to make the headache go away. The pain in your head may be better but what about what is causing the headache? Are you going to take medication forever? The better approach would be investigating why you are getting the headaches and treating the cause rather than the symptom. It’s the same with somebody that is overweight-there is a reason they got that way and that needs to be the trainer’s approach.

With NLP (Neuro Lingistic Programming) it is possible to change past experiences and thoughts that are limiting you from getting to your goals. You may have had an experience as a child where someone picked on you because you were slim or made comments that made you uncomfortable. The way you deal with that is by creating a programme to protect you from any more negative experiences. Some of the programmes we run are old and no longer serve us a purpose so they need to be deleted for you to be able to move forwards in life.

So when you decide you want to make changes to your health make sure you place priority on your mindset and internal language.

Rachel Marks is a leading personal trainer and NLP coach

Posted 17th March 2016