Personal training is much more than just coaching your clients through a few workouts a week. It’s a job that requires patience, compassion, and collaboration. You’re not just your clients’ coach – you’re their support system, their guide, their cheerleader, their nutritionist, and if you’re lucky, their friend. As a result, you need to implement all kinds of strategies across various disciplines (nutrition, fitness, medicine) to get your clients the results they deserve. One of these strategies comes in the form of functional medicine.
Are you hoping to become a successful personal trainer? If you’re a current PT looking to level up your service game, here are four benefits functional medicine can have for both you as a personal trainer and your trainees.
What Is Functional Medicine?
Functional medicine is the specialized practice of assessing and treating the underlying root causes contributing to a particular condition or disease.
Benefits of Functional Medicine in Personal Training
1. Avoiding Injury
When a personal trainer applies functional medicine concepts in their practice, they’re able to provide safer training services. For example, a personal trainer knows that their client suffers from pelvic organ prolapse because they had a baby six months ago. Not only does the trainer know the condition the client has, but they understand the root cause. From there, they can make recommendations for form and technique when doing certain high-impact exercises that will avoid worsening the client’s condition or causing injury.
2. Helping Clients Reach Their Goals
Functional medicine helps you understand your clients’ fitness levels and capacity on a deeper level. When you have a better idea of what’s going on beneath the surface, you can develop better solutions for your client’s unique needs. Using functional medicine in personal training helps you tailor your fitness plans to meet your client where they’re at. By offering customized fitness plans for each client, you’ll help them reach their goals in a way that works for them.
3. Holistic
Functional medicine helps personal trainers take a more holistic approach to health and fitness, looking beyond just diet and exercise. While those two criteria are incredibly important for living a healthy life, they are not the only two that matter. A person’s family history of disease, inflammation levels, sleep patterns, and hormone levels can all contribute to overall health and fitness levels.
4. Increased Trust
When it comes to functional medicine in personal training, the most important and rewarding benefit is the strengthened sense of trust you’ll get from your clients. Functional medicine gives you the tools to see the bigger picture when it comes to your clients’ health. It allows you to dig deeper and see them for who they truly are. Making this genuine effort won’t go unnoticed by your clients. They’ll appreciate your dedication and feel more confident leaving their fitness training in your hands.
There are many rewards you and your clients will reap when you use functional medicine in your personal training practice. By using functional medicine principles, personal trainers will be better equipped to help their customers live their healthiest lives.
