Who are you exercising for?

Don’t just exercise and look to become healthy because your wife or your work colleague wants you to. This isn’t a motivator that’s going to drive you for the long term. Instead, find a reason why becoming better is important for you. To be successful, to be stronger, healthier, and to become more resilient, needs to be because of a deeper internal motivation.

Often for a lot of people there’s been a time in life when they’ve looked and felt good. Maybe you’ve looked back at an old photo and now realised you’re 30kg too heavy. Could this be you? If it is, then this is a great reality-check, and is a great motivator to get back to your old self.

Most people do want to look better and is always one of the main reasons why people want to join the gym. Do you want to get in good shape so you feel comfortable taking your shirt off at the beach? Or do you want to lose some weight so that you can fit into a size 10 dress again? Vanity is a great short to mid-term motivator, but often there needs to be something else that will keep you focused for the long term. See if you can find a deeper motivation, beyond just improving your physical appearance.

If you have kids, don’t you want them to become a better version of you? If you’re a parent, then the best thing you can do for them is to lead by example. Regular exercise and being health-focused will teach them to be hard-working, positive, and self-confident in their own skin?

Regular exercise is great for managing stress. Exercise promotes the release of the feel-good hormone dopamine, along with adrenaline, which helps to improve mental sharpness and the feeling of being alive. The more you’re able to push through pain and adversity in the gym will help you develop more mental resilience outside of it. By training your body to handle small bouts of acute stress with exercise will help you to manage anxiety and perceived stress that you may experience day-to-day. If you’re looking to gain a mental-edge, to improve your focus with your work, to have more mental clarity, to be more creative, then you’ll be surprised how just a regular commitment of exercise will transform not just your muscles, but also to give you a purpose and better mental health.

Regular exercise will improve the likelihood of you living a longer healthier life, so that you’re physically able to do what you want to do for as long as you want to do it. For me, I want to keep the ball in my court and to not be reliant on other people to care for me and to push me around when I’m older.

Throughout our time together my aim is to

• Improve your fitness

• Make you feel younger, by improving your mobility and loosening up your shoulders, lower back and your hips

• Reduce your body fat

• Help you to build lean muscle and full body strength

• Reset ‘unhealthy eating habits’ you may have developed from eating too much sugar, processed foods and/or drinking too much alcohol

• If fat loss is your goal, introduce you to the benefits of Time Restricted Eating and Intermittent Fasting

• Improve your all-round holistic health so that you can reduce stress, feel healthier, and to be more confident within the body you live