I am so happy to see so many of you loving the workouts, programming, and results that you have gotten since our opening! (it has only been 3 months, and many of you have been with us an even shorter time than that, and made some significant progress!) I always had a plan of beginning challenges once we had a solid client base to get involved, and many of you have already made a plan of starting our Whole 30 challenge in January. So exciting!
I also have had a plan of providing periodic blog posts pertaining to current events, issues, or even skills that we are working on here in our community, along with health and fitness tips and information. With the recent growth of our group, I figured we could start right away!
Searching for a good topic in the back of my mind the past couple of days, this idea of positive self talk and encouragement has come to me in many different avenues. I have had the fortune of having great clients make the suggestion, that was reinforced by an article I stumbled across last night.
A common thing that newcomers to exercise, or those that have been out a while, practice (often unknowingly) is negative self-talk. This can be very debilitating to progress as well as perceived and real accomplishments, and can really happen without knowing it. I love that our studio is such a welcoming and non-intimidating place that so many of you have chosen to really build your self-confidence as well as your strength and cardiorespiratory fitness! However, I would like to aim towards expanding this positivity through improving the quality of our self-motivation and perception of exercise and fitness. This is something that can internally change your outlook and is necessary for all of us even in the toughest of workouts or health and exercise journeys (myself included!) if we are to benefit to our fullest extent.
Many people look to personal trainers as a cure-all pill to their weight struggles or health problems. The problem is, that the personal trainer is a facilitator to changing your exercise habits yourself. The trainer offers you space, equipment, programming, coaching, guidance, accountability, and motivation, but ultimately it is up to the individual to internally subscribe fully to approaching and accepting this valuable service and receiving all that the trainer is offering them. Each client has to truly ask themselves if they are willing to put in effort and hard work, because those two things, coupled with a positive can-do attitude to receive and trust in the trainer’s expertise will really change their lives.
It is important to remember how the climate of personal training and exercise is dramatically changing. Health care administration is rapidly beginning to recognize exercise as a vital part of your medical needs, and the rest of the country is responding in kind, by considering stricter standards and education for Personal Trainers in the future (we support this wholeheartedly!), as well as beginning to include exercise training in certain insurance plans. Exercise is the best preventative care for a myriad of issues, the largest and most prevalent being heart disease, osteoporosis, metabolic diseases, obesity, and falls. Too many times clients view personal training and exercise as merely a cosmetic means to an end, to lose those 10lbs or fit in your jeans. What is more important, however, is the investment you are making to your mental and physical well being and health.
So Prove It, you say?
In This Study, researchers found that positive and motivational self-talk significantly decreased time to exhaustion (TTE) and ratings of perceived exertion (RPE) when compared to a control group in endurance exercise. This is one among many studies that support this idea of positive self-talk being a significant influence on performance in conjunction to exercise efforts.
It can be a slow process, but quitting won’t speed it up.
