5 min
It won’t be news that a healthy diet is crucially important for one’s health. However, combining healthy eating with physical exercise yields greater results. It might represent a new professional challenge, but the possible benefits for your business are endless. It’s been a long time coming that the big opportunity in the future is the merging of the pillars of nutrition and exercise, which until recently, have been separated .
The Power of Combining Exercise and Nutrition Coaching
These days, personal training and nutrition go hand in hand with each other. Providing clients with additional macro coaching using your own experience will be beneficial for both parties.
Dietitians are the obvious source of information for your clients, but it might not be the right one for their specific needs. In addition, why would you want your clients going elsewhere to spend their money, when you could provide those services yourself? When it comes to exercise, the right nutrition is essential to achieve your specific goals, or in this case your clients goals. So who better than their personal trainer to help and guide them through this process?
There are many advantages that result from the combination of these two pillars. First of all, your clients will achieve better results in less time. A study by Foster-Schubert et al. (2011) for instance indicates, that combining both nutrition and exercise is the most effective way of attempting to reduce body weight and more importantly adiposity. Reducing overall body weight and visceral fat comes with a decreased risk of heart and coronary diseases. Diet and exercise are also crucial for the maintenance of fat-free mass and resting metabolic rate during weight loss as stated, for example, in the study by Stiegler, P. & Cunliffe (2006) .
Increasing the metabolic rate or at least maintaining your client’s metabolic rate is important in order to keep their weight loss consistent without having to cut their calories dramatically or increasing their daily calorie output. Some clients will already have some metabolic damage from previous fad diets or nutritionist that did not cater to their specific needs. Here is where a personal trainer can run them through various reverse diet techniques in order to regain their normal metabolic rate levels. Psychologically this has a big impact on the client, as they see that they are able to slowly increase their calories while at the same time change their overall body composition.
This is because physical exercise boosts the production of endorphines. These chemicals produced in a person’s brain are responsible for making him or her feel happy and relaxed. By also providing your client with a healthy diet, they will feel more energized and productive not only when exercising but also in their daily routine. This example shows how nutrition and exercise synergize to improve your clients’ overall health.
These benefits lead to happier and more successful clients. As a result, you can expect to see increased client retention - when clients gain better results, they will be happier with your services and they tend to become more loyal towards your business.
Secondly, combining nutrition and exercise coaching can help you expand your market share, since your services will appeal to a larger audience. And client acquisition will enjoy a boost thanks to the effects of positive word of mouth advertising by satisfied clients.
Technology to Support Your Exercise and Nutrition Coaching Offering
In short, combined coaching is an excellent way to increase your service level, as well as a lucrative business opportunity. It helps your clients reach their goals and can thus potentially boosts both client acquisition and client retention. However, I can imagine that as a personal trainer, you already have a lot on your plate. Scheduling, exercise coaching, marketing. Can you easily add nutrition coaching to your offering without stressing your workload to the limit? Well, it all depends on the tools you use. Thanks to the help of technology, offering an inclusive coaching offering can be done without much of a hassle. Interconneced food and nutrition applications make it easy for you to provide an all-round coaching package to your clients.
Related: 5 Ways Technology Makes Nutrition Coaching Easier
Moreover, a proper coaching software system helps you save time for all your activities, potentially leaving you with a net gain in free hours that can be spent on extra coaching sessions.
Finally, don’t forget that solid applications and software tools help boost your client experience, improving the way they value your brand and your business.
Conclusion
Summing things up, combining nutrition and exercise coaching results in three important outcomes:
- First of all, it improves the physical success of your clients, leading to happier and more satisfied clients (and higher retention figures).
- Secondly, it allows you to expand your market share and boost client acquisition, allowing you to grow your business.
- Finally, it will result in an improved client experience - especially when combined with the right tools and technology. Fitness software will be able to help you combine exercise and nutrition coaching in an effective and time-efficient way.
References
Proper Nutrition: A Matter of Life or Death (IHRSA)
The Benefits of Healthy Habits
Exercise and stress: Get moving to manage stress
Should Personal Trainers Be Dispensing Nutrition Advice?
[The future of personal training: What to do when “personal training” becomes obsolete.]( http://www.precisionnutrition.com/future-personal-training “The future of personal training: What to do when “personal training” becomes obsolete.”)
