When Athena and I founded the IFPA 30 years ago, we created a Mission: "To help every man, woman, and child lead a longer, healthier, and happier life." We explored every non-invasive protocol, using exercise, nutrition, healthy lifestyle, sleep, and stress management, and used every practical method to teach those protocols.

While most IFPA-certified personal trainers rely on 1, 2, or possibly a few of the 12 IFPA Components of Fitness, and some IFPA-certified sports conditioning specialists rely on many more, or possibly most, if not ALL of those components, rarely do I see any trainers, medical, or healthcare professionals teaching Health Protocols to their clients or patients. I write this article now to help motivate our IFPA professionals to put on their "teaching hats," and begin to teach their clients what they need to do to maximize their health and by extension...improve their fitness performance.

There are a great number of health protocols to improve health, and undoubtedly, you have individual favorites that I may not address below, but please keep in mind that the 12 protocols listed below are among those that a great percentage of our populations violate, and must be taught and corrected to achieve our IFPA Mission. Personal trainers who go above and beyond what is required of them in the gym are the ones most likely to keep clients for a lifetime and achieve great success in reaching their clients' goals.

Proper and daily oral hygiene. I have previously written an extensive IFPA FitBit describing in detail proper hygiene to keep your gums healthy; please refer to that article for the details, but as a reminder, the research I reported on in that article showed that many chronic disorders begin with gum disease, a disease easily prevented using the protocols I detailed in the article. Proper oral hygiene includes more than brushing and flossing your teeth. It is highly recommended you use a water pic and finish with a quality gum prevention mouthwash rinse to prevent gum disease.

Safe and effective exercise prescriptions. Exercise prescriptions are built on 4 factors: Frequency, Intensity, Time, and Type (or Mode). Like drug prescriptions, if the dose is too low, you will not get the effect you are looking for, but if the dose is too high, you run the risk of overtraining, injury, and high dropout rates, or worse. Finding the correct dose is critical to achieving your Mission. Please review, on a regular basis, your IFPA "Book on Personal Training" and all that you learned in your IFPA personal trainer certification course, to ensure you are developing the safest and most effective programming for your clients.

Safe and effective nutrition prescriptions. While we are always walking a "tightrope" when it comes to advising our clients on nutrition, I have yet to meet a client that is not in need of some level of education on what makes up "healthy eating." IFPA certified personal trainers can supply some foundational education on what is standard for healthy eating practices without trying to usurp the legal authority of licensed Registered Dieticians. The IFPA Sports Nutrition certification courses go a long way to assisting you on how to cut through a lot of the marketing hype, "Fad-Diets," and misinformation that often deluge our clients with unsafe and ineffective weight-loss plans, and make a strong effort to provide your clients with healthy and wise advice.

Major addictions: i.e., drug use, both recreational and performance-enhancing drugs (PED), alcohol abuse, smoking, and tobacco use (I have warned you at length in previous FitBits about these major addictions), vs "minor" addictions: excessive TV, social media, surfing the web, cell phone/texting, and other "technological" addictions.

We all know people who are cemented to their cell phones and other technologies. Technology is both a blessing and a curse. It can be a blessing when used to improve our lives. It becomes a curse when it interferes with our fitness plans or our real-life, real-world interactions with friends, family, and loved ones! Athena and I would often look around while out to dinner to see how many people were "texting" instead of paying attention to their date, or even their family. I have seen, far too many times, a mother, father, and their children all staring at the phones instead of having loving, family interactions!

We never had to "order" our family to not bring their cell phones to the table. It was already understood in Athena's house that cell phones are never permitted to interfere with family time, and your household should be the same. In many ways, families and friends were closer, had more meaningful relationships, and much less loneliness and depression before cell phones were invented. Ask your clients: "How much time do you spend on your cell/day?" If your clients admit to more than one hour/day, outside of professional, work, or career requirements, perhaps you need to think about an intervention that limits their cell phone or online time to improve their human interactions.

Late afternoon caffeine use. Caffeine can remain in your system for 9 hours or more. While you may only feel the energy boost from your morning coffee for a mere 2-3 hours, its effectiveness can interrupt your sleep schedule if you are drinking coffee or caffeinated drinks into late afternoon. Even for those who say: "I can fall asleep after drinking a cup of coffee," while that may be true, the problem is that the coffee will prevent you from achieving the deep, restful, restorative sleep we need each night.

Fluctuating sleeping schedules. You can achieve far better, far healthier, and far more effective sleep if you set a scheduled time to go to sleep and awake. Much is made of getting 7-8 hours sleep each night for good health. You need to go a step further with your personal training clients and get them to go to sleep and awake at set times, i.e., go to sleep at 10 p.m. and wake up at 6 a.m.

When you give your body a scheduled sleep pattern, you will have a far more effective and quality sleep pattern where you will achieve all the levels of sleep needed for good health: Rapid Eye Movement (REM), Light, and Deep (Restorative) sleep. Your body's biorhythm or circadian rhythm requires a relatively strict schedule to maximize your sleep quality. That also means "catching up on sleep" on the weekends is another way to interrupt your circadian rhythm. Our bodies developed long before the "weekend" was ever thought of. Go to sleep and wake up at the same time every day!

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