San Diego Personal Trainer Shares Secrets

A trainer friend of mine was asking a few questions on working with a obese client. I thought I would share my response. Please feel free to comment.

Her response: "I recently starting training my first female obese client (my previous experience was mainly with more athletic men and women.) She is very detrained, and while I feel her workouts to date have been high quality and fun, the workouts are staring to lack the variety I usually offer to my other clients. I don't want her to get bored...Any Suggestions?"

Kevin,
"Thanks for the help...I am training her 3 days/wk. She generally does about a 1/2 hour of cardio on an elliptical machine (probably will stay with this because she recently recovered from an ankle injury and seems to enjoy it). She is 5'2" and about 185lbs. Her muscles are pretty detrained, however she is pretty flexible for a person in her condition. I have her on an alternating push-pull schedule. An Example of some of the things we are doing (keep in mind I have been using both unilateral and Bi-lateral variations when possible):

-body weight squats (leaning against fitness ball on wall for support)
-Bench Press
-Incline Bench
-Standing Shoulder Press
-Lat Pulldowns
-Russian Twists
-Biceps curls
-Tricep Pushdown
-Deadlifts and Goodmornings (Extremely light weight, and while usually I wouldn't try something like this with someone as detrainer as her, her flexibility however makes these exercises applicable)
-Exercise ball crunches
-Standing cable crunches
-Various planks (4pt, side)

Any suggestions would be appreciated!"

My response: Her goal is lose weight correct? Have you looked at her menu and what's she's eating. This could really help her in the future for continued weight loss. I guarantee her losing weight will keep her motivated.

As far as workouts, I would train the whole body for each day. I like your workouts, but I think there are some variations that you could do. How about multi-muscle group exercises? Like a squat with a bicep curl, or even a squat with bicep curl and shoulder press. This really gets the heart rate up and burns more calories than doing one exercise. Even the bench press, do the chest press on stability ball instead. Also add some balance exercises. A few new exercises per week might just do the trick.

Have you asked her what she likes? This is sometimes eye opening. The things we think our clients dislike, may just be the thing they liked the most.

Hope that helps