Posts in “Psychology”
Change & Mindset – How to keep your training fun and dynamic!
It’s common for people to say they don’t like going to the gym because they don’t know what to do and eventually get bored. Similarly, people may start training, and be making good progress, but eventually they find the same old routine is just not exciting enough to keep them engaged. Then they find reasons […]
Read articleMental Health and Fitness – A Complicated Relationship
Today I wanted to write about a topic slightly different from the usual blog. Often, especially as a person working in the fitness industry, it is easy to have blinders on and only focus on the technical aspects of training: nutrition and health. We become so focused on HOW you should be training that we […]
Read articleSmall Wins For Motivation
Maintaining motivation in your training can often be hard. This will cause us to go through peaks and troughs in our desire to go to the gym. The focus on one specific “holy grail” goal that will be (hopefully) achieved in 6 weeks or whenever it may be, can often feed into our drooping motivation. […]
Read articleChanging Your Eating; It’s Not All About Looking Good
Changing Our Eating; It’s Not All About Looking Good As Personal Trainers we get a lot of questions regarding how to change our eating habits, and peoples motives are very often image driven. I’ve spoken previously about not relying on the scales for image. Good nutrition, however, is not all about looking good. Appearance is […]
Read articleDitching the Scales – Should You Focus on Weight?
Ditching the Scales! So many clients walk through the gym doors seeking a drop in the number of the scales. It is great to have a goal, but should you focus on your weight? Sometimes it is worth ditching the scales and making sure we have other, less weight-focused goals. Unfortunately we are all made […]
Read articleAccepting Change – Drift From Your “Norm”
This post is going to use my own recent experiences in golf as an analogy for your training or diet. Sometimes we get so used to doing things a certain way and develop habits that we seldom actively move away from these. Being so engrossed in one way of doing something, although at the time […]
Read articleExercise and mental health
It’s mental health awareness week for those of you who didn’t already know. Poor mental health is becoming a serious concern for many. Stress is a big contributing factor in the rise of ill-mental health. Stress itself isn’t directly a mental health condition. But our inability to cope with stress can lead to the decline […]
Read articleTop Tips To Being More Confident! You Can Do It!
What is Self-Confidence? Weinberg and Gould (2007) described self-confidence as “the belief that you can successfully perform a desired behaviour.” Self-confidence itself is multidimensional, meaning we can be confidne tin one area of our lives, but less so in other realms. How confident we are depends on the specific behaviour or taask and the sociocultural […]
Read articleTop 5 Stress Management Tips
Stress Management: A “Real World” Perspective In recent weeks I published a blog article on the whats, whys, and hows of stress which drew on some of the psychology of stress and the management of stress. What I wanted to do with the current article was to offer a little more of a “real world” […]
Read articleWhat Is Burnout? And Why Do We Get It?
It is usually around this time of year that people start giving up on the gym, one reason for this we call ‘burnout’. Some people may just have a lack of motivation or not sufficient drive to reach their goals, whereas burnout can be caused due to several different factors. So how do you […]
Read articleThe Whats, Whys, and Hows of Stress!
What is Stress? Generally, we see stress as sense of pressure, negative emotions, and unpleasant tension. Contemporary, psychological, definitions of stress break the concept down. It is broken down into “stressors” (e.g., external environmental factors) and the “response to the stressors” (e.g., feeling pressured). The concept of stress involves physiological, behavioural, and psychological consequences. Stress […]
Read articleGet Motivated: Client and Personal Trainer Perspectives
We are almost a month after the Christmas break, the gyms have been bustling with new gym members and old stalewarts. It is around this time we would expect to see some of the new years resolutioners’ enthusiasm begin to diminish. Is the spark for your fitness fix begeinning to fade? Are you struggling to […]
Read articleChanging Your Training Environment – 4 Key Factors
Everyone likes to train in different ways, in different environments. I don’t pretend to be any sort of psychologist, but it does really interest me how motivation and therefore training adaptation can be altered so much by the environment that we train in. So I thought I’d write a blog about how changing your training […]
Read article5 Top Tips To Fit Exercise Around Work!
Exercise can often get pushed to the back burner when life gets hectic, whether it is work, socialising, family or just lack of motivation everyone (even myself) have been guilty of making excuses for not exercising. So the question is…..how can we fit exercise around our busy lives, work and families. So, without further ado, here are […]
Read articleGoal Setting – Why You Should Be Setting Process Goals Ahead of Outcomes!
Goal setting….we’ve all been there! You’re ready to make a change, you’re sat thinking about setting that end goal to keep you focused; whether it be fitness, physical or even a weight goal. Specifically with a weight goal, as personal trainers, we often hear….’I want to…. Weigh X amount by Z date’ More often then not, […]
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