Dead Trainers Society

I was enjoying a black coffee in the City’s financial district this morning with my good friend and fellow pointy shoe aficionado Zack Cahill and we were discussing change. Much like him, I’ve always had a relentless drive to improve the service I give my clients. I know I am not the only one trying to do this either. I’ve talked to many trainers who always have one eye firmly focused on their next training course.However, it struck me a few years ago that I really didn’t need to learn another way to do a squat or to master the conjugate system of periodisation. I had no need to know the intimate workings of the lesser-dominant extra-lymphatic nervous system* or how to best activate the deep tri-phaser tuberculosum sphinctorum* to help my clients get results. I certainly didn’t need to go on another course because they were falling short due to improper training form or a lack of training complexity. I’d written fat loss programmes in the past that would make Supertraining look like a Peter and Jane book. I’d spent hours at a computer agonising over the optimal protocol to exact 100% efficiency from the workout. In fact I am sure that I often expended more energy writing programmes than my clients did completing them. Something else was the key and it wasn’t in the information I was delivering, but rather in how that was getting done.

For training athletes or working with complex rehab cases then every detail such as the aforementioned can make the difference, but for the average person looking to lose weight (and in particular the busy corporate folks I specialise in working with) it simply came down to choices. Getting the results from the clients meant working out how to influence the choices they made when they weren’t with me and what they wanted more. Like a lot of other forms of self-harming, from smoking to alcohol usage, many people with food issues often live in denial and their relationship with food brings them a short-term hit despite them knowing that their choice has taken them a step further from where they would like to be physically and emotionally.

There is a tendency for our industry to operate in a very prescriptive fashion when it comes to advising on weight loss. Those who fail to achieve said advice are usually labelled pejoratively as ‘excuse makers’ and dismissed as being entirely at fault. However, the fact is that purely prescriptive advice is only ever effective in people who are completely committed to change in every respect. This is not the norm. The lines of gown-clad smokers outside any hospital will tell you much of our capacity to continue destructive behaviour even in the face of terrible consequences. Drug addicts will lie, cheat, steal, and more to fund a habit even though they know this to be wrong and we all know the research surrounding the chasm between the reporting of food intake and actual measured consumption.I know a thing or two about destructive behaviour patterns and thankfully food has never been a crutch for me but I can understand why people sometimes find it hard to stick to a diet, when their go-to in any kind of momentary lapse is the chocolate cake.

This post came about after listening to a discussion on Radio 4 in relation to diets and having recently turned my attention to reading and researching more about why people do, and don’t, change their behaviours even when their addictions are having severe consequences on their lives. If only it were as simple as telling people to reduce carbs. Even the more ‘scientific’ approaches, such as eliminating allergens, ‘detoxifying’ etc all tend to understate or ignore the emotional component behind why people eat food that takes them further, rather than closer to their goals. Perhaps the success of some complementary approaches to weight loss can be in part attributed to the empathy and tendency for the practitioners to work with, rather than argue against, the client? It is certain that the simple imparting of information is insufficient, particularly in those with low belief in their own ability, or when that information is delivered didactically and without consideration of the client’s own mindset. The result? A tug of war between trainer and client, ultimately always lost by the trainer, who all too often attributes their failure to facilitate change to the clients lack of readiness to accept it. We are often great at looking in the mirror for our successes and out of the window for our less stellar performances.

So, where do we begin? What separates the successful trainer from the less successful? More importantly, what separates clients who succeed versus those who don’t? How can we explain two clients both having the same information but achieving wildly different outcomes? Biochemical individuality? Perhaps, to a point. But the real world isn’t a laboratory and the reality is that people’s ability to achieve and sustain change is the difference between winning and losing in the weight loss battle. I’ve read enough research to know that clients with the right mindset can often lose weight on Ornish just as well as can those on Atkins (although more and more research supports the concept of carbohydrate restriction over fat restriction as a primary weapon against obesity). Despite the dogma, individuals both succeed and fail on on all diet plans. Sure, I believe Atkins to be vastly superior in terms of health and weight loss for numerous reasons I have written and spoken about before, but only if the person assigned to do it believes in that diet, commits to following it, and enjoys the support and guidance of others who believe in their ability to succeed on it.

In my opinion (and it is only my opinion so I encourage you to form your own) as trainers, we must aim to inspire our clients to see the negatives of poor food and lifestyle choices themselves rather than lecture them on it. We should look to ‘excuse makers’ as people who need a different approach, not merely failures. We must continually focus our efforts on improving our client’s confidence in their own ability to achieve lasting change, without relying on our status as fonts of all knowledge and purveyors of solutions to keep them on the straight and narrow. Knowing someone believes in you was often what allowed us to follow our hearts as children, safe in the knowledge that our parents would support our choices until we grew able to make those choices ourselves independent of them. In many ways we seek the same from our clients, hoping that they will see the value in learning to make the right choices for themselves, which is the key to achieving long term behaviour change.

* Some of these terms may have been invented