SHOULD TRAVELLING EXECUTIVES BE INVESTING INTO REMOTE HEALTH COACHING?

There are many obstacles facing the travelling executive when considering their health and fitness.

Picture this, you have a to catch the redeye to an important meeting at short notice. Now, already your stress levels have risen, you’re thinking about the presentation you have to make to the board, your job could hang in the balance. You have already had a busy day at the office and you need to ensure that your presentation is ready for the morning. You skip dinner to catch the flight, substituting your normal home cooked meal for a sandwich bought from the airport. You finally take-off but you can’t sleep because of the corrections you need to make to your presentation. You land having had little sleep and the jet lag is kicking in – but now you have to talk in front of a group of your peers. You regularly exercise but aren’t able to get to the gym for three days trying to recover from the flight there and the flight back. To top it all off this happens three times in ten days, and now you’re in pain from being seated for hours on end, stressed from the pressure, and having to take medication to help with the illness you have caught from the flight.

Not the prettiest picture right?

In a randomised controlled study conducted by Shariat et el (2017), the effects of exercise on musculoskeletal discomforts of office workers were investigated. Now although not directly related, the study shows the importance of exercise for executives in similar sedentary working environments.

Participants (N = 142) in this randomised controlled trial were office workers aged 20–50 years old with neck, shoulders, and lower back pain. They were randomly assigned to either the ergonomic modification group, the exercise group, the combined exercise and ergonomic modification group, or the control group (no-treatment). The exercise training group performed a series of exercises, while the ergonomic group received some modification in the working place. Outcome measures were assessed by the Cornell Musculoskeletal Disorders Questionnaire at baseline, after two, four and six months of intervention.

There were significant results as you can probably imagine. Most notably in the four to six-month period after the intervention, only the exercise group saw significant improvement (p<0.05).

It was concluded that to reduce the occurrence of musculoskeletal disorders in office workers a protocol of stretching and strength exercises should be used.

Now this takes a little clarification, when they say stretching, what is easy to take from this is that you should hold a stretch for several minutes – but this could make the problem worse – what is necessary to interpret is that by stretching we mean loading. In order to strengthen muscle tissue, the tissue needs to be loaded appropriately, that is not to say that “stretching” i.e the lengthening of a muscle or muscle group may not be needed in this situation.

So what can you do about it?

Too often we hear that travelling executives are struggling to look after their health effectively, sometimes due to lack of knowledge around fitness, or they simply aren’t able to find a suitable place to train.

Well all that is becoming a thing of the past. At BaseTraining a client no longer invests into a gym membership. You know the one, the one that takes money from your bank account every month, and you promise that every time it does you will start going, and eventually you lose motivation and quit anyway having wasted thousands of your hard earned pounds. which also begs the question how much will you  pay to not go to the gym?

Have you ever considered that what you may need is a professional coach to help you manage your health and fitness around your busy schedule potentially for the rest of your career?

What do we mean by a professional?

Well, a professional coach is someone that helps executive clients reach their fitness potential. They provide health and fitness coaching that includes advice on nutrition, sleep, lifestyle and stress management, and also provides you with an individually designed fitness program, enabling you not only to train effectively towards your goals, but enables a professional working relationship to develop between you and your coach- a relationship that enables us as the coach to plan for the long term, and the short term, which can include designing workouts that work around your last minute flight across the pond. All this is in support of the overall goal, to help You the traveling executive reach your next promotion, seal the deal with your clients improve your focus, feel and look great doing it.

So if you want to make the changes that you have been craving,

Start by investing into a Professional Coach, scroll back to the top of the page and fill out the form on the top right, you won’t regret it.