Why Every Personal Trainer Should Provide Personalized Nutritional Meal Plans.
Giving your clients all the tools to reach their goals means pairing your clients’ workouts with personalized nutrition-focused meal plans.
Nutritional meal plans are a great addition to the advice, motivation, assessment, and physical training programs you provide. They help your clients know what, when and how to eat in order to avoid training plateaus. They take into account things like food preferences, lifestyles and metabolic needs. The best nutritional meal plans not only incorporate a wide variety of foods, but also provide a foundation for healthy eating - whether its for the next week or the next year.
We’ve broken down the three essential steps for creating personalized nutritional meal plans:
- Establish your client’s nutrition needs: track age, height, weight, activity and metabolic needs.
- Identify food and lifestyle preferences: Are there any foods they dislike? Do they have a dietary preference like vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, or low glycemic? Do they follow a paleo, mediterranean or keto lifestyle?
- Pair the nutrition needs + food preferences with your exercise plan. Determine how many meals they should eat each day and how many nutrients they need per meal and snack. Offer foods, recipes and meal ideas that match #1 and #2 above to create a nutritional meal plan.
- To make the idea of creating meal plans for your clients less daunting (and less time consuming), use nutritionist-created detailed meal plans on Evolution Nutrition’s online meal planner or meal planning app.
Evolution Nutrition’s online meal planning software makes your job determining these needs, a seamless and streamlined process. With this cutting edge nutrition software you can create, modify or use the existing meal plans already created in the robust Evolution Nutrition database. This online meal planner with over 1,000 meal plans provides the calories, macronutrients and fluid levels for each meal, the totals for the day and week, and a detailed shopping list, so you truly can plan ahead!
Meal planning helps your clients know how to fuel their bodies before, during or after a workout, as well as the ideal foods to eat the rest of the day. It offers a roadmap for healthy eating, gives recommendations for what food to keep on hand and makes it easier to reach their training goals.
By Lauren Rezende, M.P.H, RD