Moving along with our new Fitness Friday feature (pun completely intended, ha!)…
…one of the reasons I decided to prioritize bringing qualified exercise professionals into our network, is because over the years I have seen a lot of everything-but-best-practices in this industry. Women with PCOS are not, in general, treated very well by fitness professionals.
It is a bad combination in general. Women with PCOS often don't feel great about how they look. A lot of people working in the fitness industry, honestly, don't feel great about themselves, either, and they often focus on their physical appearance at an extreme level to compensate for that.
Of course, if you have PCOS, you may be living with the fantasy that if I could only look like THAT…I wouldn't feel so badly about myself…and you may be projecting the false assumption onto an apparently fit person that they have credibility to help you, that they may not have.
We are working on creating a training to increase the number of truly qualified fitness professionals out there, but until we have that available, I wanted to give you a list of things you can ask while interviewing potential trainers to see if they are a good fit.
1. What are their credentials? Have they taken the time to formally study their claimed area of expertise? Or have they just lived in a gym most of their lives? If they cannot name a credentialed fitness organization that they have taken the time to study with, they do not deserve your time or money. You wouldn't go to a doctor who was self-taught…you shouldn't lower that standard for your trainer.
2. What is their experience with PCOS? Have they formally studied the disease? Who is the physician they refer to? What physicians refer to them? No trainer is qualified to take on your case alone, without being part of a comprehensive healthcare team taking care of the other parts of the problem. If they cannot give you names of registered dietitians and endocrinologists with whom they have productive relationships, they are not qualified to work with you.
3. Can the trainer provide references? And by references, I mean other women with PCOS who enjoyed and benefited from the experience.
4. If the trainer is not a formally trained nutrition professional, are they willing to refrain from giving nutrition/diet advice and/or selling supplements? Are they willing to endorse whatever food choices your chosen nutrition professional is helping you to make, even if those choices are not the ones they would personally make for themselves?
5. Will there be some sort of initial benchmark evaluation to see where your program needs to start and from which progress made can be measured? Is your program being customized to accommodate your personal energy levels, blood glucose trends, medications, etc.?
6. Will your trainer listen to and accommodate any incidents of pain or discomfort? This is a tough one, as the most important job of a trainer is to push you out of your physical comfort zone. That being said, they need to be confident enough in their work to trust that letting up or modifying the workout in response to pain is sometimes the best choice. It is never right to push someone through pain that may be causing permanent damage, or creating a negative association with activity.
7. Does this trainer"get" the many phobias and anxieties you may have to overcome in order to be comfortable with exercise? I'm not just talking about the poor body image, the social anxiety, the fear of failure. A little discussed fact about exercise is that for women who have been sexually traumatized, physical exertion can retraumatize them. A trainer needs to be sensitive to this and be professional with language, body language, and how they touch their client in order for the experience to feel safe. If your nonverbal vibes are telling you there is a problem with someone, it is perfectly ok to listen to that and look for someone else.
8. Who is sponsoring this trainer's work--in other words--who subsidizes their lifestyle? How does that commercial relationship influence what they say to you? If your needs run counter to what that trainer is being paid to promote, who are his/her loyalties with?
The reality is, most trainers really don't make much money on training. They make money on endorsements. Endorsement deals often dictate what the person in that deal can say about nutrition and fitness. I know, because I have been offered several. I turned them down, because everyone that came my way, as quickly as it would have increased my standard of living, would have required me to alter the messages I give to all of you. I made the choice not to do business with any company that would require me to give them control of my freedom of speech.
Ironically, companies paying out endorsement deals do so because they believe that having a popular fitness professional promoting their product gives their product credibility. And the trainers live with the belief that they are more credible because they have landed an endorsement deal, when in many cases, they have simply made public the mentality that they are willing to alter their advice for the right price. I encourage you to ask your potential fitness coach who their commercial relationships are with, and whether or not they could give you advice that was best for you, even if that advice entailed not promoting their sponsor's product…or more importantly…a competitor's product. If they cannot…their priority is not your health, it is their personal financial income.
I am thinking of creating a letter that you all could download to give to a trainer that would summarize what you will need, kind of a contract between the two of you, that would allow inCYST to do most of the talking or negotiating for you. There are some trainers who are just bad news, but there are others who simply need awareness. If you think that letter would be helpful, please leave a comment here.
If you have had negative experiences with a fitness professional, I would love to hear from you. The list of questions above comes from my years of experience working with the fitness industry, but I know there are a lot of things I don't know about. I do know, when I have this conversation with women with PCOS, they always share experiences of inappropriate interactions that they had kept to themselves, mostly because they hadmfelt somehow that they deserved to be poorly treated because they were out of shape.
Remember, the fitness industry is quite competetive and there are far more aspiring trainers out there than there are people who need them. Trainers need YOU far more than you need THEM. You can ask for, and expect, professionalism, respect, genuine compassion, and a minimum level of accurate knowledge about the diagnosis you live with 24/7. You don't EVER have to tolerate disrespect because your current physical condition is a place you have chosen to improve.