Having discussed how to approach nutrition coaching with your online personal training clients, it’s time to help your clients create a lifestyle plan that works for them. A well-rounded programme includes nutrition habits, workouts, and other lifestyle habits that will determine how successful they are in achieving their fitness goals. Let’s dig in.
Essential Elements of a Successful Lifestyle Plan
Nutrition
In our previous article on online nutrition coaching we discussed in detail how you can help your clients create better eating habits, educate themselves on what fuels their body the best, and why good nutrition is important for athletic performance and general health.If you have a nutrition qualification, all you need to do is to create a system that works for your business and helps your target audience make changes to their nutrition at the same time. As part of a well-designed lifestyle plan, nutrition and workout planning go hand in hand to ensure the workouts are fuelled while both aids the ultimate fitness goal of the client.
Stress and Recovery
Stress has been part of our life since humans exist. One of its important roles is to generate the so-called “fight or flight response” in immediate danger so our body reacts quickly to prevent that danger or get out of such situation. Once the cause of that stress disappears, we feel tired and hungry because our body used all it had to rescue us.Unfortunately, in the modern age our fast-paced lifestyle creates an overwhelming amount of sustained stress, from work, through personal life, to exercise. If you add lack of sleep on top of all that, it’s very easy to get onto a downward spiral of exhaustion, anxiety, cravings and lack of energy.
Now, you probably already know all that, but your personal training clients may not or may not understand in full how one affects the other and how it’s all related. Helping them find a balance between sleep, nutrition, stress management, and physical activity should be the ultimate goal of the lifestyle plan you create for them.
It may be small habits, like going to bed half an hour early, heading out for a half an hour walk at lunchtime, attending stress-releasing yoga sessions, or at least dedicate 5 minutes every day for themselves. A small habit like writing a gratitude journal may help them see their life in a different light. For busy professionals a flexible plan that allows fewer heavy workouts on highly stressful weeks, and more of them when they feel up for it may just be what they need to still feel accomplished at the end of a very tough week.
Exercise
Most personal trainers and online coaches have already developed methods they prefer to apply when it comes to program design. Any exercise program should be fit for purpose and help your clients achieve their desired results.This means, that a power-lifter, a bodybuilder, a runner, or an average Joe with general fitness goals are not going to follow the same workout routine, because their goals will be different. Every personal trainer will come to a point in their career when they can identify what type of clients they would like to coach. Mainly because those are the type of people, they can help the best, but enjoying the process and being successful are also important elements.
When it comes to online coaching, having already established who your ideal client is will be a great help when you start designing online training plans. With a system like PT Distinction you'll be able to create templates for the most popular goals of your ideal client that you can then customise for each individual.
Creating workout programs is as vast a topic as nutrition, so we will dedicate a future blog post to this area. Creating exercise programmes becomes less overwhelming once you have all the previous details nailed down from your consultation, the lifestyle and fitness assessments, and you were able to help your client create SMART fitness goals that are in line with their long-term aspirations and desired lifestyle.
