The Fitness Industry Needs To Change Its Mindset

In financial planning, you’re asked how much you want to receive per month upon retirement. Then you calculate how much you need to save/invest per month from now till then.

We should be asking those same questions when it comes to fitness. What/how do you want to do/feel when you retire? You consider the what/how in the long run and you work backwards. So these are the movements that I need to focus on. These are the kinds of training I should be doing now. These are the number of hours I should put in a week.

For many years fitness professionals have been pushing the YOLO movement and we end up having people getting injured. We also unconsciously “train” our client’s behaviors to think that they need to do this fast and do this now. Inevitably, we created “monsters” who chase the highs because they need to get their hit of dopamine.

We sell them the “get fit in 3 months!”, “lose 20kg in 60 days!”, “be Instagram ready in 10 days!”, when we all know better it takes years to help them develop the right habits to stay healthy and fit. All these YOLO selling have caused countless of physical injuries and mental health issues, and these carry on for years.

We need to stop. We need to come as an industry to change our mindset which in turn will change our clients for the better.

As the dumpster fire year comes to an end, may we all start looking at ways to help our clients plan their fitness journey better by teaching them to look at their fitness in terms of years and not days. To guide them to develop better and smarter training and eating habits that will help them go further in life. And that we be responsible enough to call out the wrong habits even if it hurts our financials.