Is Your Exercise Professional One of NZ’s Best?   10 Jun 2015

Is Your Exercise Professional One of NZ’s Best?

10 June 2015

When you make it up a flight of stairs without puffing, or go for a day without pain from an injury. What about when you laugh, long and out loud and don’t wet yourself. Or when you have that magic moment finding yourself fitting into that pair of jeans you couldn’t zip up a few months ago.

At these times you probably say a quiet thanks to your personal trainer, your group fitness instructor, or the team at your gym.

Now is the time to say ‘thank you’ out loud, with nominations for the NZ Exercise Industry Awards open now.

Exercise professionals are a humble bunch, and they are more likely to be celebrating your success rather than their part in it. After all that’s why they do what they do; to help you be the best you can be.

Good exercise professionals don’t just decide to ‘get people fit’, and start working with clients. They get a recognised qualification, train and study long hours before they even start giving out exercise advice. But it doesn’t stop there. As the field of exercise and health is always changing, they are regularly attending courses and working behind the scenes to keep themselves up to date so that the effort you put in to your workout is rewarded with the results you want.

The best professionals are also registered with the NZ Register of Exercise Professionals, or REPs for short. REPs registration is a clear quality mark of the quality exercise professionals letting you know that they take themselves, and your health and well being seriously. They are willing to be accountable by holding the industry quality mark, and committing to stay up to date with regular ongoing education.

A good exercise professional is like an entire team of professionals and support people packed in to one energetic and positive package. They give you exercise advice, and also act as a coach, overseeing the exercise you do when they aren’t there watching you. They also act as a nutritional advisor, teaching you how to navigate the minefield that is understanding food labels. They are also there to listen when you have a tough day, and to celebrate your achievements, big and small.

The NZ Exercise Industry Awards have been running for a number of years, and we know that for every exercise professional that enters and exceeds the judges expectations with the things they do every day, there are many more who don’t enter.

They’ll say they don’t care about these things, but we think they would love to know that you appreciate what they do by nominating them. How do we know this? Because we talked to a few of last year’s finalists and they told us.

One of those finalists was Ruth Wilkinson. She is the owner of Prime Fitness and won the award category ‘Up and Coming PT of the Year Award’ in 2014. Her thoughts on winning? “I can’t explain it. To be recognised at that level for something that we all clearly love to do, is just beyond words.”

There are many categories in the awards, and while the focus is certainly on exercise, it’s not all about looking good, or working clients the hardest. In fact, one of the categories is the Community Excellence Award, and this award is open to any individual or organisation offering initiatives or programmes to the wider community that encourage exercise participation in a population that would normally find such exercise difficult to access. One of the recipients of this category in 2014 was Active in Age New Plymouth. Hilary Blackstock from Active in Age found the award meant as much to her participants as it did to her. “It was a very cool feeling, and even cooler that I could take the award back to the group as a surprise and see their excitement”.

While trainers will continue to do the work they do without recognition, why not take the small amount of time it would take to click on the link and nominate someone who has made a difference to your life through exercise.

www.exerciseindustryawards.co.nz/nominations/nomination.php

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