The following personal training tips include how to motivate yourself and stay motivated, how to exercise more effectively and get the nutrition your body needs to sustain your exercise routine.
Contents:
Getting your head right
Exercise tips
Healthy eating
Getting your head right
Set achievable goals
Start with a goal you know you can meet. Then try to break that large goal into smaller more achievable parts. You must have tangible, quantifiable, short-term and long-term goals for your fitness program so you can gauge your progress.
We recommend that you start with a "stake in the ground". This baseline will help you measure your success. Before you begin, your personal trainer will give you a complete fitness analysis that will help you and your trainer in develop a personalised fitness program which addresses your particular needs.
Short-term goals allow you to track your progress and keep you motivated when you just don't feel like exercising (like when you're stressed or when it's winter).
Remember that your goals should be realistic and attainable. Talk to your personal trainer about your goals. He/she can then advise you on what's realistic. DO NOT get sucked in to believing the things you see on infomercials about diet and fitness products - They are terribly inaccurate and misleading.
Visualise success
Close your eyes and think about the goal you want to achieve. How does that make you feel? What do you see? Can you picture yourself already having achieved that goal? Keep these positive images in your mind every time you think about your goal. Also recall them every time you feel your motivation lagging. That should keep you motivated and getting to the gym.
Measure your achievements
It’s no good setting goals and not being able to monitor your progress. How will you ever know how far along you are? With your personal trainer, discuss the various ways you can measure your goals. Leading Edge believes in making measurement part of the process, and evaluating your success regularly.
Keep a daily log of your activities that are contributing to your overall fitness goal. This keeps you focused on positive efforts you are making, and shows you progress. When you are feeling particularly demotivated, pull out your diary and remind yourself how far you have come.
Be kind to yourself
If you are feeling demotivated and negative, try as much as possible to be gentle with yourself. Don’t listen to that inner voice of negativity; keep focused on what you’ve achieved and the effort you have made so far. Don’t beat yourself up about missing a training session or eating a slice of pizza. Rather resolve to do better from now on. You will not serve yourself by carrying the weight of guilt around with you. Drop it!
Reward yourself
When you’ve reached your overall goal, really reward yourself. This reward will also keep your focused as you keep working towards your goal. Think of something you've always wanted to do (within your budget of course).
Time management
Make exercise appointments with yourself. If you are serious about achieving your goals, you can't exercise in a haphazard way. You need to schedule training sessions in your diary and keep them. This is probably one of the most important things you can do to achieve your goals. This also shows that you consider yourself and your goals important and you respect them.
Do something
If you can’t make your training sessions, get out and do some form of exercise. Even if its walking up the escalator at the tube station or getting up from your desk to speak to a colleague. Stay active. Every little bit of activity helps.
Get support from family and friends
Tell the special people in your life what you intend to do and how you intend to achieve your goal. They will cheer you on and support you, and that’s invaluable.
This is for YOU!
Don't forget this important point - THIS IS FOR YOU! Your training sessions are time well spent on YOU. This is one-on-one time allowing you to look after yourself and do the best with your body that you can. You are not trying to achieve these fitness goals for someone else! You are doing this because YOU matter, and you want a better lifestyle and to change the way you feel about yourself. If you are doing this for anyone else, you are wasting your time and money.
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Exercise Tips
You only need three things for your exercise programme to be effective. If you skip any one of these three, your results will suffer.
Resistance training
These exercises require you work with your body weight, weights and machinery in the gym. These exercises will add more lean muscle tissue to your body, and muscles work harder at burning fuel. This will increase your metabolism and cause you to burn more calories all day. You will even burn calories while you sleep!
Cardiovascular exercise
During cardio exercise your heart rate should be 60% to 80% of your maximum heart rate. The simple formula for calculating your 100% maximum heart rate is 220 minus your age. If the intensity of your exercise increases your heart rate beyond 80%, slow it down a bit. If your heart rate isn't at least 60%, work harder. Simple heart rate monitors can do the trick – making sure you stay within your optimum fat-burning range.
Healthy eating and optimum nutrition
A good, hard workout can burn maybe 300-500 calories in 30-45 minutes. It’s no use making all that effort and getting home late and eating a pizza or Big Mac. You’ve just wasted your time and money on a great workout.
Working small muscles with isolated movements is a waste of time!
If you don't enjoy doing resistance training or are pressed for time, concentrate on working the largest muscle groups with compound resistance movements.
Most people want to lose fat and tone and firm their bodies. The way to do that is to use resistance (weights or machines) to train the large muscle groups. Men should be concentrating on legs, chest and back. Women should concentrate more on their legs and back.
The best exercises for legs are lunges or squats (your personal trainer will show you the proper form and then monitor you during the exercise) and leg press. The best chest exercise is bench press, and the best back exercise is the seated row. All of these are compound movements, which means they incorporate multiple muscle groups.
Take note
Along with a food diary that we recommend, start to make notes of your cardio and resistance training workouts. This just keeps you aware of the effort you are making.
Cool down properly
Just as warming up for exercise is important, cooling down after exercise is just as important. Once you have completed your workout, take five to 10 minutes to walk, or stretch to allow your body to cool down. This is very important for the muscles and joints and for the heart and lungs.
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Healthy Eating
Gaining or losing weight
In most weight loss or weight gain programmes, we aim for the body to lose or increase 1-2 pounds a week. This will help you achieve more sustainable results.
This is done by increasing or decreasing your calorie intake by 500 calories a day (3500 calories a week).
On a weight loss programme, this can be done by burning an extra 500 calories a day or decreasing the amount of food you eat.
To decrease the number of calories in your diet, try make small adjustments to your diet. Eat smaller portions, stay off the refined sugar and high glycaemic carbohydrates. Do this over the course of two months and see the difference.
If you're trying to lose weight, you should eat the bulk of your complex carbohydrates at breakfast and lunch and only have vegetable carbohydrates at dinner.
For your body to gain weight don’t think this is an excuse to pig out. You need to rather increase lean tissue (not fat) so you need to eat more protein. Approximately 1.8-2 grams per kilogram of your body weight e.g. 75 kg man would require 150g of protein per day. So keep watching your food labels.
Keep a food diary.
You may think this is silly but it really does make you aware of just what you are eating. It also allows you to see the quality of food you are taking in. When you start your training programme with us we recommend you keep a food diary for a week (including drinks and alcohol). We then review it together and see where we can make positive changes in line with your goals and lifestyle.
Try not to eat after 8pm!
If you are trying to lose weight, we would advise you not eating a heavy meal after 8pm. Your body needs time to digest and if you are eating carbohydrates, these will not burn off by the time you get to bed. If you do need to eat after 8pm, make sure it’s a salad or fruit.
Never, ever skip breakfast
If you want to maximize your fitness results or fat-loss efforts, you've got to eat breakfast. Even if you don't exercise at all - breakfast remains the most important meal of the day. Your breakfast should contain complete proteins and complex carbohydrates.
A great breakfast is oatmeal (not the pre-packaged, pre-sweetened kind) with a little honey and banana and a protein drink. Or try scrambled egg whites with peppers or tomatoes. Egg whites have the protein, egg yolk has the fat.
Drink plenty water
We may be stating the obvious here, but the recommended amount is approximately eight glasses, or 2 litres of water every day. When you are exercising, you need to drink even more.
Over 75% of your body is water (even bone is more than 20% water). When you don't drink enough water, and substitute diuretics like coffee, tea and caffeinated sodas, you dehydrate your body, your blood doesn't flow properly and your digestive system doesn't operate smoothly (among other problems).
Even a small deficit of water can radically affect how your body performs. Here's a good rule of thumb: if you're urine is a dark yellow and/or has a strong odor, you're not drinking enough water.
Eat regularly throughout the day
Instead of eating three big meals (or worse yet, one HUGE meal at night) eat five or six nutritionally balanced "snack/meals" each day. This keeps your metabolic furnace stoked, so you burn more at a faster rate.
Throw out the bathroom scale!
One of the biggest weight loss myths is the use of a bathroom scale to show progress. Get rid of them, they will only demotivate you. Weight does not accurately reflect the level of your fitness. If you should be measuring anything, it should be body fat, not the weight. This is why its important that before you begin your training programme, and when you are setting your goals with your personal trainer, that you measure body fat percentage. All these baseline measurements can be taken, and then you work from there assessing your achievements.
Remember that if you are doing resistance training as part of your workout, its only obvious that you will start to build muscle. Muscle always weighs more than fat, so the bathroom scale will reveal that. But building muscles will help burn fat, and that’s where you will see the difference. You will see it when you try on your clothes.
Say no to caffeine
Caffeine can dehydrate your body so try to remove it from your daily intake. This may require some weaning, but when done, you will feel better. If you feel that you need something, instead of grabbing a cup of caffeinated coffee or soda drink, try drinking herbal tea. We wouldn’t even recommend decaffeinated coffee, it still has so many chemicals in it.
After exercise
When you have completed your exercise regimen, instead of eating carbohydrates, grab some fresh fruit or water. The reason is that for a minimum of an hour after exercise, the body is still breaking down fat. You need to allow the body to finish doing its job. This is applicable when you are trying to lose weight.
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