Surprising Personal Trainer Fitness Tips – 2024 Edition

Getting fit, lean and strong.  It’s all about drinking the yellow stuff in tins, eating your body weight in raw eggs, and running a marathon before work.  

Right? Well, no, actually, not even a little bit. Lifestyle changes and tweaks can go a considerable way to making you a healthier feeling and more youthful looking person without the need to dedicate your life to a new regime.  

Don’t get me wrong, like with anything, the more you do something, the more you will get out of it.

So if an 8-week body transformation is what you want to do, that is an option. But that takes extreme dedication and will interfere massively with your life as you currently know it.

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So here we’ll look at making some changes that you can work into your routine and life that, over time, will go a very long way to changing your body.

These mistakes and surprising facts I will be talking about come from myself (a personal trainer for ten years) and other personal trainer colleagues.

We’ll cover the following;

• The biggest mistakes you might be making
• Surprising facts and info from personal trainers

Two mistakes you might be making as you try to get fit, lean, and strong

Not eating enough

It might sound counterproductive but it is so right.  Way, way, way too often, I hear people saying something like, ‘Ooh, I’ve done well today.

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 I’ve only had a banana and a small bag of popcorn!’ thinking that consuming less must mean they are losing weight and getting fit.

Wrong.  Here’s how it works. Your body is a trained survival machine. It always assumes the worst to keep you alive and tries to protect you.

So when it comes to food, if less of it arrives in the stomach, the body starts worrying that supplies aren’t good.

We are, after all, cavemen and women who are now living in a very talented world, but at a fundamental level, we’re still just animals.  

Survival instincts kick in, and the body slows the metabolism right down so that you are only burning just the very minimum level of calories needed and puts the rest into storage, i.e., FAT!

It just won’t if it doesn’t need to use those energy supplies. Also, after a prolonged eating time, the body will start to use its proteins as energy, and your muscles will waste away.

Then when a decent meal does arrive, thanks to your new low metabolism, the energy from that meal also goes into storage.  

So after a period of undereating, you will gain huge fat reserves as soon as you start eating again. The answer? Little and often.

Many small, healthy regular meals tell the body that times are good and your metabolism goes through the roof and burns fat.

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Only looking at the scales.

How much you weigh is not the best indicator of how fit, lean and healthy you might be. If you put the majority of pro footballers on the scales, nearly all of them would be classed as ‘obese’ when you compare their weight to their height.

 But the fact is they are walls of muscle. So when looking to get fit, try and avoid getting on the scale, or at least try and avoid obsessing over the scales.

If you can, use a body fat percentage which you can get tested at your gym or health center.  

Or put on an outfit, have a photo taken, and then stick the same gear on every few weeks and have another picture. This is when you’ll see and feel differences in body shape.

Monitoring the odd pound here and there is pointless as so many factors can affect that; you should be interested in how much fat you store or burn.

2 Surprising facts about getting fit!

‘low fat’ and ‘sugar-free’ options are working against you!

The main reason for this is that they are processed.  Sweeteners, additives, stabilizers, preservatives – these are not designed to be in the human body (I go back to that caveman animal within us), and the body doesn’t know what to do with them.  

Plus, if something is designed to be low in one thing, it will almost inevitably be high in something else to make up for it. Low fat, it may be, but check the sugar content.

I bet it’s sky high and you’ll be hungry again in no time at all.  Take ‘sugar-free’ also – no doubt this should be a good thing as it will be loaded with zero calorie sweeteners. Here’s the problem with that.

Your smart body will detect the sweet taste and then be confused by the lack of calories it is expected to burn.   So over time, it stops associating sweet flavors with calories and won’t make any effort to burn them, so you are turning off your body’s metabolism.

Not great if you’re also tucking into loads of fat-free foods loaded with sugar.

You can over exercise!

Trying to force your body to burn more calories is not healthy, and it’s not necessarily useful.  

Studies show that unless you are a professional athlete and it is your job, over-exercising can cause stress and begin to shut down the body’s processes and functions, including metabolism.  

A regular but not excessive combination of cardio exercise and a bit of weight lifting will see you burn fat.

Conclusion

Take these tidbits of advice from personal trainers and implement them into your diet and exercise routine to keep you on track toward hitting your goals.

Leave me a comment below so we can discuss the advice I mentioned above. Thanks for stopping by the personal training pioneer!