As a personal trainer, a significant part of your job is motivating and assisting your clients in reaching their fitness goals. Sometimes that can be challenging. However, new technologies, such as fitness trackers, are making the job a little easier.
With access to quantifiable, easy-to-track data, clients become more motivated to come to the gym as often as possible.
Ali Gritz, a personal trainer and group fitness instructor at Crunch in New York City, encourages all of her clients to invest in a fitness tracker, but not just any tracker. She only recommends the Exerspy.
“It is the most detail-oriented tracker on the market currently,” said Gritz. “It is an accelerometer, which means it measures your motion, taking gravity into account. It has a heat flux sensor that measures the amount of heat dissipated by your body. It measures skin temperature and skin conductivity as well.”
Many of Gritz’s clients are experiencing the added benefits of using the Exerspy. Since starting to work with Gritz two years ago, Guro Wiik has seen remarkable results.
“My goal was quite modest when I first started, but Ali took our workouts to a whole other level,” explained Wiik. “As we started to get further into it, I realized that I could do a lot more than I thought, so my goals kept changing from just losing extra pounds to lifting heavy and building muscle.”
Almost immediately after beginning to work with Gritz, Wiik invested in an Exerspy. According to Wiik the device helped to keep her on track with her goals and encouraged her to increase her activity.
“It gave me an awareness that I didn’t have in the beginning,” said Wiik. “I realized I could burn a lot more calories and get my steps in if I didn’t take the metro to work and instead walked to and from work. It is a great accountability tool, which really helped me to stay on track.”
However, a healthy lifestyle involves many factors beyond fitness. A huge component is nutrition. The Exerspy is not just limited to tracking movement, it also connects with dotFIT to track nutrition. Clients log their food intake so they can not only stay on top of their workouts, but can also ensure they are eating well.
“There are tons of food logging systems out there, but dotFIT is the most accurate calorie tracking system,” said Gritz.
Gritz believes the Exerspy paired with dotFIT is the best program for weight loss. It is easy for users to see how many calories they burn in comparison with how many calories they eat. As a result, weight loss becomes trackable and doable.
“What I find is my clients who don’t like to workout consistently — [when they] look at their Exerspy and see how many calories they burn on the days they workout, they are way more inspired to workout more often,” said Gritz. “They see the calorie burn go up and they know the more they burn, the faster they lose weight. Having trackable numbers is really inspirational because it gives the client ownership.”
Wiik is proof that this method really works. She has lost over 20 pounds and her body fat percentage has decreased from 35 percent to 22 percent.
“Ali made me realize that I can push myself so much further than I thought,” said Wiik. “I have reached beyond my goals. It is a very incremental process, you can’t do it quickly, but it is the best investment I have ever made.”
By Emily Harbourne
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Emily Harbourne is the former assistant editor of Club Solutions Magazine.
