Paul Waters, fitness guy

What am I?

I've been blogging for a while for my business, balance weight loss, but I've not until now sat and written much as me. It's a change in style for me and I spent some time wondering whether anyone would be interested in the slightest in what I had to say. I've worked in the fitness industry all of my adult life and I've done lots of different roles. I've been a Fitness Instructor, self-employed Personal Trainer, worked in Nuffield hospitals as a Lead Physiologist, and for the last nearly seven years I've had a variety of jobs with a wonderful company, Lifetime Training, including Tutor, Senior Tutor, Regional Manager and Curriculum Manager. I've recently written a book for Bloomsbury Publishing called The Complete Guide to Weight Loss, due out in September this year, and in the coming months I shall be back self-employed doing a wide range of work including course tutoring, course writing and development, weight management courses, book writing and personal training.

I'm looking forward to such a varied existence and I hope that it can be seen that what I say in this blog comes from a reasonable amount of experience. I certainly am not going to be labelling myself as a 'Fitness Guru' or 'Master Trainer' any time soon though, rather I hope to be seen as an experienced member of the health and fitness community and one that offers balanced views (hence the business name) on a range of topics around the subject. I guess it's OK when someone gives another person a fancy sounding title, but I'd never dream of assuming one for myself, so for now I'm going to call myself a 'Fitness Guy'.

More than words

As I was thinking about what to call myself, I realised that this may be a good place to start with my thoughts on the fitness industry. Over the years, many words, terms and job titles have emerged in our sector, and more recently which of these is used seems to have taken on even greater importance. I was at a Skills Active Technical Expert Group panel meeting recently (another term I'm not sure I'd choose for myself but it was an honour to be asked to be part of the group) and we spent a long time debating what the new occupational standards that guide fitness instructor and personal trainer qualifications should be called.

Should it be fitness, exercise, physical activity, wellbeing or health? Are we  fitness instructors, gym instructors, fitness professionals, wellbeing advisors, personal trainers, coaches, motivators, or movement specialists? Does it matter? I'd argue that it does, as each of these words brings about a different image in a person's mind, some of these images may well be positive ones, others not so. Ask the average member of the public their thoughts around what goes on inside a gym, and bizarrely still to this day, there's a notion that it's full of incredibly muscular individuals all staring at themselves in the mirror, preening in between sets of lifting heavy weights, not that many people know what a set actually is. I ask you, is this so bizarre? Or have you seen this happen? I know I have, many a time in all sorts of gyms, fitness centres, leisure centres, wellbeing facilities or whatever you prefer.

And I guess this is my point, it should be about what people prefer. If the target audience of a gym is those who wish to get bigger, stronger or faster, then calling itself a Wellbeing Centre and having Lifestyle Coaches isn't going to get many people through the door, if they'd fit with those extremely broad shoulders! 

We can be pretty certain that the general public currently don't prefer what we're doing. According to a state of the industry report published every year, around 7.6 million people are gym members in the UK, out of a population of nearly 64 million. OK so the total membership base did rise in 2012/3 for the first time in a while, but the reality is that gyms have barely made a dent on getting the majority of the British public active. And maybe that's not their fault, maybe gyms are for 'Fitness' and 'Exercise' people, I'd count myself as one of those weirdos. We like to exercise, enjoy working hard, get up in the depths of winter in the pitch black to get to the gym before work, and use terms like 'training to fatigue', 'working to failure', 'achieving overload', 'beastings', and attended classes including the words 'blast', 'attack', 'pump' and 'carnage'. It's no wonder the general public think we're nuts! 

Global crisis

This is all well and good, and it keeps the small percentage of the 7.6 million people who are members of gyms who actually go entertained. But the truth is there is currently a health crisis of epic proportions right here on our doorstep and across the globe. Obesity rates have soared since the 1980s and a report last week suggested that the shocking figure predicting that by 2050, 60% of the population would be obese, may well have underestimated the extent of the problem. Add to this high blood pressure, high cholesterol, shockingly rapid increases in cases of type 2 diabetes, depression, stress, anxiety and an ageing population suffering from arthritis, osteoporosis, and back pain and in need of hip and knee replacements, and I personally start to feel that we are under-equipped and failing in our attempts to improve the nations' health. But maybe health wasn't our focus, maybe it was fitness?

What happens next?

This is a question I have spent much time pondering. In my career, I have never really been driven by working with the highest level athletes; I like normal people and I like helping them to achieve what some see as everyday goals like losing weight, climbing the stairs, increasing energy levels and boosting self-esteem.

Maybe there is a role for gyms to play in this goal, I've seen enough good things over the years to know that people can achieve these things in a gym environment, with the right encouragement and education. But for this to happen on a wider scale some big things need to happen and they need to happen soon to start making an impact. 

1) We need to start talking people's language. We might need to consider the terms we use to name exercises, the titles of job roles, the names of our fitness (or activity/wellbeing) facilities.

2) We need to build the trust of the medical profession, and vice versa. Two-way meaningful dialogue needs to be had, and this should be driven by the government themselves. The health and fitness world can play a major role in improving health and preventative medicine should be considered far more important than it is now. For this to happen we need to continue to strive towards high standards of education for instructors, quality control and assurance in our roles, a unified system of regulation that encompasses the many approaches to exercise but ensures the same messages consistently come across to the end user, the general public.

3) We need to focus more on a holistic approach to health and wellbeing. For too long the emphasis has been on exercise, and often on training hard. We need to balance this off with more on nutrition, daily physical activity, lifestyle factors like alcohol and smoking, sleep, stress and behaviour change. We should have clearly defined boundaries in these areas, but changes to these aspects of life can make massive improvements to health even in the absence of hard physical exercise.

4) We need to think outside of the box (one for the Cross Fit community), or rather outside of the gym. When we took exercise outdoors a few years ago, we went out with Boot Camp, training people like we were Royal Marine PTI's, screaming at them to do more clap press-ups or swing that kettle bell faster! A good friend of mine, the legend that is Keith Smith, often talks of starting Ug Camp, like Boot Camp only softer. And he's right, it's OK to offer training until your eyeballs bleed for those who are into that sort of thing, but we need to have more choices on our shelf. We need walking groups, chair-based exercise sessions, dance, family activities, cooking lessons, yoga, sports, water-based activities and play. Something for everyone, something to attract those who hated PE at school, something to enable people to be 'active' instead of worrying about their 'fitness'.

5) Finally, we need to care. This doesn't mean we need to go around hugging more people. It means we need to put more effort into making this a reality. It means we need more courses on lifestyle-based activity and how to promote it, we need to work more closely with schools, GP surgeries and local councils. We need to want to help people, we need to involve people who actively dislike gyms to find out why and also to get them to design activity programmes that they would prefer, and we need to take exercise, or health, or wellbeing, or physical activity to the population, in a way that appeals to them, instead of them being terrified to walk through our doors and join us in 'pumping some iron.'

Time for change

I hope you don't see this blog as a rant, and I certainly hope nobody takes it as a criticism. There are many fitness professionals and gyms that do wonderful things every day for many people, changing lives constantly. This is rather a call to arms, and legs for that matter, to change the way people perceive being active and healthy.

Yours,

Paul Waters, fitness guy, or should that be Paul Waters, health and wellbeing guy, or Paul Waters, physical activity guy?

It's up to you, and more importantly, it's up to the people who we have yet to engage in a healthy lifestyle!