You get what you pay for. Investing in a good personal trainer or fitness coach really can be the difference between reaching your fitness goals or not. Yes, having someone to be accountable is huge, but we’ll talk about 3 distinct reasons why you need to invest in a good fitness coach: autonomy, mastery of fundamentals, and laughter.
Fitness coaches help with autonomy
You may be hard-wired to hate exercise according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal (Read article here). One main thing researchers found for people who don’t enjoy exercise or even struggle sticking with it, is not knowing what to do or how to do it. This is commonly referred to as ‘competence’, or ‘autonomy’. This is a huge obstacle that having a personal trainer/fitness coach can help you overcome.
Fitness coaches help with mastering the fundamentals
A good personal trainer/coach will educate you not only on the proper form of different exercises, but help you learn the fundamentals of establishing and maintaining a healthy lifestyle-since that is the overall point, to learn skills that will serve you for a lifetime. These skills don’t happen overnight, but when you focus on the mastery of the skill-you’ll find yourself succeeding in no time.
Coaches put the fun back into fitness
Something that the WSJ article didn’t address was laughter. Laughter and laughing helps patients deal with pain. Laughter helps you be a resilient person. Even forced laughter (the courtesy laugh) has been found to help increase adherence to a new behavior.
The first step then becomes to try to find something you enjoy. Second step, if you can’t seem to find something, find ways to make it more enjoyable. Some options would be listening to your favorite playlist, or working out with a partner/buddy. The third step to employ if the previous 2 steps aren’t working is to fake it. Fake that laughter, or in other words, “Grin and bear it”.
Sometimes, ok a lot of times, fitness training is hard, tough work. So in those times think back to Bond, James Bond. Remember that scene in Casino Royale when he’s being tortured and he’s making a joke about it? Pretty gruesome stuff he was going through, but faking a laugh made it bearable!
Main Points
- Finding a mode of exercise you enjoy is important, finding something you’re good at is even better.
- Laughing and faking your laughter can help you push yourself harder in your fitness training and even enjoy it more.
- Fitness coaches/ personal trainers really can help you reach your fitness goals through helping you with competency and making exercise fun.
Homework:
Try this: take a second or two and brainstorm what it is about exercise that you enjoy and don’t enjoy. Next, select one of your dislikes that you can altered or fixed with the help of the article. If you need help overcoming those dislikes give me a call!
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