Functional Trainer: Holistic Health Series Part 1

Jan 16 2010 by Jack Walton

When considering your health and fitness you have multiple choices available.  Where to start, what area to work on, who to see, how often…..? Taking a ‘Holistic’ view is essential to this, but what does it mean?  Over the next few weeks we will discuss Holistic Health and how these principles can guide you to making decisions about how to go about improving your health and how to put together an approach that works.

Health Goals
Improving health and fitness, enhancing quality of life and increasing happiness means different things to different people.  Those who visit ‘Functional Trainer’ usually have goals that include weight management, pain reduction, cardiovascular fitness, athletic improvement, increasing strength and injury rehabilitation.  What are yours?  What do you want to be better at in your life or for your sport?  When making your goal make sure that it is something achievable and realistic and really will make a difference to your life. 

All too often the main barrier to success of achievement is that it is non-specific to individual.  Strange how this may seem, what seems to happen is that we embark on fitness programmes, workouts and exercises that bare no resemblance to the goal we want to realise.  It is not specific to us and it is a shame that so much time, money and effort is spent so ineffectively.

Why Holistic?
In addition to having a focus and goal, the next (and usually missed out) step is to work out want you need to do.  This is more of an issue in society than it has ever been due to the industry marketing and misleading information out there.  Alarmingly around 70% of people who come for a consultation at ‘Functional Trainer’, have no real concept of holistic health.  This means that, whilst they have their goal of weight loss or increased power, their awareness of what it will take to get there is very narrow.  Belief may be that it will just be ‘cardio’ or purely doing anything in the gym.