About the Lifestyle Fitness Coach Certification Text Book

Lifestyle Fitness Coaching by James Gavin, Ph.D.

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.

Take this fast quiz to see how well you understand your clients' motivational strategies and personal goals.

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.

About the Author
James Gavin, PhD, has been designing and delivering training programs in lifestyle fitness coaching to health fitness professionals since 1998. Gavin, a professor and graduate program director in the department of applied human sciences at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, has been a consultant to health fitness centers for 20 years and a practitioner of counseling psychology for more than 30 years. Dr. Gavin was awarded a Diplomate in Counseling Psychology by the American Board of Professional Psychology, the highest award in counseling psychology recognizing achievement and excellence in the practice of psychology. He has written and researched extensively concerning fitness personality matching since the early 1980s and has presented around the world at health fitness conferences since 1985. Dr. Gavin is also the co-author of Psychology for Health/Fitness Professionals.

Table of Contents
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments

Chapter 1. Making the Case for Lifestyle Fitness Coaching

* What Do We Know?
* Forces and Counterforces for Active Living
* Understanding the Evolution of Coaching
* Toward a Definition of Lifestyle Fitness Coaching
* Getting From Here to There!

Chapter 2.Coaching and Active Living

* Understanding the Modern-Day Exercise Mandate
* Dreams and Visions for the Future of Fitness
* The Nature of Change
* An In-depth Analysis of the Psychosocial Structure of Sport and Fitness
* Choice, Commitment, and Change: Essential Ingredients for Coaching

Chapter 3.The Coaching Relationship

* Promoting Growth Through Relationship
* What Are the Characteristics of Effective Coaches?
* Why Do People Want to Be Coaches?
* The Coach’s Power to Influence
* Understanding the Relational Underworld: Transference
* Gaining Wisdom

Chapter 4. Goals, Boundaries, and Ethics in Coaching

* Goals
* Boundaries
* Ethics
* An Essential Framework for Coaching

Chapter 5. Coaching Stages and Processes

* Stages of the Coaching Process
* Prochaska’s Transtheoretical Model (TTM)
* Taylor’s Learning Process Model
* Endings and New Beginnings
* Reflections on Stages, Phases, and Endings

Chapter 6. Building Rapport and Gathering Information

* The Unspoken World of Communication
* Active Listening to Enhance Understanding
* Questioning That Promotes Understanding and Builds Rapport
* Frameworks for Considering Client Information
* Cornerstones of Effective Coaching Technique

Chapter 7. Developing Insight and Deepening Understanding

* Focusing
* Immediacy
* Reflection of Meaning
* Coaching for Insight and Discovery

Chapter 8. Influencing Clients in Change Processes

* Challenging Skills
* Solution Skills
* Power and Responsibility in Influencing Clients

Chapter 9. Coaching Dialogues

* Understanding Coaching Dialogue
* Two Coaching Dialogues
* Effective Dialogue and the Need for Practice

Chapter 10. Assessments and Guides for Coaching

* What Coaches Need to Know
* MAPS—A Model of Sport and Fitness Matching for Lifestyle Fitness Coaches
* Adding Value Through Assessment

Chapter 11. Applications of Guides in Coaching

* Understanding the MAPS Inventory
* Client Reports Based on the MAPS Inventory
* Coaching Dialogues Initiated With the MAPS Inventory
* Maintaining Rapport in Using Assessments

Chapter 12. Opportunities and Directions in Lifestyle Fitness Coaching

* Your Expertise As a Coach
* Opportunities and Growth in Lifestyle Fitness Coaching
* Your Life As a Coach