Fitness, Business, Fitness Business, & Achieving Life Goals

“Selling is the second oldest profession, often confused with the first”. from Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play by Mahan Khalsa.

That quote makes me laugh and yet there is so much truth in it as to how people feel about “SELLING”. Visions of shadey car salesmen, TV pitchmen, and telemarketers come to mind. All sales people care about is getting your credit card in their greedy, sweaty, little hands and then…. “See ya!” As a matter of fact, I went through a “sales training” program for health club managers back in the early ’80’s that was exactly that. I was told that the goal was to get people to join and then hope they wouldn’t come. Sell, sell, oversell, sell them services we don’t even have. I quit shortly thereafter and hated anything to do with sales for almost two decades. But that was then and this is now. I came from that vile, hard sell experience to what I now feel as the joy of selling. It has become one of my missions, to teach others a natural, caring way to sell.

I think to understand my view we need to discuss what selling really is.

My epiphany came in a realization that selling is really about helping other people get what they want and/or need and not about “getting their money”. Do we make money from selling? Yes, but making sales/money does not mean that you are not enhancing the lives of your clients. In fact, the more you:

1) Really listen to their wants/needs

2) Clarify history, details, situations as needed so that you really understand where they’re coming from

3) Make an honest recommendation to them as to a course of action that will best solve their problem and why

the more sales/money you will make. The difference is that we do what we do because we want to help people. We are their advocates. We ARE the good guys. Making sales/money is simply a reflection of how much opportunity we have to help them.

So enjoy the sales process. It’s how you help others.

(Now, if we can leave them with a “Wow”, we will feel even better about our experience together, but that’s another post.)

Historically, as we get older, balance starts to be a little less sure and, unless we work to correct this, a spiral of declining function begins. Fear is often the culprit that accelerates this decline.

The chances of decreasing bone mineral density, osteopenia or osteoporosis, is more likely as we age. This increases the chances of breaking bones when falls take place and that makes it scarier. Many people give in to that fear and develop what I call “the old man shuffle”. The following are compensations that, while we may think they keep us safe, actually begin to limit our ability to move fluidly and with confidence.

1) Body weight is forward so if you fall, it’s forward where you have more control and might be able to catch yourself.

2) Center of gravity never quite gets out onto the standing leg. If your center of gravity gets outside of your base of support, there’s a greater chance of falling and of not being able to save yourself. Strides become shorter and the feet tend to slide forward barely leaving the ground.

3) Finally, they start looking down at their feet as they walk. This makes sense doesn’t it? You want to see where you’re stepping. Well here’s a real interesting bit of brain research that I discovered. We’ve all heard that if we lose one sense the others are heightened. In fact, something similar takes place when all your focus is placed on watching where you are stepping. Because you rely so much on the visual, you don’t allow yourself to feel where your body is and you start to lose your sense of body position and balance.

The good news is that these are reversible conditions. Through strength and balance training, not only are your abilities improved, but so is your confidence. You can walk without fear of falling and be more self assured.

If you face these challanges, your next step (pun intended) should be to work with a Personal Trainer to create a fall prevention program for you.

There seems to be a general assumption that everyone should be doing 3 sets of 8-12 repetitions for your weight training workout, but there are a couple of key points that I want to bring your attention to.
 
First, SETS: there is a body of research that concludes that most of the benefits of resistance training can be achieved by doing one set to failure and that additional sets, while they do have additional value, have a diminishing return (i.e. doing 2 sets does not give you twice the benefit of doing 1 set. It gives you less.) Of course how many you do in your program depends on your own individual goals and current training status. I typically use between 1-3 sets with most of my clients.
 
Next, REPS: Low reps and high weight deliver greater strength benefits. High reps and lower weight give greater muscle endurance. Most general conditioning tends to fall between that, somewhere between 8-15 reps. There is no magic number here, no lightswitch that says, if you do 7 reps it’s strength and 8 reps it’s general conditioning. There’s almost always a combination going on. 

Now here’s the important stuff about reps:
• Any of these repetition ranges will “tone” the muscle. “Tone” is what active muscles feel/look like.
• None of these are magic “get leaner” ranges. Getting leaner depends on your total program and your nutrition.
Whatever you or your Personal Trainer chose for your top rep, that is NOT where you should stay. It’s a graduation number. i.e. if you’re using 10 reps as your number (You could easily choose 13 or 14 as a target number), when you can do 10 reps in perfect form, you graduate. Raise the weight by the smallest increment that you can. Next time, if you can do 10, raise the weight again. Keep raising by small amounts until you reach a point where you can’t get 10 reps. That’s your workout weight. Stay with that until you can get 10 reps and then, guess what, you graduate. Raise the weight. Keep the progress happening.

To continue making progress toward your health/fitness goals, you must continue to up the challenge. Once the challenge is no longer there, you can even lose a bit of the benefits that you had already gained.

Good luck and keep pushing yourself.