I entered the fitness industry fairly late in life at the age of 40. I had been exercising regularly for many years in order to make myself stronger after injuring my lower back during child birth. At 39 I started training with a personal trainer, my goal being to run the Great North Run, for this I allowed myself a year to train. I was lucky in finding a great personal trainer who understood my goal and he was my inspiration to retrain as a Personal Trainer (Andy Mills, who now lives in America).
Getting a Personal Trainer qualification is the easy part, you then have to finely tune your craft to become the expert and this can only come from practice and education. You have to keep learning, because no two individual clients are the same.
I believe that one exercise programme, or class does definitely not suit all.
Once I moved into the fitness industry I started teaching high impact aerobics (loved it), spin, Zumba (didn’t love that), running and I even took part in a Miss Trained figure contest. After 10 years my body started to object. My back would scream every time I put weight through my right foot, my mid back was screaming from lifting too many weights and kettle bells. I wasn’t allowing time for my body to rest as this was how I made my living.
Finally things came to a head and I visited an Osteopath who advised me to stop all impact work, stop lifting heavy weights, and generally slow down.
Luckily realising that I was getting older and wanting to specialise I had re-qualified as a Pilates instructor. Now over the years I have taken many courses but studying Pilates was a light bulb moment for me, everything fell into place, this was a field I wanted to be in, this is what I wanted to teach.
It made me wonder, if I had done Pilates after my back injury, maybe just maybe my back would now be ok, my knees may not have become Arthritic and weak?
Because if Pilates does nothing else, it makes you body aware, sets posture, strengthens the core and stabilising muscles.
So with the prevalence of lots of high impact exercise programmes currently out there and the amount of classes popping up everywhere, I wonder how much damage we are doing to ourselves.
I see people on a regular basis that have no control of their limbs, they have no muscle mass around their joints, but they are not aware of this because to them this is normal, so the thought of these people doing high impact exercise quite honestly makes me shudder. I know of a local Osteopath who is already getting clients suffering from injuries from these programmes.
Most people may be ok after doing these classes and they may do them for weeks with no ill effects, but years down the line the injuries may start to surface because we pay with our bodies in our 40’s and 50’s for what we do in our 20’s and 30’s.
A word of caution: some of these exercise programmes are taught in one day, this is fine for fitness professionals, but what you may not know is anyone can attend these courses and then go into the world and teach. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE A QUALIFIED FITNESS PROFESSIONAL. So before you embark upon the latest intense training craze, please check the qualifications of your instructor.