What is Holistic Fitness Training?

Humans are multi-dimensional beings comprised of the body, mind, soul and emotions, and we believe effective health care attends to all of these aspects as they are interrelated and affect one another. To complicate matters, each dimension holds sub-levels, too.

Most fitness trainers focus on the body, and it’s no wonder since achieving and maintaining a healthy physical machine requires a deep understanding of how it functions. Most personal trainers today share extensive knowledge and experience with their clients in both exercise and nutrition.

While there’s also a holistic component to food and nutrition, today we’ll focus on defining a holistic fitness routine.

What is holistic fitness training?

The G Force approach to holistic fitness training involves four main parts:

Mind training. The power of the mind on the body is absolutely instrumental to attaining your health goals. If you can visualize it, you can achieve it. And knowing this is more than half the battle! One way our personal trainers work with you to train your mind is by helping you replace your “I can’ts” with “I cans.” We also encourage our clients to use the mind at the end of a workout as physical activity releases endorphins. This allows you to enter a meditative state more easily and optimizes your creative energy. During your next cool down, try visualizing what it’ll be like for you once you reach your goals and watch how fast you get there!

Aerobic or cardio-vascular training. As we learned from Richard Ryder in his success story last week, one of the advantages of having a personal trainer is they can show you the most effective ways to get leaner and stronger while protecting you from injury. Many people either stretch before or go right into their workout but this sets you up for potential injury and lowers performance. We suggest doing 5 minutes of cardio exercise to gently warm up the muscles and tendons, increase metabolic rate and cardio-pulmonary efficiency, and basically ease your body into more challenging exercises.

Strength training. While cardio is important for a strong heart – and we recommend longer sessions on your off days – it’s strength training that really packs a long-lasting health wallop. Whether you want to lose weight or just get healthier, the goal is lean muscle mass. By increasing muscle mass, we also increase metabolism and automatically lose fat because the body is burning calories even at rest. With more muscle, our balance, coordination and posture improve, as well as some of the more non-tangible benefits, like self-confidence. Also, studies show our strength peaks around 20 and as we get older, our muscles naturally start deteriorating. For this reason, it’s important for our future health to build as much muscle as possible now and have an active routine so that we’ll continue (with a few adjustments, of course) to maintain muscle power as we age.

Flexibility training. During a workout, muscles are challenged and lactic acid builds up. To initiate recovery, improve recovery time and reduce pain or tightness, it’s important to cool down with proper stretching. You’ll lengthen muscles and joints, release lactic acid and it also releases feel-good neurotransmitters which reduces stress. As an anti-aging method, regular stretching exercises also increases your overall flexibility which, like our muscles, also declines as we age.

As you can see, the G Force holistic fitness training methodology includes a mind aspect as well as three areas of the physical body that need attention and work.

Food, nutrition, including how and when we eat, are also essential elements of a holistic fitness routine – which we’ll cover in a future post so stay tuned!