The How and Why Mentorship and Coaching will Change Your Life

Mentoring and coaching are essential to meet your fitness goals.

Why?

How?

Think of this for a moment.

You wouldn’t drink contaminated water without a great water filter, right?

So, why would you even consider consuming a fitness routine without proper mentoring and coaching to filter the negatives away?

Having the right mentoring and coaching services are essential components for meeting your fitness goals.

Here’s how.

Lifestyle Support, Guidance, And Encouragement

Coaches and mentors provide key answers to technical questions regarding:

• Fitness


• Wellness


• Nutrition


• Health


• Lifestyle

They’re not just there to serve as an encyclopedia, though. They’re also an interactive vessel to help you filter away the negative and come up with a comprehensive strategy to put those answers to work. This includes:

• Identifying motivators


• Identifying obstacles


• Setting long-term goals


• Setting immediate goals


• Developing a reward and consequence system

According to the American College of Sports Medicine, fitness coaching that’s provided on a one-on-one basis is one of the most effective methodologies to help you sustain improvements to your lifestyle.



Coaches and mentors offer unbiased and nonjudgmental support, guidance and encouragement based on your specific needs and wants. This enables you to use problem-solving and goal-setting to make and continue the necessary changes, additions, and subtractions to support your overall desired lifestyle.

Having The Right Professional On Your Side Is Key To Progression

Even if your immediate fitness goal is as simple as exercise and diet modification to lose 20 pounds because you’re obese and have recently been diagnosed as pre-diabetic, how you progress through and beyond the singularity of that goal will guide your overall lifetime fitness objectives.

You’ll need the right professional to help you make the necessary observations and readjustments so that specific fitness goals ultimately merge into your big health and wellness picture.

Don’t Confuse Trainers With Coaches And Mentors

It’s important to understand that there’s a big difference between a fitness mentor/coach and a fitness trainer.

Trainers simply have hands-on knowledge, usually in a specific niche, of exercise and train their clients in the proper techniques for the results the client says they want. While this is helpful in preventing exercise injuries and coming up with goal-oriented workout routines, it’s still a very targeted ‘ask and receive’ methodology with a very limited range toward overall broad fitness objectives.

Meanwhile, fitness coaches and mentors aren’t just focused on the here and now of teaching you how to exercise a specific way to reach your immediate fitness goal. This type of help is as much about skill acquisition as it is implementation and re-evaluation within your complete wellness plan.

If you’re clueless about what you need and want, your coach and mentor can help you create a fitness plan.



Your coach or mentor has an entire bag of tools and expertise to help you with two vital tasks:

• Identify the goals you should have based on your desired outcome.


• Progress through the catalog of lifestyle changes to reach, amend, and sustain those goals in relation to your specific big health picture.

This observational and adjustment difference is key when it comes to progression, or rather the longevity, of maintaining and resetting your fitness goals for the future.

Think of it as the difference between just grabbing a bottle of water for one-time use off a shelf (personal trainer) versus the longevity of purchasing a water filtration system for many glasses of water, lemonade, raw food recipes, and so forth in the foreseeable future (fitness coaches and mentors.)

Help Holding Yourself Accountable

You already know that self-discipline is the primary component in holding yourself accountable and getting your fitness goals achieved. You must filter out the excuses and reasons why you can’t as you embody all the reasons why you must.

However, your fitness mentor and coach are crucial elements in ensuring you’re not left to hold this heavy burden alone.

A fitness mentor is someone who has been there and done that for themselves. They offer an inspirational advisory role based on their own firsthand experience within the fitness vein. They serve to help you get where you’re going the most efficient and effective way possible based on their own knowledge of trial and error.



A fitness coach is a different kind of advisor. He/she holds the technical knowledge to offer you strategies aligned with your individual purpose and best and worst qualities.

Both coaches and mentors help you hold yourself accountable along the way to your goals and larger objectives.

Think of the above as a stool holding up your fitness goals:

• Leg one is your own personal accountability.


• Leg two is your fitness mentor pointing you in the right direction.


• Leg three is your fitness coach offering you the mindset to follow that direction.

By dispersing the weight of your goals , you make it easier to hold them up over a lifetime.

Fitness mentoring and coaching should never be confused as a way to micromanage your fitness goals. At its core, these fitness services are nurturing enablers to help you continually self-engage in lifestyle choices to improve your lifetime wellbeing.

Lifestyle changes to reach fitness goals are hard. These aren’t fad diets and sporadic episodes of exercise. They’re long-term changes to how you think, eat, move, and act, and that requires tremendous commitment and continually holding yourself accountable.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed, discouraged, and distracted in matching and upholding these lifestyle changes to your fitness goals, which leaves you constantly climbing up and down the ladder of success. How does having a coach and mentor help?

• They’re a buffer against quitting during the lows and complacency after the highs of success.


• They help you find realistic diet and exercise programs that you can maintain and feasibly hold yourself accountable within. If either is beyond sustainable, then you’re setting yourself up for disappointment and failure.


• They help you find that sweet spot between fitness actions being challenging enough to keep you engaged and pushing yourself and simple enough to succeed and maintain for the long-term.


• Along the way, you gain invaluable feedback on what you’re doing right and not so right to keep you focused on the end results.


• Accountability is also easier when you know that you have someone else, in your coach and/or mentor, who’s privy to your actions and progress toward each goal. You try harder because you have someone other than yourself monitoring you, rooting for you, and invested in your success.

In closing, achieving a single fitness goal, much less a larger wellness plan, can seem like an impossible task within the busy lives most people lead today.



Fitness coaches and mentorships are often essential in learning how to mitigate and navigate the obstacles holding you back.

From gaining the emotional support you need and ensuring your immediate goals are progressing alongside a bigger health picture to offering a support system for your personal accountability toward long-term success, fitness coaches and mentors offer extraordinary value.

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Author Bio:

Nichelle Smith is a nutritionist and fitness lifestyle writer. She loves sharing her ideas and personal experiences related to nutrition and fitness through her writing. She currently writes for Big Berkey Water Filters. Her favorite pastime is working out and reading books together with her cat, Charlie.

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