Creating Chaos - For Fitness & Sport Professionals

They say love your job and love your life. Well, I do love working in the fitness industry having changed careers in 2007 and I most certainly love my life. It was a big step for myself and a huge leap of faith initially as I went straight into self employed Personal Training having never sold a thing previously.

My previous background was rather specialised in a very different direction as an Arabic Interpreter and Intelligence Operator for the Forces. My interviewer when I first stepped into PT was right when he said that the skills from my previous experience was going to prove highly useful although at the time, I didn't fully share that confidence. I just knew how to be me and have stuck with that ever since.

As an industry, fitness is relatively juvenile and still finding its feet with regulation only being fully in place for around 10 years. Research is constantly unwinding and rewriting our methods and practices. With such radical changes constantly hitting industry professionals, one of the most crucial fundamentals of maintaining our credibility is professionalism and integrity. Ensuring that our practices and guidance are honest, factual and proven. In my mind, one of the most frustrating observations is the over-glorification of specific trains of thought.

Of course to advertise and market effectively, there needs to be engagement that creates desire but there becomes a point when morally, a more factually based analysis would leave readers with a much clearer understanding and without false expectations. Making such grand statements can leave other commercial organisations feeling the need to equal or surpass their marketing promise resulting in a significant disparity between a customers perception and the reality.

A much more impartial reflection of innovations is key for clarity and an absolute must on the part of regulatory bodies and industry leaders.

Finally, to maintain industry-wide integrity, a level of professional respect is needed, I'll elaborate. There are methods of conditioning and practices within the industry that I don't fully agree with. In fact, there are some modes that I feel cause more damage than good. However, without clinical research to back my argument, I am merely expressing my opinion. Irrespectively, to maintain my own integrity, I should demonstrate a degree of respect and acknowledgement for the subject of my discussion. The number of times, blogs or articles begin with "I'll tell you the real truth about..." or go on to slate certain trains of thought is quite surprising. Especially with a clear absence of clinical back up. What they really mean is "here are my thoughts on..."

To progress the industry and demand the respect from our counter-industries, a certain decorum is vital from all parts, regulatory bodies, awarding bodies, training providers, fitness professionals and indeed anyone representing the fitness world.

Fitness professionals and enthusiasts are well aware that recovery is the key to enjoying the benefits of exercise. My question is, do professionals know how much recovery is needed to actually allow the body to compensate from the damage it has just been exposed to? How can you confidently know that the body is ready for another training session, be it intense or moderate? Of course, general feeling can be a useful barometer for knowing whether you're ready to slog it out again but the truth is, it's the nervous system that should be listened to in order to discover recovery time.
The two arms of the autonomic nervous system; sympathetic and parasympathetic. In simple terms, the sympathetic is like the accelerator pedal in your car, speeding up your body, internal systems and function; whereas your parasympathetic is like your brake pedal, slowing things down.

At any one time, they are both in operation providing balance and maintaining healthy function. Exercise generally arrives in conjunction with the stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system and the PNS allows us to fully recover. However, do we accurately know when this has occurred or is it guess work?
Many athletes tune into their resting heart rate as an indicative measure of recovery on the notion that a return to a normal resting heart rate represents recovery. Sounds simple enough right? Well, unfortunately not. Sympathetic overload (i.e. overtraining) can be identified by a lowering in resting heart rate which may appear initially as a positive adaptation to exercise.

Another way in which athletes tend to manage recovery is by their planning. Typically having a light training day or a total rest day after a heavy or intense session. Is this enough? Whilst theoretically it makes sense, the body's response to training isn't always predictable. Sometimes the nervous system takes longer to recover from varying degrees of overreaching in training, not even considering muscular recovery.

My point is, periodisation of training programmes isn't enough. Careful and continual monitoring of training responses is absolutely necessary to allow the body sufficient time to recover. There are more accurate and simple methods of monitoring responses so that you as trainers and clients are able to be more selective about when to train. We're looking forward to launching our advanced fitness testing course in 2012 which covers much more on this.