ABPT Personal Trainer

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🏆 Anytime you walk through the gym doors you’re winning.

I had this conversation this morning. The guy was middle aged, family guy, he has a front line occupation, shift work with nights and I told him the same thing I tell a lot of people.

🏆 Whenever you walk through the gym doors, you’re winning.

💪 Training in your 40’s and upwards is a different level of hard.

🪫You’re already starting depleted.

⏱️ You have all the stressors of family and work life.

💼 The vast majority of 40+ year olds are hitting the golden era of their careers. They’ve moved into high responsibility roles either training and mentoring, leading and managing large teams, responsible for corporate budgets, running business. There are real world consequences for your work colleagues and family when you don’t pull off what needs to be done.

You need to remember 👉 at this stage. If you don’t work, none of this works.

🥇Health is the #1 priority

The simple process of looking after yourself, IS looking out for your family, friends, loved ones and work colleagues 👉 They need you, and they need you healthy.

🗓️ Every workout counts, every positive action makes a massive difference to how the next chapter plays out. The days when you can only give 20% count just as much as the days you give 110%.

🤝 Your part is to get yourself to the gym, trust the fact coaches are there to get you the rest of the way.

🌅 This morning’s 6am pt session we had thunder, we had lightning, we had the sunrise and as always my lady walked through the door and got it done 🙌

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Training tip of the day

Breaking the mental block ⛓️‍💥

The magic in training isn’t in the complicated.
The magic is in the simple 👉 Progressed slowly each week.

🪄What is the persons goal?
🪄What is their sticking point?
🪄What are we progressing to help them past this sticking point? - weights, reps, sets, tempo, mobility, flexibility, recovery?

If we swing for the fences, it’s very easy to feel overwhelmed at the size of the goal.

If we break it down week by week, it becomes manageable.

There is no difference between a step up on plates and a step up on a box. The step up on a box can feel terrifying, especially if we’re coming back post knee surgery - the box is the mental block 📦 it’s too big of a swing initially.

Slowly adding a plate each week makes the goal manageable. We break the mental block, by breaking down the goal.

Post knee surgery the nervous system doesn’t trust the repaired knee yet, a lot of people describe is as, “it feels like it’s just going to give out on me”. We also have a lot muscle tightness and muscle compensation patterns, scar tissue, different rates of healing and recovery.

📦 The box step up can feel massive.

… however we can ditch the plates today 🙌 as my lady is officially back! broke the mental block in this mornings session and is back on the box 💃 - in her 60’s, post surgery, prioritising her health and wellbeing, doing the work.

Once small brave step each day.
One plate at a time

Absolutely buzzin!!!

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Training tip of the day: Reduction of stressors

The most effective way to improve training and overall health & wellbeing is to reduce your stressors.

By reducing your stressors you increase your capacity to deal with training load, mental health, and have enough energy for your loved ones.

Things that make a real impact are 👇

🛌 Go to bed earlier, even just 15mins earlier.

🌯 Actually stopping to eat your meals. Sit down, airplane mode your phone and be present. No one needs you for the time it takes you to eat lunch.

📋 Organise your space. If you are tripping over everyone’s shoes to get out the door. Buy a second shoe rack. It sounds silly, but if it saves you losing your mind every morning, it’s not silly.

✂️ EDIT, what are things you are currently doing, that are zapping your energy that you could either share with your partner or delegate to your kids. Do you need to do all the housework? Or could your kids take out the recycling? ♻️

📱If you are zoning out on your phone to relax, change the channel from social media to literally anything else. Make a new playlist on Spotify, look for a new podcast, download kindle.

🧖‍♀️Get the massage! A lot of remedial massages are covered on health insurance. Check your policies.

🏖️ Take regular breaks from training. If you have been training for years. It’s important to take a week off every once in a while to allow the body to fully recover from the workouts. You won’t lose any strength from taking a week off, but it gives your nervous system and muscles time to recover.

👯‍♂️ Have a laugh with your mates. Pick up the phone, meet them in person. Friends and laughter is by far the most effective stress reliever out there.

👉 And if it all sounds silly, think about what this would look like and how you would feel if you did these things. Then, the flip side 👉 what it would look like and how would it feel like if you didn’t.

You don’t have to do it all at once. But, what would it look like if you tried them one at a time.

Small steps x

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🌱Environment matters

When dealing with big goals, we need to break it down into its smallest steps and look at what barriers are stopping these steps.

One obvious barrier that kept getting in the way of me being organised around my meals, was my dining room table.

I had a large, cheap ikea table left over from my flatting days.

The table was a nightmare. It was too big. It was trying to function as too many things and it became a dumping ground.

Downsizing my table and placing it in an area my family actually wanted to spend time in has made a monumental change in my entire family’s eating habits.

🙌 It’s no longer a multi purpose space, where we’re shoving craft supplies out the way.

🙌 We’re no longer all crammed at the kitchen island. Where we all just stare at the fridge and the dishes in the sink.

🙌 My husband and I get to model the behaviours we want to see in our kids.

🙌 We actually get to slow down, relax and connect.

👉 Where you eat your food does make an impact to your eating habits.

🪫 You’re not going to want to eat your packed lunch if the staff room is an oppressive janitors closet. You’re going to want to leave and walk down the road to get something.

🪫You’re not going to be thinking about what you’re eating if you’re stuck at your desk just trying to get through your emails.

🪫You’re certainly not going to care what you’re eating for lunch if you’ve brought at the servo and eating in your car. At this point you’re just starving.

🫶 If you are making changes to your health, reflect about how your eating space affects your food choices and habits.

You don’t have to buy a new table.

💪 But moving your existing table to a different spot might help

🍴Eating from cutlery and dinnerware you actually like might help - don’t underestimate the power of a cool lunchbox and a metal fork.

🚶‍♀️Leaving work, and meeting a friend in the office green space for lunch. Or phoning a friend to chat with while you have lunch might help.

🫶 Make meals time a time to look forward to, not just another task to get out of the way.

Small changes over time.

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Reframing

When training, how we talk to ourselves is important.

Often in training, when we find something we’re not good at, it’s referred to as “weak point training”. It’s not a bad thing, and it’s important to lean into our strengths as well as our weaknesses.

Personally, I think reframing can help. Instead of calling it weak point training, calling it “areas for growth and opportunity” can be helpful.

Over the past 2 and a bit years of training people, not once have I ever trained a person, leaned into their “area for growth and opportunity” and made them weaker.

Every single time we focus on an area of opportunity, we become stronger for it and 10 out of 10 times we all learn something new in the process.

We don’t know, what we don’t know, until we know it.

🌧️ Change in weather, is just another opportunity to find a new way of doing things - 5:30am training ☔️

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Coaching tip of the day: Cueing

There are 3 types of cueing when training people.

🗣️ A verbal cue e.g. saying “knees tracking over toes”, “shoulder back” …

👀 A visual cue e.g. using a mirror, recording an exercise. Showing someone a picture of the muscles they’re targeting.

📦 A physical cue e.g. squatting to a box, touching your knee to the ground, adding a band, giving someone a target to kick; a hand, a pad etc.

If you are in the gym and you’re feeling like something doesn’t click 👉 It’s a totally normal part of the process.

Trying different cueing styles can be helpful as they lend themselves to different learning styles.

Often each person is a mixed bag of a few learning styles, that’s why people often enjoy a bunch of different coaches.

Each different cue or new perspective helps solidify the process.

We’re all adding new strings to our bows 🎻

Go ask the coaches for their favourite cues, they’re gonna have some good ones!

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Beginning’s

I brought this bike out of necessity, a good 7 years ago. I just needed something to keep up with my eldest, who was out running me on his bike every morning.

$100 on market place and a toddler seat later. I was set.

If I was to continue with the pram, I would’ve had to jog for 3 hours every morning. It could be done, but sometimes we need a better tool.

So I had to figure it out, I had to grow with them.

Often when we go to make our big swing. We think we need all the tools and all the information.

You don’t.

You just need to start.

Each step will inform the next.

Each time you don’t know something it’s an opportunity to learn.

Each time you practice stretching yourself it gets more and more comfortable and you start to build confidence in yourself.

Don’t stress about knowing what you’re doing. No one knows, just keep showing up and keep taking in the lessons.

Joining a gym or taking on a Personal Trainer are supports to help you through the first wobbly steps. They can help you find a starting point and help you get on your way.

Very grateful for my children, I may have more grey hair. But I have a full and happy heart - thanks for stretching me boys 😆

Just start 🫶

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Kim is living proof the best time to start is now, and if you look her picture up in the dictionary, you’re likely to find it under courage.

Courage to start.
Courage to keep going.
Courage to get knocked down, get right back up, day after day, session after session.

Kim is who we all want to be when our hair gets a little silvered, and our smile lines etch in a little deeper.

Kim is the lady with courage. The courage to go after what she wants, and damn well get it.

Kim, it’s 100% been my pleasure.

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The heart of a gym will always be the people you fill it with.

An absolute joy to be able to do what I do. I get to support people through their challenges, support them through their wins. I get to support people to create a life where their body is not only going to carry them through it, but their body will thrive for whatever their next adventure will be.

Build it, share it, fill it with memories for a lifetime.

100% worth

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So this is an example of one meal I have pretty regularly.

I’m not saying everyone does this, but it’s just one example of how to hit 30g of protein from whole food and have things balanced enough.

👉 Food doesn’t have to be perfect, it has to be maintainable.

🐄 It’s also got calcium, whole grains, fibre and fruit.

🍯 The honey and banana in the mix are fast acting carbohydrates to fuel my morning workouts.

🫶 Never forgot a persons starting point.

What is simple for one person is incredibly difficult for another and if you’re in the process of making positive change to look after yourself, you’re doing amazing and every step forward counts.

✨Eat to feel good, move to feel amazing ✨

Aimee ✌️