Once you graduate from Onfit Training College and start life as a personal trainer, you’ll doubtless pick up a whole host of client with wildly differing fitness goals in mind. However, you’ll sometimes find that some of these goals are pretty similar, such as ‘I really want to lose weight’, or ‘I want to build a little more muscle in time for beach season’.
High hopes and aspirations
Everyone has their own reasons for enlisting the help of a personal trainer, with an ultimate ‘end goal’, or goals, in mind. Perhaps an end goal of one of your clients is to be able to comfortably fit in her favourite dress, something she hasn’t managed for the past seven years. Maybe a client of yours wants to get around the Tough Mudder endurance obstacle course, and needs your help to whip them into shape.
Everyone has their own reasons for enlisting the help of a personal trainer.
Both of these end goals require the need for physical training, but personal trainers should also try and delve into the psychology of their clients, and take a look at behavioural aspects that may help them to better achieve their goals. We all have these goals in the back of our mind, and it’s a permanent dream to achieve them, but all too often, it seems as though life can get in the way.
In a perfect world, things such as a too-heavy workload, excessive stress, illness, injury and the rest of the curveballs that life throws at us wouldn’t exist, but the reality is somewhat different. Such things can cause our fitness goals to be put into the back corner of our minds until they are completely forgotten about, and it can seem even tougher to finally reach them. So how can you, as a personal trainer, help your clients out?
What is an example of a behavioural goal?
Setting behavioural goals, as well as physical ones, can go a long way. If you can determine what kind of challenges your clients may be facing, you can come up with something to aim at over the next few weeks or so. Let’s say that your client is heavily overworked, and struggles to find the time to slot in adequate exercise time. You could ask him or her how often they think that they can manage to work out during the coming week, and if they say “three”, make that the target to aim towards.
Understanding your clients’ behaviour could be key to helping them reach their goals.The behavioural goals you set, whatever they may be, should always be achievable, and can be tweaked as your client progresses. In time, this behaviour will ‘improve’ and your clients will find the path to their end goal a lot smoother than they did previously.
Be sure to contact the team at Onfit Training College to find out more about our range of courses.
