Diet and exercise go hand-in-hand when it comes to achieving fitness goals. Diet plays an important role in achieving and maintaining weight goals, building muscle, and improving overall health and well-being.
As people become more health conscious, new dietary trends emerge including diets such as keto, paleo, and intermittent fasting. You may already be familiar with some of these. Understanding these trends and how they affect the body is important for you to know so you can help your future clients achieve their health and fitness goals.
Why is it important to know about dietary trends?
Knowing about dietary trends also allows personal trainers to make appropriate recommendations and modifications to their clients' nutrition plans. For example, a personal trainer may need to adjust a client's protein intake to support muscle growth or recommend carbohydrate intake before a workout to improve performance.
It's also important that as a personal trainer, you feel comfortable helping your clients navigate fad diets and misinformation about nutrition. By staying up to date on the latest dietary trends and research, you can provide clients with accurate and effective guidance for reaching their fitness goals.
Dietary trends are always changing. New trends come about for various reasons, including changes in scientific research, popular media, cultural shifts, and personal beliefs or experiences. It's important for personal trainers to stay current and be aware of the advantages and disadvantages of popular and new dietary trends.
You can stay up-to-date by researching dietary trends, following experts and leaders on social media, reading health and fitness magazines/websites/blogs, and listening to health and fitness podcasts.
For your first assessment you will need to research a dietary practice – use the tips below to help you with sorting through the research that you find.
Assessing resources
How do you distinguish between fact and fiction? The CRAAP method is a mnemonic that can be used to assess the validity of a resource. Basically, can you trust the resource?
CRAAP stands for:
- Currency: This is about the timeliness of the resource. Is it current and up to date? If the resource is too old, it may not be relevant or accurate anymore.
- Relevance: This refers to the relationship between the resource and the research topic or question. Is the resource directly related to the topic or question at hand?
- Authority: This refers to the credibility of the author or publisher of the resource. Are they qualified to write or publish about the topic? Do they have relevant credentials or experience?
- Accuracy: This refers to the correctness of the information presented in the resource. Is the information reliable and accurate? Are sources cited to support the information?
- Purpose: This refers to the intent of the resource. Is it meant to inform, persuade, or entertain? If it's meant to persuade, is it biased or balanced?
By evaluating a resource using the CRAAP method, you can determine if it is a credible and reliable source of information that can be used in your research or decision-making process.
