BUILDING RESILIENCE

March was a month of celebrating women with events such as International Women’s Day, Women’s History Month and Mother’s Day. In my career as a personal trainer as well as in my family, I see strong women every day and it is important to me to be the best I can be for them. Part of this means being supporting and trying to learn about and understand their needs.

I have been working as a personal trainer in Stockport for a decade and throughout this time most of my clients have been women. This is the case throughout the market. Personal training has traditionally been a male dominated career (although this has started to change in recent years), and people who hire personal trainers are predominantly women. This is true for me and I’ve found over the years that women tend to stay for the long term which means I have learned a lot about women.

When I qualified to be a personal trainer, the course centred around anatomy and how to write a training program. The teachers of these courses would tell me that as a personal trainer you can help people better their health, lives, and mindset, and from this you get great job satisfaction. I was told it could be a lifelong career. But they didn’t prepare me for the other things that go on – the psychology of personal training.

There’s an assumption that sports psychology is for people working with elite athletes, but I believe it’s something all personal trainers need to learn about to be successful in the industry. It’s important to understand the psychology of clients to help motivate them, improve mental wellness through exercise and to help them enjoy and make the most out of their sessions.

Having built a fitness community and maintaining a long-term clients base, I get to know my clients well. I didn’t know much about women. I grew up playing football with the lads, I was in the army with lads. Lads who never expressed their emotions.

Working with women over long periods of time I’ve found the opposite. I get to know clients and they trust me enough to confide in me, sometimes enough to let their emotions out during sessions. I’ve had lots of experiences where this has happened. I had a calisthenics session once and a client cried when doing a handstand, and another client who came into the session and told me they would probably cry but they needed to let it out. Exercise became part of them getting through difficult times in their lives and for many of my clients, maintaining mental wellbeing is their ‘why’, the reason they train with me.

When I first started in the industry, I didn’t know how to help people when they were going through difficult times. I thought I was a personal trainer, not a counsellor. However, I started learning about psychology and understanding personality types and this really helped me understand clients better. Once I can understand I clients’ needs, I can cater to them.

Some of the clients who brought their frustrations with life into their sessions I am better able to deal with now. I’ve learned how to say the right things – or say nothing at all. Sometimes this means deviating from the training plan and changing the session for that day – focussing on cardio or a particular movement they enjoy. It’s important for me to be flexible to accommodate clients needs on any given day.

During my decade long career, the biggest thing I have noticed about the women I train is how exercise helps them to build resilience. Most of my clients still show up regardless of what is going on in their lives – moving to a new house, divorce, bereavement, and a whole host of challenges that life brings. They’re not just building physical strength in the gym – they’re building mental strength too. I’m in a privileged position to be part of that transformation.