Does your gym measure up to this?

A gym is essentially selling you a big room full of kit.

Personal Trainers tend to sell results and outcomes

Weight loss

Before and after pictures

12-week transformations

“You are here, and if you hire me as a trainer, I can get you here.” 

At Thrive, we believe in selling the process.

Because even after you achieve your goals, you are still going to have to keep following the process of training.

It never stops.

Ever.

Progress, growth, development, improvement never stops.

We call this the training experience, and to us, this is the key component to running a successful gym or personal training product.

We ask ourselves

” What can we do to give our members the best training experience?”

Then we set up the training environment and 60 minutes that you are in the building around that.

Be it the gym space, the training kit, the coaching, the social event, the measurement and tracking tools. The whole training environment that you enter into every time you arrive.

The results come second to the experience.

Process, not outcomes. 

 

Once you get your head around the fact that the process of following an exercise regime is never over you are in the right place to then decide on which process or training experience suits you.

You can actually find a way to start enjoying the process rather than trying too hard, because of the goals, you have set.

Setting up an exercise regime based on outcome goals and results leave you at great risk from setting a routine and process that is unsustainable.

Setting up an exercise regime based on the experience of training means progress and improvement. The goal becomes secondary in importance, emphasis, and focus.

Think of starting a training regime like going on holiday. You don’t go on holiday to get the result. As the result is coming home and going back to normal.

You go on holiday for the experience, the feelings, the actual intricacies of walking on the beach, feeling the warmth of the sun on your face and lying by the pool in the sun. Then you are left with the memories of the experience.

Your exercise routine should be the same as this. The feelings, the energy, the support, the camaraderie.

As with anything in life if you want the hard bits to feel worthwhile you likely need to do them with someone or with a bunch of people that you connect with and feel are in it with you.

This is your team

If you are dreading your workouts, you are trying way too hard and you likely have hired the wrong coach who also doesn’t understand the concept of the training experience. They think it is all about the results too.

Working too hard isn’t really about the physical pain, it is more about the mental suffering you undertake because you are convincing yourself through something that you know is uncomfortable.

This is what Professor Steven Peters calls your chimp, in his book The Chimp Paradox.

You have to convince your subconscious brain (the chimp) that although this is uncomfortable it will be worthwhile.

Your chimp is also like a young child in this way. This part of your brain is undeveloped and only intelligent enough to understand the pain and the need to stay away from it.

You only have a certain amount of energy you can use to subdue the chimp, before it takes over and makes you miss the gym, go home and watch TV.

If you want to progress you have to get the chimp on board by just making the process less painful.

Push hard sometimes.

Not all the time. 

Dan and Chip Heath in their book, Switch use the analogy oh a rider and an elephant. The elephant is bigger, stronger and more powerful than the rider. You have a degree of control through coercion, but if the elephant decides to rampage…

Pushing hard burns matches, and you only have some many matches to burn in a week.

Setting goals is great, and we believe that knowing your outcome is an essential part of the journey of fitness. You need the outcome goal to line up with your identity, who you see yourself as and to link in with your purpose as a person.

After that, your values should line up with the actions and process needed to get to the goal. Any goal will just boil down to the tasks that you need to schedule into the diary every week.

These tasks will be mostly simple and repetitive. You just need to keep doing them every week for a long time.

This is why the experience surrounding those habits is so important. The feelings, sensations and thoughts around those repeated actions.

The place you go, the people you see and the process you follow.

This environment will either be a place that you continue to turn up at or a place that you don’t want to be. The experience of the environment will determine your chances of success.

In Howard Cutler’s book with the Dalai Lama, he notes that the feeling of wanting to achieve a goal is never satisfied by the actual achievement of a goal.

Lose weight, change the dress size, run the race. But you won’t actually change how you feel about yourself as a result of the achievement.  Expecting it to do so, is a misunderstanding of ourselves.

Changing how we feel however is impacted by our ongoing habits and environment that we enter into week by week. This is why the training experience is so important.

These feelings wash off quickly.

So, train and eat well for a week and you will feel better, eat poorly and miss training the week after and you won’t feel good.

Feeling good is transient and a weekly commitment to your habits. You can’t accumulate it in a bank account, you can’t save it and use it when you need it. It happens as a result of the single training sessions and meals and then it wears off and you have to do it again.

The same as taking a shower or brushing your teeth. You just have to do it consistently.

Take a look at your training experience and ask yourself if you are set up to get the best out of it with the place you go, the people you see and the process you follow.

Jack & Patrick run Thrive: Optimal Human Performance a Personal Training Gym in Bamber Bridge, Preston PR5 6EW

www.thriveohp.co.uk