As a fitness professional, we’ve made it our job and personal business to concern ourselves with the health and wellness of others. But what about our own fitness?

When you’re always programming workouts for clients, tracking progress, calculating stats, running camps and so on, it can become easy to lose track of your own health and fitness goals. So, how do make sure that we prioritize our own self-care and maintain a healthy balance between the time we take care of our family and clients and the time we use to take care of ourselves.

Practice What You Preach

Let’s be honest, we tell our clients about the importance of prioritizing their own health and sometimes we don’t even take our own advice.

We say things like “you can’t pour from an empty cup” or “you can’t give what you don’t have”, and—my personal favorite—“you have to take care of yourself, in order to take care of others”. Yep, I say all those to my clients and yep, I still have to figure out how to balance life in a way that allows for me to take care of me!

Quite frankly, some days I just want to stay in the bed and skip the workout altogether. Some days, I actually do. Most days, I get up between 4:30 – 5:30 am and I go after it before the husband or the twins wake up because it helps me to refocus and re-center and prepare for the day ahead of me.

Treat Yourself the Way You’d Treat a Client

How do we as fitness professionals continue to make our own health priority number one? Well first, we treat ourselves like we treat our clients!

We take caring for our clients SERIOUS! So much so, that we will spend hours planning their program, hours researching medical conditions so that we can best create the right program for them, hours making calls doing check-ins and follow-ups and even more hours with the clients during the workout! You are your first client! Period!

Find Your Source of Accountability

Secondly, have a mentor or another trainer (or group of trainers) that you are accountable to.

Greatness makes greatness! If you want to be the best at your business, you position yourself around great trainers, great entrepreneurs, and great people. It is no different with your own fitness.

One of the things I’ve recently done is connect myself with a group of trainers that do outdoor boot camps. Not only do I go to learn from them, but I also go to work out. I’m out in the community working out with people of all fitness levels, at the same time learning from some of the best trainers and these trainers don’t take it easy on me because I’m a colleague. NOPE! They hold me to a higher standard, they push me to be my best self and they pour back into me the things that I pour out to my clients every day! We all need that!

Carve Out Some Time for You

Thirdly, schedule your own work out the same way you schedule your clients. Carve out time each day for yourself and your work out.

It needs to be intentional! I’m not negating that we do need to be spontaneous sometimes, I’m just simply trying to get us to understand that we have to be our own client! We have to do the things that we teach and instruct our clients to do and do those things relentlessly in order to stay on top of our own personal goals. Plan, program, and execute!

Make Time to Rest and Recover

Lastly, we need to take time to recover! I mean, think about it, you are responsible for so many people: your clients, your spouse, your kids and maybe even a few pets. You are not the Energizer Bunny, you can’t just keep going and going with no break! You’ll burn out!

So, just like you have to plan your workouts, you have plan your rest and recovery! We know that recovery is just as much an important part of any great fitness plan. You are not different, you need time for yourself, by yourself, to detach from all the daily tasks and all the responsibility of each client! It is necessary and I’m sure well earned, so take it! Take a vacation! Take a break! Take some time off! If you do that, you’ll come back refreshed and renewed, ready to run full throttle at all the things in front of you!

You’re no different than your clients really. You’re a person, with a lot of things to do, and a lot of responsibility and a lot of people looking to you for wisdom and advice. Your clients look to you for the example and they probably think that you are a superhero, but you’re not! You’re human and you need to make yourself a top priority because you’re just as important.