If you have been a personal trainer for any length of time - or any fitness professional, for that matter - then you know what it's like to spend a lot of time on
road. For trainers who work with their clients in homes or a geographic mix of local fitness facilities, you especially have some serious time behind wheel on a regular basis. Regardless of where you train your clients, most trainers spend a good deal of time driving to and from training sessions, seminars, and other work-related activities. For most people, that time ends up being "dead time", during which you really can't be very productive. Listed below are some great ideas for making most of that time, and making it time that you even look forward to!
Audio Learning
Audio learning is listed first in our list of great ideas because it is VERY powerful on many levels, and there are numerous resources available for this productive practice. The basic idea here is that you listen to any number of audio learning resources while you are driving. You don't have anything else to do, and you can't effectively or safely do anything with your hands, but your EARS are just fine, so put them to work!
Here are some of educational and motivational items that you might consider listening to, and many of them have resources geared specifically for fitness professionals: Self-help programs, Audio interviews, Recorded conference calls, Recorded radio programs, Career enhancement tools, and Motivational recordings.
As you can see, there are enough ideas for things to listen to while driving to fill up endless hours of time, and if you know where to look, there are literally more things to listen to than you will even have time for. We won't get into too many details, since it would take a large amount of text, but here are some great resources to get you started. Self-help, motivational audio, and recorded conference calls are items very specific to your individual tastes and situation. As for rest, here are some fitness industry specific resources:
Audio Interviews: http://www.personaltraineru.com
Recorded Radio Programs: http://philkaplan.com/thefitnesstruth/RadioShowMENU.htm
Career Enhancement Tools: http://www.fitnessdestinations.com/fitnessinfoproducts.html http://www.fitnessdestinations.com/sixfiguretrainer.html http://www.fitnessdestinations.com/personaltrainersecrets.html
Planning Workouts
Driving time is a perfect time to work on training protocols for your clients. If you are doing same workouts week after week and month after month, both you and your clients are going to get bored doing same thing all time. A great way to keep your own motivation up while also keeping your clients from hitting plateaus in their training programs is to change up training routines on a regular basis. Think about all of muscular and cardiovascular training principles that you are familiar with, and come up with new and inventive ways to put those resources together in effective training routines. Also, for specific clients, you can spend that driving time thinking about their individual workouts, and ways that you can make them more intense, or fill them with more variety. This is a valuable practice, especially if you have long-term clients who need things to be changed up on a regular basis.
