Personal Trainer Singapore – Coach Jonathan Wong

Anybody who excels in their profession has somebody to give credit to, somebody to thank, somebody to appreciate for their success. While there is lots of studying that you can do on your own (after all, I have a book and education material collection worth a small car….) it is the moments of inspiration that come from being around the industry leaders who are the best in the world at what they do that truly allow my mind to expand by allowing me to see just how much I DO NOT KNOW! And how much more there is to learn. Just like Stephen Hawking wrote, we really are standing on the shoulders of Giants.

I’m honored to count these guys as my teachers and mentors. After attending their courses and seminars, I can truly say that all our Singapore personal training clients and boot camp members benefit alot in their health, weight loss, fat burning  and strength building goals. Unfortunately, in Singapore, these guys are not very well known to the general public, but only to those who are serious about getting the best information in the world!

Coach Charles Poliquin – Olympic strength and conditioning coach. This guy knows a lot about almost any training or health topic out there. And his certifications are the hardest to obtain in the fitness industry. In fact to reach level 5 (the highest level) you need to produce a medalist (verified by the sport council) in either the world championships or the Olympic games. I am currently the only level 3 coach in Asia, that means that we have coached people to national teams. Am going for level 4 later in 2010.

Dr. Mark Houston – Cardiovascular health specialist. This guy literally “wrote the book” about how to use nutrients and lifestyle to combat high blood pressure, cholesterol issues, and all heart/cardiovascular health conditions.

Dr. Robert Rakowski – Functional Medicine Doctor. This guy is a former US marine, but has applied the discipline to study of how the human body works. I saw him treat a person for a shoulder problem… and found out that it was his LIVER that was too toxic and causing the pain…this doctor taught me alot of what I know about detoxification and cancer as well.

Coach Pierre Roy – Pierre has been coaching the Canadian Olympic weightlifting team for 35 years and has the sharpest eye for the details of training. He corrects high speed lifts to the accuracy of 0.5 cm! and the next time the lifter does it, the weight goes up effortlessly. His methods of coaching that I learned save clients HUNDREDS of hours of learning technique. Things that used to take weeks to learn, now take minutes. That’s value for money everyone!

I am constantly looking for great mentors to learn from. It really helps clients get results faster and better! And it helps keep the Genesis Performance Center Singapore best health & fitness center and personal training Gym.

I just read a study published in the medical journal “Archives of Internal Medicine” Jan 25, 2009. Yes it was done on women aged 65-75 and it divided them into 2 groups. One group did strength training with dumbells, and another group did “balance and toning” exercises. These were the results…

“A year later, the women who did strength training had improved their performance on tests of so-called executive function by 10.9 percent to 12.6 percent, while those assigned to balance and toning exercises experienced a slight deterioration — 0.5 percent. The improvements in the strength training group included an enhanced ability to make decisions, resolve conflicts and focus on subjects without being distracted by competing stimuli.”

You know the worst part – those who wasted time on “balance and toning” did not even maintain their full function.

And in these studies, usually, even the strength training is average at best, and the results were still good. Imagine if the strength training was conducted by a well qualified personal trainer… I suspect the results would be even better.

Why? The key indicator in quality of life in senior citizens (actually I think it applies to ALL people!) is muscular size and strength/power.

• Size because the more muscle mass you have the more immune system resources you can buffer – i.e. you don’t get sick
• Strength/Power because the stronger you are, the less likely you will get injured. This means, no falling down, no broken bones, no trips to the hospital and no long term bed rest i.e. no fast degeneration!

The problem – as mentioned in this study, is that senior females DON’T OFTEN DO STRENGTH TRAINING, the very form of exercise that will help them. But that is why they have many health issues! So it’s not ok to be “average”. Average is sick and dependent. Be normal! It is normal to be energetic, mentally sharp, lean and strong – at any age.

Kahyin, one of our senior clients warms up with some jumps - she DOES look way younger than her peers and is way healthier! This study is right!

Ok, many of my Singapore personal training and fitness boot camp clients as me if fruit juice is ok for them to drink… I mean, fruits are healthy right? so why not just juice them and get all their goodness… and as an added benefit you can have so many fruits in one glass… my answer (after a short chuckle)…NO, No, NOOOO…unless you want to get fat, diabetic and brain damaged!

Clients come to me to lose weight, burn fat, get healthy and improve their performance and strength… so of course NO is the answer.

Pretty Nice Ads, Pretty Ugly Results

Why?

Firstly fruit juice is high in sugar and low in fiber (even the most organic, healthy ones) – that means that it’s just as bad as any other processed and overly sweetened cola or syrup based drink. Almost nobody can get a healthy and lean physique drinking those… and nobody can get a great physique drinking fruit juice either.

It combines all the “bad parts” of fruit – the high sugar, concentrates it and gives you many servings of this in 1 glass – it takes several apples (4-5) to make 1 glass of apple juice. When was the last time you ate 5 apples in one sitting? Thats the amount of sugar you are taking in!

It takes away the good stuff – the skins and fiber in fruits is gone! These actually slow digestion if you eat the whole fruit. That makes the impact of the sugar less on your body when it is digested slowly and released slowly into the body.

Most fruit juices in coffee shops and hawker centers are “enhanced” with sugar syrup – oops thats not in real fruit!

Finally fruit juice commercial production is EVIL. Fruits are very heavily sprayed with poisons to protect them from bugs (its actually because the soil they are grown in is so bad that artificial fertilizers are used which do not provide the plant the nutrients to be healthy and have its OWN defense against bugs – thus pesticides are needed)…

Do you think fruits are lovingly plucked and gently squeezed one by one to make juice? Of course not. They are crushed by the thousands, skin and rind and all and the juices drained out. Oops some pesticide is left on the skin… oops… its in your juice.

Most pesticides are nervous system and brain toxic. That is BAD.

I prefer to have full nerve function and brain function. I prefer to be lean and healthy. I don’t drink fruit juice!  And any Singapore personal trainer who knows his/her nutrition facts won’t tell you to either.

I know that we need about 8-12 servings of fruits and veggies to stay healthy, alkalanize our body, and get a  wide spectrum of anti-oxidants. That is why I use a organic veggie and fruit extract that keeps the nutrients but does not give us the high sugar content. I also use a variety of organic fibers to keep the digestive tract healthy. We used to be able to get great nutrition from fruits… but fruit today is not what it used to be – its low in nutrients, genetically modified to be sweet, and covered in pesticides… we should all use a greens/fruit supplement and a fiber to stay healthy. Contact us to see if we have any in stock so you can get the nutrition your body needs to maximize its potential.

There are so many definitions of fitness, and it means different things to different people.

• For a weightlifter it means that you should be able to lift as heavy a weight as possible from the floor, to overhead. For a soccer or basketball player it means that you would be playing at a highly competitive level even late in 2nd half or 4th quarter.
• For a triathlete it would mean improving on your personal time (swimming, running and cycling suddenly become easy if you are undergoing our triathlete training program)
• For a golfer it might be putting 15m on your drive (which should take us just weeks to help you with)
• For a “regular” man or woman who works a “normal” 9-6pm job, fitness may be looking good, having good energy and productivity, and having the ability to do whatever tasks life throws at him or her.

And even for this “regular” person which is, most of us, he or she may have such different goals.

• Lose Fat
• Lose Weight
• Bulk Up/Build Muscle
• Lower Cholesterol and improve other indicators of health
• Prevent osteoporosis
• Have energy to chase their kids around
• Overcome diabetes… and so on…

Different goals need different programs, techniques and planning to achieve.

It is best to go after one goal at a time for best results. (Don’t be fooled by programs that claim to do everything all at once for everybody!)

Even if there are too many “problems” to solve, we go after the most challenging and biggest one first.  E.g. if a person needs to run faster for his sport but is overweight, we target his oversize tummy as a priority because in the big scheme of things, that will give more benefits.

What to go for first, how long before you change “target”, how to best go about each of these goals and what method would work best FOR YOU is how we design our personal training programs for clients.

To get into the Singapore’s best personal training / fitness coaching sg program, just click on the link here.

NOTE: Even things like exactly how long each set should last, must be customized for your body type for maximum results?

To be technically excellent a personal trainer in Singapore or elsewhere will need to have good understanding of:

• Biomechanics (how the body moves in space)
• Kinesiology (how the joints move etc)
• Nutrition
• Endocrinology (hormonal system)
• Manual Therapy (massage, rehab, trigger point work etc)
• Injury Prevention
• Performance Enhancement

And I’ll probably think of more if I really sat down to do it. The body is such an awesome piece of creation that we will probably never get to the end of it.

Oh yeah, don’t forget that it’s not just good enough to know. A personal trainer must distill out the important points and teach/coach them to a client.

I believe all this is too much to teach in any reasonable amount of time. It needs to be learnt over years of consistent study and practice. This cannot be driven by any certification. It has to come from an intrinsic sense of excellence. Being the very best that you can be.

I know I’m not perfect but I do want to make the best use of whatever God given ability I have. If that means spending several hundred bucks a month on books, dvds, seminars etc. So be it.

“Who we are is God’s gift to us, who we become is our gift to God” so we might as well be the best we can be!

Maybe one day personal training will be a professional qualification. That will be a happy day for the fitness industry. But meanwhile I will “act as if” that means that I will “act as if” we are a professional organization and industry. That is how things come into being eventually.

The research statistics are pretty scary. During our life we have about an 80% chance of having back pain. Sure its not a Singaporean study but I see no reason to think that we are different.

After taking a look at some of the ways “real life” people I know in Singapore that have hurt their backs…it’s something that we as personal trainers and fitness professionals MUST take note of and prevent. Here are some of the ways that people I know have been hurt.

1.    Back pain after Sneezing (this one was a slipped disc that required long term medical care)
2.    Back pain after helping an old lady carry her shipping.
3.    Back pain while slipping on a moist badminton court
4.    Back pain while helping a friend shift furniture

As usual I’m a “be a part of the solution” kind of guy, and actually I study a lots of material specially so that my staff and I at the Genesis Performance Center can help our clients deal with, prevent and recover from back pain so that they are back to full speed, full strength and full health.

Back pain is frustrating because it makes us feel old and immobile and I dare say …. even helpless! It is only responsible for fitness and performance professionals to help people avoid it!

This is why our personal training programs, our sports specific programs and our group fitness bootcamps all take into account the clients current and past back pain problems.

Unfortunately there is money to be made in the Singapore fitness industry (or just about anywhere, but in Singapore it is not a very regulated industry).

Nothing wrong with that!

I do make a living helping people of all ages achieve their health, fitness, performance and appearance goals.

But if only there was more truth being spread, there would be far more people getting excellent results form their fitness program.
I was at a lunch with some of my father’s friends. Because of my experiences as a personal trainer and sports performance professional, I got asked many health, sports and fitness related questions.

Sad to say, I feel that we (myself included) as fitness professionals in Singapore, have not done that great a job so fat at spreading the word about what are the truths and what are the lies that will affect the average person who wants to maintain their health and quality of life.

My dad’s friends were educated professionals in the finance industry but they had many of the same misconceptions that happen on internet forums filled with 14 year old kids.
Some of their misconceptions:

• Back health and core training – more crunches for you? NO!
• The basics of good nutrition – is a calorie a calorie? NO!
• What should a training program look like? – From warm up to program design…
• Jogging, that is what keeps me in shape – If you like it and have good running mechanics sure, but for most people, that isn’t the case (and it isn’t the best use of your time)
• More food makes me fat – More food makes you leaner! Unless its BAD food.

Not everybody once thought that the earth was round. Clearing up misconceptions takes time. Good thing we have the internet and since I can’t speak to everybody person to person, I can do my part by writing good articles that can hopefully save you time, money and injury!

The best way to get the real deal on fitness is to join our women fitness boot camp, our atheltes performance training or our personal training programs!

In the final part we shall talk about guarantees. Yes nothing in life is guaranteed. BUT there should be some buyer security when it comes to something as important as your body. Come on even your MP3 Player has a 1 year guarantee (with reasonable conditions).
All fitness places and personal trainers in Singapore that are serious about the results of their clients will have a guarantee. It’s not a “oh just do what you feel and anytime you can get your money back” kind. Rather it’s in the sign-up contract.

If you:

• Train the way we ask you to
• Modify your diet the way we ask you to
• Rest and recover the right way
• Use The supplements that are required for your genetic and hormonal profile

And this doesn’t work - It’s MY fault! you deserve a refund! I can’t pay a person’s time but the least I can do as a professional is to return their money.

On the other side of a coin, a client who just comes in to fool around (I have never had one like that but in theory its possible) I reserve the right to release him or her! Because that is not somebody that should be joining a serious and professional personal training service.

To see if you are the kind of client that is suitable for us, and if we are the personal training service that is suitable for you, visit www.personaltrainersingapore.com