I just have a discussion topic on my mind..

What does everyone think about personal trainers writing diet plans for clients? This is a bit of a sketchy area for people in this field, since nowhere in the personal training scope of practice does it qualify us to create anything like that for people. Offering nutritional consult, sure, we do that all the time with no problem. But the full-on diet plan is a different story.

Personally, I wouldn’t feel comfortable at all creating diet plans for anyone. Yeah, I have a better knowledge than the the layman off the street about macronutrients, nutritional balance, etc., to achieve certain goals, but nowhere near the extent of someone such as a dietician. But I know many trainers who do do this on a regular basis. Some of them have enough experience to do it right, but then there are many other trainers who are still in the “cut out ALL fat” stage.

I know that a lot of trainers will get their “nutritionist” or “nutrition specialist” ticket as well. Again, I’m sure the courses for those teach a lot and can certainly qualify a person in their own right, depending on the course, but it bugs me that those titles aren’t regulated at all. I could walk out my front door and legally call myself a nutritionist right now.

Anyway, this was a bit of a rant on my part. So my question is this. Trainers, how in-depth do you go with nutritional/diet information for clients and what additional education do you think is necessary for providing it? Clients, how much do you trust in a personal trainer’s diet plan, and do you, yourself, look for any extra credentials?

Go.

I have given full diet plans when I was working as a PT, a ‘few’ years ago. I rapidly learned that doing this meant I spent more time writing them than people spent using them.
Then I shifted to advising gradual changes, 10% diet that I have suggested here etc. and these have had a far higher success rate.
I think the trick with PTing is to be able to remember and cope with the fact many clients will be nowhere near as into diet and fitness as we are. It was the part I couldn’t handle and why I stopped. On this topic it is why PTs need to resist the temptation to suggest an entire lifestyle change on day 1, it won’t be stuck to, and the clients will feel guilty and disappear. Tell them you will give guidance to gradual changes and keep their priorities in mind. For you it could be gym, diet, income, then other life, for them it could be family, career, bills, shopping, social life, looking nice for the other half who barely notices anyway, gym, diet, ironing.

I’m not a trainer, nor have I been a regular client, but as someone who is long-term committed to fitness (method varies according to current goal/focus), who reads about food and nutrition for pleasure and knowledge, who regularly participates in forum discussions, and whose spouse does the same leading to many conversations at home, I have to say most PT’s should not be giving advice (and what I overhear in my gym seems rather suspect although admitedly I’m not getting the whole “plan”).

The thing is, the same thing won’t work for every body and there is so much mis-information around. Nutrition is just not an exact science and the way one person responds to certain foods/macro’s can be hugely different than another. For example, when a body is insulin resistant (and in the US something like 80% of overweight people and 30% of normal weight people are insulin resistant) the way that body responds to carbs is much different than someone who is not insulin resistant. How is a PT going to know, blood glucose isn’t a good indicator.

A friend just signed up for a 3 month program with an online trainer and nearly everything I’ve heard so far just has me shaking my head in disbelief – for a 150 lb woman, this trainer is suggesting 155 grams of protein a day. What? It’s just stupid. Guess we will see if that is right for my friend or if she just gags on all that protein.

Lifestyle and priorities are a huge factor so some general guidelines might be helpful. “Stop eating garbage” is helpful advice across the board I think, but many people can even debate about what is garbage. Just getting people to think about their food choices and consider what they are eating is a huge and helpful step for most.

I agree with Sure because I disagree with one part of what she said. Nutrition is a very exact science, so exact there are no guaranteed one size fits all systems.
To give some idea for a bit of a laugh I used one of the BMI calculators online. Height, weight, gender, that will be 1,887 calories a day for you sir. It did say the system was aimed at average, not fat or fit but I would disappear with that intake. My actual intake is over 4,000 a day and I people don’t view me as fat.

This may sound like a cop-out answer but it really isn’t.
I would say it is a case by case basis depending on the client and the trainer.

Let’s be honest – First: Not all trainers are the same.
The certifications are not equal to each other and I see personal trainers everyday leading clients down a wrong path of bad technique and/or not even paying attention to them.
Just acting as a $$$ factory.

Also clients come in various categories –
On one end you have the people who want to take charge of their own health.
They often want to be taught the science and theory and they take that new knowledge to change their own eating habits

Then we have the helpless souls that want everything done for them …..
How many times have you heard …… “Just tell me what to do and what to eat”
Statistically this group often does not have the best track record for long term success.

Yes, nutrition is a science — but at the same time, it is often made to sound more complex than it really is.
We basically have 3 macronutrients to balance and the other micronutrients that need to be accounted for.

Once you do some quick calculations it is easy to get somebody on the right track with a good balance of lean proteins, complex carbs and essential fats.
It’s really pretty simple for the average person trying to get in good shape.

Now if we are designing a diet program for a pro bodybuilder during his 16 week lead up to a contest, then THAT is a different story.

So if a trainer is comfortable in his knowledge , is covered by the usual medical and legal disclaimers and his client is totally clueless as to the basics of nutrition —- I think only good can come from getting them on the right track with a designed plan.

And of course as Old Man properly pointed out ….. formulas like BMI are total crap.
Inaccurate and really no basis in science
In fact many people that are fit will calculate out as Obese using these flawed formulas.

I myself calculate out over 30 for BMI just to give one example of how useless these kinds of mathematical theoretical calculations are.
Forget the scale, forget BMI, forget the BMR formulas ……… the MIRROR tells the truth.

Michael Spitzer
Author
Fitness at 40,50,60 and Beyond

I’ve had this discussion with a lot of trainers online. The short answer I’d give is it depends. This is a hazy issue.

The first thing I’d like to point out is that if a client wants to dramatically change their physique, they NEED to learn about nutrition and change their diets. There’s no getting around that.

Should their trainer be the person they get their diet advice from? Depends a lot on the trainer, the client, and the trainer:client relationship.

I did 3 semesters of nutritional studies during my 4 semester Diploma of Fitness. As such, when trainers tell me that giving nutritional advice beyond the basic “don’t eat like stupid person” is outside of my field of practice, I find that a to be a significant professional insult. FFS, we spent much less time learning how to test fitness or develop exercise programs or instruct exercises or deliver personal training sessions (you know, the stuff that we actually do in all our sessions) than we did learning about nutrition.

In saying that, different trainers have different levels of nutritional competence. I’m absolutely confident in my ability to write a diet plan for someone who has no medical issues, in accordance with their goals. It was a requirement for my Cert IV that I do this with a real client in order to pass my course and become qualified. I wouldn’t, however, provide the same service for someone with a medical issue that could be effected by diet. In fact, it’s unlikely that I would provide this service for someone who is healthy, because if I give you a diet plan, there’s a dietitian out there who could do a much better job at it than I could, and there’s a very high chance that if I did it you wouldn’t adhere to it anyway. On the other hand, if I give you general nutritional advice related to your goals, and offer some tips on how to implement that advice, you can figure out a way that works for you to get your diet on track.

There are trainers with much better nutritional knowledge than me. There are trainers with much worse nutritional knowledge than me. To be fair, there are much better trainers than me, and there are much worse trainers than me. Should the trainers who are generally not as good at this as me just not train people? Or should they operate within their strengths and develop broader, deeper knowledge so that they can do better/more? Trainers shouldn’t be giving out bad nutritional information. That’s a given. And for plenty of trainers, that means they shouldn’t give out nutritional advice, because they don’t have the knowledge (hopefully they know they don’t have the knowledge, so that they can know to either open a book or shut up and refer on).

But once again, if you’re aiming to change your physique, which 90% of clients are after, you need to change your diet. Diet isn’t an elective, it’s mandatory. Since this is critical for clients to get results, as a PT I can’t justify not having sufficient nutritional knowledge to be able to give sound advice to the majority of clients. I NEED to have this knowledge because THEY NEED to have this knowledge.

Originally Posted by Sure!

I’m not a trainer, nor have I been a regular client, but as someone who is long-term committed to fitness (method varies according to current goal/focus), who reads about food and nutrition for pleasure and knowledge, who regularly participates in forum discussions, and whose spouse does the same leading to many conversations at home, I have to say most PT’s should not be giving advice (and what I overhear in my gym seems rather suspect although admitedly I’m not getting the whole “plan”).

The thing is, the same thing won’t work for every body and there is so much mis-information around. Nutrition is just not an exact science and the way one person responds to certain foods/macro’s can be hugely different than another. For example, when a body is insulin resistant (and in the US something like 80% of overweight people and 30% of normal weight people are insulin resistant) the way that body responds to carbs is much different than someone who is not insulin resistant. How is a PT going to know, blood glucose isn’t a good indicator.

A friend just signed up for a 3 month program with an online trainer and nearly everything I’ve heard so far just has me shaking my head in disbelief – for a 150 lb woman, this trainer is suggesting 155 grams of protein a day. What? It’s just stupid. Guess we will see if that is right for my friend or if she just gags on all that protein.

Lifestyle and priorities are a huge factor so some general guidelines might be helpful. “Stop eating garbage” is helpful advice across the board I think, but many people can even debate about what is garbage. Just getting people to think about their food choices and consider what they are eating is a huge and helpful step for most.

In the instance of your friend, 1g protein/lb bodyweight/day is a fairly common rule of thumb. There are a lot of individual studies which refute the 1g/lb guideline, but there was also a meta-analysis done a little while back (I think it was about a year or two ago) which looked at all the seemingly contradictory information about the effects of protein intake. It found that the studies which said “more protein =/= better results” had such a small addition that it made perfect sense for there to be no significant difference, while the studies which said “more protein = better results” had a significant enough addition of protein to show a significant difference in results. And it turned out that 1g/lb worked out to be a pretty good dose for getting improved results without entering diminishing returns/problem territory.

In saying that, so long as you’re consuming enough protein to meet your health requirements (which is only about 0.5-0.6g/lb off the top of my head), you’ll be alright…but up to double that minimum standard does appear more effective for athletic development, at least based on this meta-analysis.

Of course, all sources about how much protein you should consume tend to come from someone trying to sell something. A really helpful resource I had back in my Diploma days (I can’t remember where this information came from, unfortunately), prescribed something like 0.8-1g/kg for sedentary people, 1.2-1.4 for endurance athletes, and 1.4-1.7 for strength athletes. Vegan websites seem to have cottoned onto this information, but take the sedentary prescription and say that’s what everyone should be eating. They’re selling something. Up the other extreme end of the spectrum, the makers of Max-OT prescribe (IIRC) 53% of all macro-nutrients come from protein, which, on a 4,000kcal/day diet, is a bit. Did I mention that Max-OT is a program made by a supplement company? The groups that recommend 1g/lb (or 1.7g/kg) are busy trying to sell strength programs/equipment/gyms rather than special diets. Everyone’s selling something. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it gets you thinking about motives, and what’s in it for the person giving the advice. For the trainer/gym owner, if they don’t make a cent out of food/supplements and get paid on the basis of people achieving their goals, then maybe their incentive for recommending a certain amount of protein is that it will actually support your goals. They could still be wrong, but it’s certainly more noble to try and sell something to someone so that things will work out for them than to try and sell something to them that will either hinder their goals or will do nothing to help them.