Conor Hogan from Gravity Fitness, Raheny, Dublin 5. Today I will be taking about the nutrition certification I am completing at the moment.
Nutrition coaching helps enable you to maximise your health potential. It helps you make the most of your health and assists you in addressing any healthy eating concerns you may have. Nutrition coaching is specific to the individual, and it recognises that you can often have unique dietary and nutritional requirements and preferences.
Good nutritional advice can help you improve and maintain your health, putting you in control of your nutritional needs and overall well-being. Each individual is unique and instead of a ‘one size fits all approach’, should be recommend a personalised plan centered on their own wants and needs and what’s achievable based on personal food preferences and lifestyle factors.
Coaching is a process used to facilitate individual change and personal development. The emphasis is on looking to future goals and being proactive to achieve success and recognise opportunities as they arise. This enables you to invent the future you want.
Why Precision Nutrition is so good, as opposed to other nutritional courses, is because they are the gold-standard when it comes to nutritional coaching and imparts a huge array of knowledge throughout the entire course, leaving you with so much information when it comes to helping your clients. And not only that, they offer plenty in terms of continuing education too, so the possibilities are immense when it comes to studying with them.
The Precision Nutrition textbook is broken up into an introduction chapter and 2 separate units: Nutritional Science and Nutritional Practice. Each of the 18 chapters (1 intro chapter, 9 chapters on Nutritional Science, and 8 on Nutritional Practice) contain case studies at the end to help you understand the information provided within that chapter better. The first section, “Nutritional Science”, covers exactly what it says, nutritional science. In it you will find the science you need to understand nutrition and how the body uses all the nutrients we provide for it. The second section, however, is where I believe the real value of this certification comes in. In this section you are presented with the knowledge needed to plan for how to deal with any unique challenges and obstacles clients may present and the best ways to work towards success in regard to their goals. This second section brings the science from the first one together with strategies to deal with real world issues like client information gathering, monitoring, assessment, client compliance and client education.
The real beneficiaries of this though, are the clients themselves. They will be the ones taking full advantage of all the information while talking to the coaches when it comes to nutritional needs, how their lifestyle factors affect these needs, overcoming any obstacles that they feel they may have, and how best to put them on the road towards their own success.