My Role as Your Concierge Fitness Coach
How are a Personal Trainer and a Concierge Fitness Coach different?
Most of us are familiar with personal trainers. At first thought, you might picture the young, muscle-bound trainer at your local gym, adjusting the treadmill for clients or barking commands. While traditional personal training has huge benefits and works well for some people, I’ve discovered that just doing personal training lacks some essential components that prevent clients like you from being successful over the long haul. This is why I’ve built the ShipShape services around going beyond just personal training to offer holistic concierge fitness coaching.
Skillset of Personal Trainers
Let’s start by exploring the services that personal trainers typically provide. When you look for a trainer, be sure they’re certified by a reputable organization like ACE, NASM, NSCA, ACSM, etc. This means the trainer has taken courses and passed a nationally recognized test, that prepare him or her on how to provide you with the proper assessment, programs, and feedback to help you reach your goals. Because of this training, personal trainers typically have the following things to offer:
A personal trainer designs, trains, and executes an exercise program that leads to some sort of a desired result for the client. Whether that’s weight loss, bodybuilding, or general toning and flexibility, the program is usually centered around a result focused on the physical body.
A personal trainer helps encourage accountability by setting appointments. This most often results in the accountability being short-term, only lasting as long as the sessions continue.
A personal trainer may be persuaded by new equipment and over-the-top moves. There seems to always be some new, expensive, state-of-the-art piece of equipment, and trainers are the first people those companies try to get on board.
A personal trainer counts every repetition out loud, uses constant "good, great, and awesome" feedback, and includes a lot of scientific terms and explanation of energy systems as the why behind the exercise.
While some are certified and offer services in other areas of health (i.e. nutrition plans), many personal trainers focus their efforts on just the physical workout, and not the holistic view to connect to the broader lifestyle behaviors and the whole well-being of each individual.
As a Certified Personal Trainer, I have the skills and experience to build a strong physical fitness program that gets results, but those are just the basics. As a Concierge Fitness Coach, my style differs and expands well beyond that.
My Role as a Concierge Fitness Coach
As a Concierge Fitness Coach, I provide 360 degree support. I design programs that incorporate health, nutrition, and mental wellness. It’s about so much more than building a person’s body:
My focus is to learn all I can about a person, understanding everything I can about his or her current lifestyle, behaviors, personality and goals. I want to know about your family, your habits, your work, the things that keep you up at night and the things that make you excited.
I work with each client to set attainable goals, develop sustainable skills, and build wellness-promoting behaviors that can be maintained for a lifetime. I work to develop a trust-based relationship that doesn’t end when a fitness session does. I understand your “situational responses” to life and we create an action plan to manage through these. That’s true accountability!
It is a truly unique, personal program. I mold each experience to fit each individual client. Location, exercises, music, and coaching tactics are each based on individual client preferences. We work together to make exercise fun.
Lack of time is the biggest obstacle I hear for not being able to stick with a fitness routine. I deeply understand this challenge, and have structured my business to help you overcome it. I’ll come to you for each of our sessions. We can meet at your home, a gym nearby, or your favorite walking trail or seaside park - the location of our workouts is just another level of individualization that I bring to each session.
There’s no fancy equipment or gym necessary. I work with the space at hand, teaching sustainable fitness techniques that fit each client’s lifestyle. If we want to try fun new equipment, great! But that is never a necessary part of my routines: I use equipment to enhance and challenge a workout, not define it.
I focus less on standard cues, numbers and words when coaching clients, and instead provide explicit cues on body position as it relates to the environment. This type of cuing acts as reminders to provide feedback as it relates to the specific exercise. More than counting reps, you’ll hear me giving strategic encouragement, "Great job on that last one! You really did well keeping your butt down and maintaining a neutral head position. On this next one, ‘push the floor away’ and fully engage your core by pressing your navel to your spine. Got it? Let’s go!”
I ask questions with the Intent to Listen. I listen closely and seek to find behaviors we can implement that lead to permanent behavior change. A client may say "I have battled my weight for the last ten years; I am tempted with food at work and don't always make good choices." A trainer hears "I need you to tell me what to eat, because I don't know how to make good choices." Instead of telling, I ask follow-up questions to learn more like: “What types of foods do you typically have in the house, what is the situation when you feel tempted at work, is it a daily or weekly frequency?” This allows us to work together to find sustainable, small lifestyle changes that you can start to implement on day one.
Concierge Fitness Coaching is fulfilling and rewarding for both me and my clients. I’m building relationships and experiences for people that have purpose and meaning. My favorite part of this type of coaching is when I get to experience my clients’ success with them, and be there to support them throughout the journey and celebrate with them as their goals are met. Let’s stop thinking about fitness like it’s a simple set of sessions: fitness is part of a fulfilled life.
To design your custom concierge fitness package, visit my site.
