We know that you are constantly seeking to expand your knowledge, skills, and abilities as a personal trainer. You work hard to be sure that your clients are receiving high quality fitness training. At MYZONE, we want to support you as you support your clients along their fitness journey!
In this blog, we will cover a few of the best practices for using the MYZONE system as you train your clients. Just as you individualize your fitness program design and implementation for each client, you will need to creatively integrate the use of the MYZONE system into each client’s training program. Your use of the MYZONE system should be driven by your client’s goals.
Monitoring Your Client’s Fitness Program
The MYZONE system allows you to monitor (in real-time) your client’s exercise intensity, caloric expenditure, and heart rate recovery every single session (see our previous blogs on these topics for more information). The MYZONE system also provides you the opportunity to expand your programming by checking in on your client’s Activity Calendar whenever you would like. You can design programming for your client for a week or a month at a time, and even if you only see him or her once per week, you can hold your client accountable to the exact routine by looking at his or her Activity Calendar.
In addition to holding your client accountable for meeting the minimum required amount of physical activity per week by earning 300+ MYZONE effort points (MEPs), you can give him or her specific target heart rate zones to hit and/or caloric expenditures to burn.
The MYZONE heart rate belt will be most effective at measuring the intensity of cardiorespiratory exercise and muscular endurance/circuit training workouts. Heart rate is not the most effective way to measure the intensity of muscular strength and flexibility workouts.
Periodization
As you are designing programming to match your client’s fitness goals, a best practice is to offer variation over time. This is known as periodization. Using periodization, we offer variations in volume (quantity) and intensity of exercise. These two factors, quantity and intensity, should have an inverse relationship. Either daily, weekly, or monthly, you can change up the quantity and/or intensity of your client’s program to provide variety. Use the MYZONE system to hold your clients accountable to the designed guidelines.
For example, you program a high intensity cardio workout for your client to perform on Monday, followed by a recovery session on Tuesday before you see them for your resistance training session on Wednesday. You could request that for 30 minutes on Monday, your client average between 75-85% of maximum heart rate during his or her cardio (GREEN and YELLOW zones). Your client’s Activity Calendar should then display a GREEN or YELLOW tile for Monday. Then, you could request that for 45 minutes on Tuesday, your client average between 60-69% of maximum heart rate (BLUE zone). A BLUE tile should then be on display in your client’s Activity Calendar for Tuesday.
The MYZONE system will provide you the opportunity to talk to your client about the value of recovery and to hold them accountable for it.
Measuring Cardiorespiratory Fitness
There are many ways to monitor your client’s cardiorespiratory fitness improvements using the MYZONE system. Three that we recommend as best practices are measuring resting heart rate, assessing heart rate recovery, and monitoring submaximal heart rate.
Measuring resting heart rate is simple using the MYZONE heart rate belt. Have your client put his or her belt on right away when waking up in the morning. Remind them that they need to hear the belt beep once to confirm that it is on (they can add a little water to the electrodes to help it engage). Tell your client to stay lying in bed for 5 to 10 minutes once their belt has engaged. Your client’s resting heart rate will automatically update in the system once the transmitter data is uploaded via Bluetooth or inside your facility. Be sure to record your client’s resting heart rate for your records. Repeat this assessment every 8 to 12 weeks to see if your client’s resting heart rate has decreased, indicating that his or her cardiorespiratory fitness has increased.
To assess heart rate recovery and monitor submaximal heart rate, follow the steps from our previous blog titled, How to Monitor Your Client’s Training Progress.
Your clients will be thrilled to learn of their fitness improvements, and the MYZONE system provides you a very practical way to illustrate their objective improvements (don’t forget to give them kudos for the subjective improvements like sleeping better, having more energy, and feeling better overall).
Offering Motivation and Accountability
Using the MYZONE system to assist you in training your clients is like having another few trainers on your team. You can leverage the MYZONE system to assist you in providing motivation and accountability to your clients in the following ways:
Goals: Facilitate specific goal setting with your clients by using frequency, intensity, time, and type (mode). You and your clients will then be able to measure each of those aspects by monitoring the Activity Calendar feature over time. For example, a client might set the goal to perform 45 minutes of cardio 5 days a week at an average of 70% (GREEN zone) intensity for one month. At the end of the month, you and your client can sit down and look at every single workout performed and analyze whether or not the goal was met and discuss why or why not.
Social Connections: Have your clients find and add one another as Social Connections on MYZONE. Further, ask your clients to connect with you so that they can see what you are doing to keep yourself fit and stay dedicated to your goals.
Challenges: Include all of your clients in a MYZONE Challenge! Figure out how you will reward the winner, and create great camaraderie and motivation among your clientele. Set up a Challenge through your Partner’s Page or your MYZONE App. We recommend rewarding consistency over quantity (i.e. hitting a target MEP zone consistently rather than earning the most MEPs), but you know your clients best.
Weight Management
Many of our clients have weight management goals. You and your client can track his or her body metrics using the MYZONE App. You can also ask your client to take pictures for monitoring progress (the App saves the photos on a calendar for reference).
To assist your clients in achieving their weight management goals, you can design specific daily, weekly, and monthly MEPs targets and caloric expenditure recommendations and hold them accountable to it. For example, if you have a client who wants to lose weight, you might recommend that they burn an average of 500 calories per workout to reach a total of 2,000 calories burned by the end of the week. You could also use MEPs as the daily and weekly target (i.e. 100 MEPs per workout, 500 MEPs per week).
As you and your clients become more familiar with the MYZONE system, you can use variation of intensity and duration to achieve caloric expenditure and/or MEPs goals.
We hope these tips come in handy when you’re working with your clients. We want to see how you’re using MYZONE during your training! Post to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram using the hashtags #MYZONE, #myzonemoves, and #effortrewarded.
For more tips on how to use MYZONE when training your clients, follow us on our Fitness Friday Periscope Broadcast every Friday at 11 am EST, 8 am PST.
Keep Moving Forward!