Health and Fitness Coach
8 January 2009 1:13 am

1. They always finish on a pampering note: It doesn’t matter what torture you’ve just been put through, if you finish with something you love, you will walk out feeling great! For most people, a partner assisted stretch does the trick, where you just lie there like a sack of potatoes and they do the stretching. Some simple massage or myofascial release can be heaven after what you just went through. Your trainer should always leave 5-10mins at the end for a little treat.
2. They listen to what you want: This can be tough because a trainer knows what you need, and may want to tell you how it is going to be. But unfortunately you know your body even better than your trainer does and they need to listen to your needs. Some women just hate lifting weights even if they know it’s good for them. Others cannot stand boxing even if they will lose weight doing it. Exercise can be fun so make sure your trainer listens to what you want and maybe it will be! Of course they may do what I call ‘mixing the peas in with the potatoes’ (the only way my mother ever got me eating peas), meaning there will be some exercises that you hate but must do. Just grin and bear those ones! But on the whole make sure you feel like your voice is heard.
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Tagged As: Fat Loss, fitness, motivating, Personal trainer, personal training, Weight loss
5 July 2008 5:40 am
What’s your attitude towards exercise? Love it? Gym junkie? Addicted? If that’s you then congratulations, you are amongst the rare rare 5% of the population. For the rest of us, whose attitude towards exercise is more like our attitude towards brussel sprouts (we do it because we were told it’s good for us, but really, yuk!), here are 4.5 ways to shift that attitude and embrace what our bodies were designed to do: move!
1. Train to embrace who you are, not to punish yourself.
Although I fully endorse a smash ‘em up session, do it from a place of encouragement, not of punishment. Listen to your self talk. You should be saying positive things such as “I can do this! Feel the burn, love the burn, I want to challenge myself, I will feel so amazing when I am finished.” A lot of people have very negative self talk, for example, “I am too tired, old, unfit, unwell, fat, stressed to go hard today. I can’t do this, there’s no way. What if I can’t finish? What if I get the slowest time? What if I fall off my bike. Come on you fat slob, after all that pizza and beer last night you deserve to be smashed!” Would you talk to others that way? Are you maybe just a wee bit tough on yourself? Give yourself a break and cut the internal bickering!
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Tagged As: fitness, Health, Personal trainer, Physical exercise, Training
29 June 2008 10:08 pm
Image by Tonyç via Flickr It is widely accepted that exercise benefits people suffering from depression, but rarely do depressed people feel like donning their lycra outfit and bouncing out the door for a workout. So how do we as friends, loved ones, or sufferers break that downward spiral caused by depression and the lethargy that goes with it?
Depression affects one in five people, so chances are either you, or someone close to you suffers this debilitating disease. More and more studies are revealing that what has historically been thought of as the cause, a chemical imbalance, may not be the main culprit but rather it can be caused by an individual’s interpretation of certain events in their lives, and the way they choose to deal with them (The myth of the chemical cure).
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Tagged As: Beyondblue, Conditions and Diseases, Health, Major depressive disorder, Mental Health, Personal trainer, Physical exercise, Weight loss
19 June 2008 10:38 am

This guest article is by Joey Sheather, high performance personal trainer and author of Global Weight Training.
How you can shock your body into new levels of growth when you are short on time.
This might sound like a cliche, but we do live in a fast-paced, high-stress world where time is a valued commodity in short supply. There is nothing worse than rushing off to the gym, skipping parts of your workout and leaving feeling like you haven’t trained properly and have wasted your time.
I believe that you should have a specific goal to be achieved from every single workout and in pursuit of that goal you give nothing less than 100 percent effort. If you fall short of that level of focus and intensity on a regular basis you are wasting your time and taking a longer path to where you want to be. Make the most of the time you have been given. This, of course, applies to the rest of your life but today we are only talking about training. (Which, of course, is the most important part of your life – ha ha).
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Tagged As: Bodybuilding, fitness, Health, Muscle, Muscle Building, Personal trainer, Physical exercise, Weight training