It’s important to enjoy your training. I understand that it may not start off that way, but once you acclimate to the new routine of regular training, you should genuinely look forward to your training sessions. This is what I mean when I talk about engagement – that is, being highly stimulated to work hard during your training sessions. Without engagement, we are merely going through the motions, just “phoning it in” as the kids say. If we go about our training with a low level of engagement, then it will be drudgery akin to that of going to a dead-end job you hate. In the end, the chances of you sticking to pursuing your goals will diminish to an after-thought. After all these years, I’ve learned that if you don’t put in a sincere effort during training, you won’t make very good progress. If you stop showing up at all, you may actually begin moving backwards and losing ground. Let’s move on then, to discuss how to develop a high level of engagement while training.
The guiding principles I have developed in my approach to training over the years have come down to what can we incorporate into our training that will be effective, sustainable, and transformative. If we get more granular about this, what we are talking about distills down to what makes training an engaging experience for my clients. For example, it may be a solid training plan that I know will elicit great results, but if my client can’t see that, then they will at some point lose interest and fall off the wagon. In other words, they will disengage. This is why It is necessary for your client to know you understand their wants and needs. Then you must begin the process to educate the client as to why following a strength-based program is a superior method for them to reach their goals.
Fitness & Misinformation
Most people have been convinced over the past decades by misinformation propagated by the fitness industry to follow a cardio-based fitness program. In reality, it is far more productive and engaging for them to follow an intelligently designed strength-based program that continually improves and assesses your strength. Yes, even for people who want to follow an endurance program, albeit for endurance athletes, the benchmark by which to measure their progress does not stop with their strength alone, but even for them, as they increase in strength, they will outperform their previous efforts.
For most everyone else, strength is an important metric to track for so many reasons. People primarily want to improve their appearance, and most will give somewhat of a nod to getting stronger as being important. When the client realizes how achieving their goals to transform their body is directly connected to increasing their strength systematically over time, they become super engaged in the process. Without tracking their strength improvement on a day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-by-month basis, people will quickly lose focus and sense of purpose in their training. It is great if people have goals to train for. Unfortunately, not everyone who just wants to improve their health and appearance also has the motivation of training for an event, whether that be a competition or a wedding. Therefore, setting the expectations before them to increase their strength on a consistent basis helps motivate them to stay the course and remain committed to their training.
Once the client flips the switch mentally from going to the gym and “punching the time clock” to getting excited about making their strength go up, they have crossed over from merely exercising to training. Most gladly abandon the mindless hours and repetitions spent doing cardio-based training. They become engaged in a whole new way. They now have a rhyme and reason to all the effort they are putting in, and the training sessions fly by as they are filled with purpose and sense of priority. They will begin to make the connection between why getting stronger is the fast track to meeting their goals – even when those goals don’t seem directly related to strength. In enough time, they will start to learn that exercising in order to burn calories is like simply spending money, but training to get stronger over time is like investing it wisely. The latter actually pays you back for years to come.
In the end, when someone is making better progress in the gym and they can easily see it on paper and/or in the mirror, they will be highly engaged in their training. They will look forward to training and go through their sessions with more vigor and enthusiasm. Helping someone make the mental leap from just burning calories to understanding the importance of adhering to an intelligently designed strength-based program may be one of the most important things a coach can do for his clients. Once you can get a person to connect with their “why”, they will often have a much higher rate of compliance to their training if not also their nutrition goals. If you can simply show up every time, you are going to do well. If you can also put in a sincere effort each time you’re there, now you’re killing it! Success will be yours in no time.