Obesity and Diabetes

Obesity puts a person at greater risk for developing several lifestyle related diseases. When a person ingests more food calories than his body uses, the excess calories are stored as fat. The American diet is high in fat, and people typically don't operate at the activity level necessary to use all of the calories they consume.

You probably remember learning a little about Type 2 diabetes in your first lesson. Type 2 diabetes is a disease in which the body fails to use insulin effectively. Obese individuals are more likely to develop this condition than others . Just as Type 2 diabetes generally is brought on by poor lifestyle choices, many people can reverse this condition by achieving a healthy body weight through proper diet and exercise.

High Blood Pressure

Do you remember briefly discussing high blood pressure in Robert's example earlier in this lesson and lt. You know that it is caused by increased pressure on artery walls. High blood pressure often is called the silent killer because many people don't even know they have it. This disease claims many lives in the United States each year. Some factors that put one at risk for high blood pressure are not within a person's control. These include age, race, heredity, and gender. Risk factors that can be controlled include obesity, alcohol use, sodium intake, oral contraceptive use, stress, and physical inactivity      . High blood pressure puts people at risk for heart attack, stroke, and kidney failure. Medication often is used to control high blood pressure, but people also can lower blood pressure through lifestyle adjustments, just as Robert did.            

Professional Boundaries

Your first client of the day is 15 minutes late again this is the third time in her last five visits she's been late. What do you do? Do you run fifteen minutes late all day ,or do you give your clients a 45 minutes session instead of the hour she booked ?

This client is violating one of your professional boundaries. Your professional boundaries are the limits you set for your practice for example, your policies when clients cancel appointments, what you do when you have to cancel appointments, and even the kinds of training you offer.

Your professional boundaries also protect your clients. For example, if you see a client in a restaurant, do you ignore her, wave hello from afar, or go speak to her? Although you may think, there's nothing wrong with being friendly, your client may have a different opinion. She may be at a business lunch, where her boss just spent 10 minutes disparaging personal fitness trainers. Or , for reasons of her own, your client simply may not want her casual acquaintances to know she has a personal fitness trainer.

At your first session with a client, share your professional boundaries for example, your policy about lateness. Communicating before the fact is the best way to prevent unpleasant problems. Later in this lesson, we will look at a specific procedure for resolving ethical dilemmas , however, keep in mind that being discreet is never a mistake.

Legal Boundaries

Legal boundaries are relatively easy to determine they are limits that your municipality, county, state, or some other political entity specifies. Zoning laws and certification requirements are two examples of legal boundaries.

Your legal limits as a personal fitness trainer may include issues such as whether you can make a diagnosis or sell health related products as part of your work.

Additionally, remember that as a personal fitness trainer you are not qualified to diagnose a client or recommend pharmaceuticals as a form of treatment. Doing so would be out of the scope of your legal boundaries. If you suspect a client has physical or mental problems that are beyond your scope of practice, refer him to a qualified professional.

Safe Lifting

Here are some general safety tips to help reduce injuries when weight training. Warm up at each session with light weights.

When starting a new exercise or after laying off exercise for a week or two, start with relatively light  weights.

Pay attention to joint pain. Using lighter weights and doing more repetitions might enable you to continue your session, but only if you can do so without pain.
Incorporate exercise that work agonist and antagonist pain, core, and synergist muscles to ensure balanced strength within a group of muscles and between  opposing groups of muscles. Imbalances in strength can destabilize a joint.

Always use good form while lifting and breathe and relax through your exercise. If you can't maintain the proper form for a particular lift, you're finished with that lift for that set. And remember to rest between 30 and 60 seconds before trying another set.

The Elbows

More than a dozen muscles cross at elbow joint, and it's also a fairly stable joint because of all the tendons and ligaments that help those muscles move the arm bones. However, because we spend so much time lifting and moving objects with our hands and arms, it's possible to injure the elbow through sheer inattention.

If your exercise involves throwing or boxing, you're at risk for overuse injuries and trauma from the explosive power. Tennis, golf, and weight lifting can cause elbow problems. And again, everyday actions in the workplace turning wrenches, constant typing, performing massages all can lead to overuse injuries at the elbow.

Next we're going to talk about how you can help your clients prevent some of the most common injuries. But before we do that, let's review what you've learned so far. Go to work and used what you learned have a good year.

The Knees

If your body were the world, the knee would be the United Nations. At the knee, the body's powerful muscles hamstrings and quadriceps meet and interact. Usually, the knee is capable of withstanding the forces placed on it while giving you the benefits of mobility. However, it's also vulnerable.

Something as simple as running when your weight and fitness level suggest that walking is more appropriate can injure the knee. So can wearing the wrong shoes, such as those without proper support or padding or shoes that once were appropriate for exercise but have outlived their usefulness. Improper exercise technique, especially if leads to muscle imbalances such as super strong quadriceps and weak hamstrings can cause knee problems.

And as is true with the other joints, knee problems, once started, can affect everyday activities, and everyday activities can affect knee problems.