Personal Fitness Professional - August 2008 - (Page 13)

Let’s take it a step further. Why do people condemn fast food restaurants for failing to provide healthy and supportive meals? Who ever said fast food was healthy? Who forces people into the drive-thru lanes? Why do only four percent of health club members show up at least three times per week during the course of their memberships? Why do the home shopping networks sell most of their clothing in extra-large sizes and beyond and ﬁnd an explosive windfall in selling diet, exercise and weight loss aids? Here’s the answer: The overwhelm of a society that has grown way beyond our body’s evolutionary abilities to change exposes us to new risks that we aren’t biologically equipped to manage. Compounded with the twisted information product marketers disseminate as science, the ﬂawed message is loud and clear: The world is changing. Find someone to rescue you. This societal thinking leads to an expectation that government should manage our health. It wants for a pill or product developer to ﬁnally release a ﬁx-all. It asks surgeons to repair damage initiated by poor decisions. No longer are people thinking rationally when it comes to their health. They search for rescue in their televisions, email boxes and tabloid magazines. But the answers lie with the sound technology of change we professionals have mastered; the synergistic relationship between supportive eating, resistance exercise and aerobic challenge. We have the solution the masses need, and the masses don’t recognize that we are proﬁcient at improving health. They think of us as workout leaders. one that serves trainers, one that beneﬁts our population, and one that may even have an unprecedented impact upon our health care system. If we can gain a bit of perspective and develop a system for educating those in need of 21st century “eat right and exercise” information, we can begin to ﬁll the gray area not being eﬀectively handled by conventional medicine. We live in a world where drug companies invest billions to generate hundreds of billions of dollars. The messengers who connect the pharmaceutical developments with the consumers are the physicians. HMOs, with good intentions, attempt to maintain networks allowing aﬀordable health care, and the consumer is lulled into a false security that the doctor diagnoses, the drug ﬁxes and the insurance company pays. If that’s the case, why not eat pie? Medicine must extend beyond diagnosis and prescription, and blanket diagnoses without exploring cause ensures that conditions may be managed without being eliminated. We competent ﬁtness experts have the ability to restore people to health by minimizing or eliminating many of the initiators of the 21st century ailments, and I’m not only suggesting we can do for those we would consider ill. Through activating targeted exercise programs, we know we can positively impact physical structure (bone density), body composition, blood sugar, blood pressure and metabolism and also bring about greater ease of movement, at times reducing or eliminating the common chronic pains many people are resigned to living with. Yes, we know this, but the population doesn’t, and as long as we stay within the protective barriers of the position health clubs created for personal trainers, we will be perceived as workout leaders. I envision ﬁtness professionals and medical practitioners sitting side by side in seminars, learning how to better assist people in managing their own health, in eliminating “dis-ease” and restoring a sense of power to a disempowered population. I’m suggesting the ﬁeld of personal training will divide into those who remain health club workout leaders, vying for sessions, and those who rise up and establish professional positions assisting individuals in bettering their lives. Go to our Magazine Archives at www.ﬁt-pro.com for the rest of Phil’s article! The Answer: an Uprising! We have three choices. We can train only those who get it and let the rest falter. We can sit back and blame our population, resigning ourselves to the excuse that we can’t control what our clients do the other 23 hours of the day, and we’re sick and tired of answering stupid questions about which diet is best. Personally, I don’t like either option — I opt for an uprising. Never before has there existed the opportunity we now have as ﬁtness professionals to rise up and rescue, to earn our rightful position as a recognized and respected player in the allied health care team. It’s time for an uprising, What Now? Gain an edge. Prepare for the future. Recognize the wave that’s coming. Look beyond the workout card on the clipboard, think beyond the conventional ﬁtness assessment, and expand your mindset way out of the realm of sets and reps. Below are six guidelines to help you step out of your box without stumbling onto the ground: 1. Amass a small, but powerful, evidentiary research folder — Subscribe to a couple of journals, ideally an exercise journal perhaps supplemented by a nutrition journal. The research conducted to validate drugs is well-publicized by the pharmaceutical marketers. The extensive research validating the positive changes exercise can bring about in blood pressure, blood glucose, cholesterol, inﬂammation and brain function rarely goes beyond peer review and publication. Peruse the journals, and pull out studies that you can reference when working with clients to attempt improvement through responsibility for their own health and function. 2. Stay within your scope of practice, but carefully venture beyond the edge of what “most trainers” do — Trainers in health clubs and wellness facilities are often told nutritional discussions are taboo, and anything remotely medical in nature should be handed oﬀ to a physician. Obey the laws of your working environment, but don’t mistake them for suggesting that all you can discuss is exercise. Discuss managing stress with your clients. Collect sound and validated materials that allow you to provide clarity as to what roles the various macronutrients play and how nutrition relates to overall health. In cases where diseases or syndromes are identiﬁed, medical clearance is the route, but that doesn’t mean you abandon your role. With medical clearance, you should work with the client to explore improvement as with guidance, you may outline a course of action that proves superior to standard medical protocol. 3. Document, document, document — Evidence comes from success. Many trainers embrace the moments where the client expresses thrilling life changes, but they fall criminally short in preserving those moments to ethically convince new clients of the potential outcomes. Always establish a complete baseline, chart, assess, and prescribe accordingly. You want super-clear records to help you determine what worked in each case, and you want those thrilling before-and-after scenarios to validate your worth among the prospects who question it. Phil Kaplan and Kelli Calabrese have scheduled 12 dates in diﬀerent cities (beginning in Dallas on September 19) for their Benevolent Uprising seminar tour. Find information and hundreds of articles at www.philkaplan.com. ● AUGUST2008 · WWW.FIT-PRO.COM 13 http://www.fit-pro.com http://www.philkaplan.com http://WWW.FIT-PRO.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Personal Fitness Professional - August 2008

Personal Fitness Professional - August 2008 Contents Letter from the Editor It's a Weighty Issue Current Controversies Streamline with Digital Neuro-Linguistic Programming Continuing Education Mark Your Calendar Act Like You Know About Marketing Blog For Fun and Profit Exercise Spotlight Product Profile New on the Market Spotlight: Krystal Davis

Personal Fitness Professional - August 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.