Lifestyle Fitness Coaching

Lifestyle fitness coaching is an emerging field in the health and fitness industry. Centered on an ongoing and guided process of dialogue, Lifestyle Fitness Coaching offers a systematic approach to help fitness professionals understand their clients' needs, interests, and personal orientations and use the information to direct clients toward achieving their health and personal goals.

Lifestyle Fitness Coaching contains detailed information on coaching dialogues between the health fitness professional and the client, addressing issues such as the types of questions to ask, how to provide feedback effectively, and how to make referrals. The text includes useful information for guiding program development and learning activities that help readers understand the material and relate it to their situations. In addition, an accompanying CD-ROM contains a Matching Activities and Personal Styles (MAPS) Inventory, a validated questionnaire that clients complete to identify their likes and dislikes. The MAPS Inventory software then generates a report that coaches and clients can use to guide the coaching process.

Lifestyle Fitness Coaching presents the necessary skills for professional development and offers a methodology for gathering and analyzing personal information about clients that enables coaches to engage in dialogue about the means and ends of clients' sport and fitness programming. With this text, professionals can do the following:
-Learn the building blocks of information and skills for developing a career as a lifestyle fitness coach

-Appreciate the skills and coaching processes necessary for communicating with clients

-Engage clients in an ongoing process of dialogue informed by comprehensive fitness-related data concerning clients' needs, interests, and background

-Reinforce their understanding and practice their application of the skills presented

-Help clients develop profiles of personal style and related exercise options
This text teaches health fitness professionals how to step into the arena of lifestyle fitness coaching to motivate, guide, inform, and support their clients' personal change processes. The book delineates the bounds of care and advice that coaches should give and helps coaches aid clients in strategizing, planning, and implementing self-change and personal improvement programs. Issues are explored including the coaching relationship; goals, boundaries, and ethics in coaching; coaching stages and processes; and coaching skills. The book also examines assessments, applications, and opportunities and directions in lifestyle fitness coaching.

As such, Lifestyle Fitness Coaching is an invaluable resource for health fitness professionals who want to expand their skills and move toward more enriching and rewarding interactions with their clients.