If you don't express your beliefs as a Personal Trainer how can you ever influence your clients.

One of the defininitions of supplement is: a substance taken to remedy the deficiencies in a persons diet.  Now lots of 'supplement' manufacturers would claim this is what their products do and to a limited extent they may have a point.  However as a Personal Trainer I feel my job with regard to nutrition is to analyse what the client eats, look at how that affects their mood and energy levels on a daily basis and assess how it has affected their body to date.

I'm no doctor and would therefore feel ill advised to prescribe drugs to my clients, but most 'supplements' are highly processed but unlike medical drugs are researched and tested only by their own manufacturer.  If we look at the sports drink market, whole arrays of products are now put up by single manufacturers, but instead of labeling them 5% sugar solution, 10% sugar solution etc. they are labeled: carbohydrate rich, pre work out boost, post workout refresh etc. Why?  Because we will buy the latter and not the former. Recently my 10 year old son snuck out at a sports centre and bought and drank one of these sports drinks, he came home feeling ill, unable to eat his supper and wanting to go to bed, his body could not take that sugar hit because we have not trained him to ingest large quantities of sugar, so should we recommend it to others.

All this said I do believe we should be helping our clients supplement their diets.  In most cases this means adding low GI carbohydrates and removing high ones, introducing more vitamins and minerals via fruit and veg and making sure that clients training at higher intensities have the right balance of proteins and that fats in all diets are balanced and natural.

I recently had a client who was training for his 3rd dan black belt in Taekwondo, he was training about 6 hours a week in martial arts and a couple of hours with me.  We looked at his diet, more with a view to energy levels, and cut 'junk' carbs and introduced the idea of wholemeal.  Six weeks later his training was going much better and he was feeling great, and as a side effect he had lost a stone.

I have another client looking to head well below his present 20 stone weight and again I am looking to supplement his diet to both maintain his energy levels and metabolism through his active working day but also maintain a net energy deficit.  However what I do not want to encourage my clients to do is go off and spend large quantities of their hard earned cash on processed supplements when they could adjust their present diet and spend that extra cash with me to obtain real and lasting benefits.

Many supplements are protein based, but WHO recommendations are that the upper limit for protein ingestion is 2.1g per kg of body weight and this level only suitable for the likes of body building athletes with sedentary people needing less than half that. Incorporating those levels in a normal diet is straightforward with most people these days exceeding those levels leaving supplements again as unnecessary.

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