Innovating in the Person Training Space (Pt 2): How Hybrid Training Tackles What Exercise Alone Can't

Hello there! And welcome to another episode of Fitlosophies: blog edition. Today, we’ll be continuing to discuss Hybrid Training and innovation within the personal training industry, with respect to service rendering. I will humbly attempt to simplify the complexity of the relationship between personal training services, client goals, behaviors, and changes, and everything related to this, as it pertains to updating what it means to receive services from a fitness professional. 

Last blog, I worked on establishing the baseline criteria for these changes. I would like to start today’s follow-up post with a quick TL:DR (too long; didn’t read) of this previous blog: The future of personal training relies upon fitness professionals abilities to counsel our clients across a broad spectrum of educational realms (physiology, biology, psychology, etc), while correctly identifying specific times within their lives that they can be motivated to make proper changes, to improve their ability to reach specific goals. Even more simply, Fitness Professionals need to uncouple ourselves from exercise alone. I promise this will make more sense later on.

With this in mind, I think it’s prudent to start with onboarding, and then expand from there. When we receive new clients at CHT, we have them go through a few different screening criteria, which are helpful to find the BEST starting point for their regimen. These screenings include both general, and specific, questions and tests:

• Health and health history screening questions to rule out any exercise contraindications and/or know if we need a doctor’s clearance for the individual

  • Includes medications (many of interactions with exercise), mental health when applicable, any current diseases/health concerns, etc

• Exercise and activity questions regarding their current exercise habits, daily energy expenditure estimate, and general routine

• Work:life balance questions to understand psychological energy expenditure

• Overall goals for how to best tailor exercise and/or behavior modification goals

  • These are broken down into SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timeframe) to better establish how long of a program to recommend, motivation levels, and exercise based

• Functional movement screen to establish baseline mechanics and potential risk factors, as well as better understand any injury history and impacts on current performance

  • These also include pain clearing tests for specific movements.

To many of you reading this, you may look at this list and say “Is all of this really necessary?”. And the answer is, “well, it depends”. And I think this specific question and answer is an incredibly important facet to why the personal training industry needs updating: people are complicated! This list is quite exhaustive, but it also helps to derive the MOST pertinent information that we can, from each individual, to help them overcome everything above. These questions serve as a way to highlight all of the barriers to achieving goals that our clients may have so that we know exactly which levers to pull in order to BEST EMPOWER OUR CLIENTS TO OVERCOME THOSE HURDLES AND BUILD THE REQUIRED CONFIDENCE, to achieve their goals when we aren’t around. We only have a limited amount of time to spend with our clients on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis - and if we want to be good at our jobs, and make sure that clients don’t feel like they wasted their time/money, we need to make sure that they are able to work on their goals for the other 23 hours of the day, or x amount of hours in the week, or y amount of hours in the month. 

Okay, enough preaching - let’s get into an example. See if you can see yourself, or similar attributes to yourself, in the following client:

Client A:

Age - 45

Gender - identifies as Female

Health information:

• Generally healthy and was cleared by PCP

• Slightly overweight

• Informs us that she is perimenopausal

Exercise and activity:

• Walks her dog 1x/day for about 20-30 min in the neighborhood

• Occasionally joins a pilates or yoga class when her kids aren’t in sports on the weekends

• Hasn’t been able to stick to an exercise routine since grad school

• Recently noticed that she gets out of breath when going up and down the stairs multiple times while doing chores

Work:Life Balance

• Since her second child, she hasn’t felt like she’s had enough time to work on things specific to her own personal goals

• Works full time, from home, which gives her some flexibility, but in a work-intensive job so she sits most of the day;

• Kids have evening activities after school most days which limits personal time

• Her partner used to cook dinner in the evenings, but their work has become more intensive and now they order/go out to eat much more frequently to save energy/time.

Overall Goals

• Lose weight

• Build cardiovascular fitness

• Stave off negative effects of menopause (improve bone mineral density, reduce feelings of low energy, improve mental health, etc)

• Feel strong

Functional movement screen

• Knee pain during some squatting movements since old knee injury in college

• Back pain every 2-3 months after strenuous exercise

Financials

• Can afford to come in 2x/week

Alright, so, now that we have our first profile, let’s start discussing WHY personal training needs an update, solely based on the information above. In the old personal training model, this client would get recommended to exercise at the weekly recommended levels based on research (hopefully). Here are the exercise recommendations from the American Heart Association. So, immediately, we have our first hurdle - they’re only allocating 2 hours per week of exercise with us, and currently only getting about 3.5 hours of low-intensity exercise on their own, routinely. But, we take what we can get, and move on. Our second hurdle revolves around the goal of losing weight. Generally, exercise alone is NOT good enough to create weight loss, especially if it is compounded with the goal of building strength and muscle mass - you must be in a caloric surplus to truly build adequate muscle. This is incredibly simplified because we do entire workshops on this topic, but feel free to look up some articles regarding muscle hypertrophy and required nutrition for muscle building. The average individual is likely not going to be able to build muscle in a caloric deficit. They may get stronger through neuromuscular adaptation and leaner through a loss of fat, but that’s different from muscle hypertrophy. So, our second hurdle is nutrition. For someone who routinely doesn’t have control over their diet, we’re going to have to figure out how to change their eating habits, OR, just let this go by the wayside and have it hinder progress, or stop them from being able to lose the desired amount of weight. This could also hinder the other goal of improving mood and energy. Here’s an article from the NIH that does a decent job of outlining some of the interactions between diet, energy, and mood. Alright, so let’s just pick one last hurdle that we need to overcome that the old personal training model wouldn’t address: time. This client doesn’t feel like they have the time to work on themselves, currently only feels able to allocate 2 hours a week that would specifically go to exercise, and is lacking in their ability to build proper habits to establish a routine that will get them to their desired outcome. Now, let me be clear, those 2 hours of exercise each week with a fitness professional ARE GOING TO BE PROACTIVE AND ADVANTAGEOUS. Don’t let me doom and gloom the old model so much that we forget that it’s still beneficial, but I’m not in the business of only being beneficial, and as fitness professionals, we need to always aim higher. So, how does Hybrid Training look to solve these issues and why would it be a better intervention than just personal training alone?

First off, as I mentioned above and in the previous article, Hybrid Personal Training looks to uncouple fitness professionals from exercise alone, in order to help our clients tackle ALL of their goals and hurdles, from the jump, rather than only focusing on exercise. In our Hybrid Training model, those 2 hours would likely be allocated in the following way:

• Phase 1: Beginning of training (4 weeks): 2 hours of training with a CHT Staff member each week

  • Goal: over the next 4 weeks, establish a TIME that this individual can use to exercise on their own, doing a short routine (~20-30min) 1x/week. If it works, they can use CHT’s Open Gym hours to have a place to go

• Phase 2: Middle of training (4 weeks): Transition 1 training session each week to a self-workout, but still maintaining 2 hours of trainer-led intervention each week

  • Session 1: normal training session

  • Session 2: accountability building session - discuss goals, lifestyle habits, develop plans for nutrition changes, positives & negatives of current program, etc. OR, a training session, whichever is most needed. 

• Phase 3: Final phase of this current cycle (4 weeks) - client led. In our last session of cycle 2, we can update our goals, progress, and gain a better understanding of what is/isn’t working, then allow the client to take agency over the decision. Do they need the extra accountability for their exercise programming with staff members? Do they need the extra accountability for their lifestyle habits, nutrition, etc? Is it a combination? Do they even need the 2nd session each week, or do they feel confident in that one touch point, with the other time being able to be self-driven?

The difference here may seem subtle, but makes a large difference. With Hybrid Training, we look to empower clients to make decisions that they feel are best for them, within the boundaries of the other factors of their lives. Health isn’t as simple as showing up to exercise, it takes attention to detail across a broad spectrum of lifestyle criteria. Using exercise as a tangible starting point, allows us to use time more creatively, to better identify where we can make appropriate changes, when most pertinent, and most motivated. In the example above, each phase may take 4 weeks, or, it may take 4 years! But, having the information, and the accountability, keeps that top-of-mind, and it gives some agency to the individual, rather than fully off-loading that for 1 hour, and hoping for the best, without looking at the host of other contributions to health. Unless, of course, that’s what the client wants!

I hope this has been an insightful article! As always, feel free to leave comments, or send an email, with your thoughts or questions. Thank you for taking the time to read about CHT and our initiative to raise the bar for fitness professionals. Train Better. Live Better.