The qualifications of your Personal Trainer must be credibly excellent in this complex and often controversial science.

Once you begin to exercise, your physiology adapts accordingly and you will notice changes within you. It is not enough to consult a ‘standard’ dietician, as these professionals invariably generally deal with unexercised people who will benefit from standard nutritional guidelines like Food Pyramid structures and standard RDA’s (Recommended Daily Amount) in vitamin and mineral intake.

Even a newly exercising physiology rapidly becomes one that needs significantly different fuelling and nutritional approaches, to ensure the best results are forthcoming and health and fitness goals are arrived at safely and efficiently.

To address just one aspect of the spectrum that requires focusing upon, when you exercise regularly, a significant metamorphosis occurs. In some cases, antioxidant vitamin supplementation (e.g. extra vitamin C and vitamin E) may well be beneficial in overcoming the exhaustion you feel at the onset of your journey to fitness. Anti-oxidants combat the ‘lipid peroxidation’ (more commonly known as ‘free-radical activity’) that occurs at this time, and help to prevent this cellular destruction within you.

Lipid peroxidation is literally the fats in your cells turning rancid.

When this occurs, the role of vitamin C and E is that of a fighting symbiosis. Vitamin E attacks and neutralises free radicals, whilst part of the role of vitamin C (as well as being a free radical scavenger in its own right) is to repair and re-energise the waste products that E has created amidst the biological conflict taking place.

Post exercise conditions must be noted individually, and with great personalised precision, to ensure maximum benefits are generated by your exercise prescription and wellbeing measures. Too much vitamin C of the Ascorbic acid variety can cause diarrhoea and gastric distress. This, however, is not always the case with the Ester C Ascorbate, a more ‘kindly’ Vitamin C form for the body.  Excessively large dosages of vitamin E, or D-Alpha Tocopherol, which is known as a fat-soluble vitamin, can cause weakness with fatigue and exacerbation of hypertension (high blood pressure).

Your age plays a dramatic role in what is known as bioavailability. This is the term used for how much of what you consume you can actually absorb. The older you are, the less you are able to extract from your food as it passes through your system. At any one time a 10 year old child has over 50% more anti oxidant vitamins in the system than a 50 year old man. An exercising mature person needs even more anti oxidants to combat the extra natural free radical propagation, which is a natural by-product of exercise biochemistry. This is much like exhaust fumes from a car on a necessary journey, and regularly exercising adults must ensure they get their extra dosages to maintain chemical equilibrium and immunological efficiency.
As a guiding principle, an individual below around 40 years of age can absorb 8-12% of the nutrients in the food put before them, whilst those over 40 have a 3-5% nutrient absorbency capability.

Your Trainer must have in-depth knowledge of both standard nutrition and sports nutrition (and know the highly significant differences between them), or he/she will be unable to make comparisons between your past standard nutritional intakes and analyse your present needs. Take the following example, after exercise in some activities; protein requirements escalate, in other activities, less or little difference is appropriate. Why is this so?

In spite of the conflicting evidence of extra protein requirements being unnecessary, proteins are still the basic building blocks of muscular tissue. Consequently, a body builder whose main goal is to increase muscular size (hypertrophy) will need more bricks to build a larger ‘house’. The case for building up large physiques by only consuming average RDAs of protein is widely unsubstantiated. Alternatively, a sprinter or pentathlete would wish to avoid developing lean mass (muscle) to a similarly pronounced degree, as the resultant power to weight ratio shift in their physiologies, due to increased weight would compromise their performance; i.e. they would probably be slower! Hence a more average daily intake of protein is acceptable for their particular purpose.

Similarly, for some who exercise and who’s diets also fail to include enough,  there is a greater need for vitamin C, and whilst standard vitamin C is adequate, Ester-C-Ascorbate would be more effective as it is calcium and water based and therefore more easily absorbed into the system (i.e. has greater bioavailability). These facts can radically affect human colonic stability and stool production, often making a significant difference in a person’s bowel function. This, of course, is particularly important for those who are exercising and suffer IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) or Crohn’s Disease.

Your Trainer must also have extensive and detailed knowledge of medical conditions, to enable his analysis of your intakes to be accurate and effective. If, for example you are on a number of medications and a special diet, lack of quality expertise can cause not only lack of progress, but may also lead to physical regression. This is because the exercise regime instigated physiological changes and demands, which were not anticipated and prepared for by your trainer.

Remember, and be very much aware here, that even if you are a person who regards yourself as healthy, the changes within whilst exercising are still happening. You would still benefit more from your exercise regime with a nutritional expert to guide you in terms of what, how much and how often. Lack of sophisticated technical expertise in this area can be expensive when buying unnecessary, inadequate and inaccurately prescribed supplementation. Furthermore, due caution should be exercised in respect of overdose and the consequences of such incompetence.

There is much to and fro’ing over those who say exercising people can actually get all they need from the food they eat, to efficiently deal with the changes that regular and structured activity brings and those who say this is not so and ‘extras’ not supplied by even the best diets can provide the right amount at the right time in many areas.

In 41 years, I have never seen any professional athlete, competent amateur, regular exerciser or even novice, who has not benefited significantly from professional nutritional analysis and the correctly calculated dietary/supplementation additions that were introduced, above and beyond their often ‘healthy’ diet. 

Bear in mind that dietary scenarios differ radically between male and female, hence intricate knowledge of bone mineral density applications, hormone variations and osteoporotic physiology etc, must be well within the trainer’s expertise. He/she must have such knowledge immediately to hand, and be able to answer highly involved queries ‘on the spot’. Anyone can go away and read up answers!

Many courses in Sports Nutrition outside of degree level are measured from 45 - 80 hours to only a few weeks, and almost all are available to individuals with absolutely no previous experience whatsoever in nutritional science. Titles such as ‘Optimum Nutritionist’ and ‘Nutritional Consultant’ or ‘Advisor’ are ones to particularly watch out for here. It is up to you, when you consider your prospective Personal Trainer, to specifically ask what their exact qualifications are in this area.

Then, when you know the training times involved, seriously consider as to whether such course lengths can produce experts with the levels of in-depth professional knowledge that you’re seeking to advise you safely and accurately.