Fitness clients want to see progress; that’s often why they seek the services of an exercise professional. Progress means different things to each client (and to each personal trainer). Many clients want to see specific objective measurements such as body weight, body...
Erin Nitschke
Dr. Erin Nitschke, NFPT-CPT, NSCA-CPT, ACE Health Coach, Fitness Nutrition Specialist, Therapeutic Exercise Specialist, and Pn1 is a health and human performance college professor, fitness blogger, mother, and passionate fitness professional. She has over 15 years of experience in the fitness industry and college instruction. Erin believes in the power of a holistic approach to healthy living. She loves encouraging her clients and students to develop body harmony by teaching focused skill development and lifestyle balance. Erin is also the Director of Educational Partnerships & Programs for the NFPT. Erin is an editorial author for ACE, IDEA, The Sheridan Press, and the Casper Star Tribune. Visit her personal blog at belivestaywell.com
Encouraging Non-Scale Goals for Personal Training Clients
Weight loss goals dominate the minds of many personal training clients. While weight loss, or more accurately--fat loss, is a valid goal for many individuals who seek our services, it is also a product or outcome-based goal. In other words, it’s not a behavior that is...
Eight Ways to Make Exercises More Challenging
As fitness clients make progress toward their health and fitness goals, they often want to keep progressing and making greater performance gains. Finding new ways to challenge clients is not only fun, but can infuse even more creativity into your program planning. It...
Vitamin and Mineral Nutrition: Signs of Deficiency and Toxicity
Vitamins are classified as “micronutrients” are necessary components to basic functions, but are also required in the optimal balance to achieve overall health and wellness. Our personal training clients may often inquire about supplementation and whether taking...
Best Mode of Resistance Training: Machines or Free Weights?
A long-debated topic among certified personal trainers is deciding the mode of resistance training that yields the greatest benefits. One camp believes machine weights are safer and easier for novice exercisers to adapt to. Another suggests free weights will optimize...
Five Common Questions Fitness Clients Ask
Fitness clients are naturally curious about the structure and function of the body – especially as they begin to see and feel the physical adaptations to exercise and better nutrition. As such, clients look to their personal trainers for guidance, education, and...
Practical Tips for Fitness Professionals in the New “Normal” Post-COVID-19
Before COVID-19 hit the world, the health and fitness industry was experiencing tremendous growth. Streaming workouts, virtual-live workouts, and virtual personal training and health coaching were all part of the landscape. Since COVID-19, the industry has continued...
7 Common Mistakes Personal Trainers Make
Anyone who ever said personal training was an easy profession was never a certified personal trainer. Being a skilled fitness professional requires significant education and training, planning, communication skills, expertise with exercise technique and assessments,...
Developing Flexibility for Fitness and Better Living
Flexibility training is one of the most overlooked and underappreciated components of physical fitness. Mostly, because it is generally programmed at the end of a workout as part of a cool-down session. However, it takes time and many believe that once the “intense”...
Benefits of Asymmetrical Training
The human body, though designed to be symmetrical, displays slight differences from left to right and front to back. These small differences are hard to recognize if we aren’t concentrating on finding them. Often, we train our fitness clients using bilateral...
Client Fitness Assessments: Charge or Not?
Approaches to fitness assessments are as varied as the individual assessments themselves. Every health and fitness professional will likely have their own approach to conducting fitness assessments and that’s OK. However, many fitness professionals wonder if they...
Portion Perception: Distortion and Reality
Portion control is an effective practice when performed habitually to manage weight and regulate caloric consumption. Fitness professionals commonly recommend this behavior change to their clients. However, learning to recognize the proper portion size can be tricky...
What is Metabolic Age?
As health and fitness professionals, we spend a significant amount of time studying and discussing metabolism. To our clients, this simply means how many calories they burn a day at rest and during exercise. Considering the nutrition aspect, our fitness clients might...
The Key to Motivation: How to Keep Personal Training Clients Going
Motivation is a key ingredient in a personal training client’s program adherence. If a client is motivated to adhere to a program, he or she is more likely to achieve lasting behavior change. That said, what motivation looks like and how we engage with clients may...
Five Nutrition Mistakes Your Clients Could Be Making
To say our fitness clients are bombarded with multiple and often conflicting “healthy eating” messages would be a gross understatement. The topic of nutrition is as deep as it is wide and our clients are often left feeling “unbalanced” in the area of food and...
Supporting Fitness Clients through Lapses and Relapses
The journey of behavior change is a nonlinear process and clients progress and regress through several stages as they grapple with adopting new lifestyle behaviors that support their larger health goals. As a result, lapses and relapses are possible and common. In the...
Consumer Psychology: What Fit Pros Need to Know
Personal training is a people-oriented business. Like any business that provides services to consumers, personal training relies on the professional’s ability to recruit and retain clients in order to turn a profit. To effectively accomplish this, fitness...
Sharpening Your Virtual Fitness Coaching Skills
It is an interesting time to be (or become) a fitness professional. As a result of the novel coronavirus, mandated closures, and social distancing rules, the fitness industry’s once traditional practices are morphing into new and innovative approaches to training and...