Personal Training for Mind and Body: A Kinder, Holistic Approach to Fitness

If you’ve ever felt intimidated by gyms, struggled with motivation, or felt disconnected from your body, you’re not alone. As a Glasgow-based fitness coach and therapist, I take a holistic approach to personal training: one that helps you get fitter, healthier, and happier in your own body. Here, I explain why I believe in this approach, and why you should too.

This article is for anyone who’s curious about fitness, unhappy in their body, or fed up with the mainstream fitness industry.

I will walk you through

·       What physical fitness is and why you should care about it (yes, you!),

·       The struggles and barriers people face when trying to improve their health and fitness,

·       What we can do to solve these problems and help everyone get fitter, healthier and happier.

Let’s jump right in!

Body Trouble: What Happens When We Disconnect

Allow me to open with a seemingly banal statement: we all have bodies. (Yes, even you). Sometimes we pretend like we don't, and try our hardest to distract ourselves from properly inhabiting our bodies by working long hours and being on our phone all the time, scrolling on social media, reading blog posts... (not this one, obviously. This one is essential!)

There are a million reasons why many of us live disconnected from our bodies, and we might not even be aware of the hefty price we’re paying for that disconnection. The consequences fall into five broad categories:

1.       A very sedentary/inactive lifestyle leading to a whole host of health problems and shortening our lifespan,

2.       Missing out on the joy of movement,

3.       Feeling uncomfortable in our bodies,

4.       Partial awareness of our experience à poorer understanding of ourselves, and

5.       Feeling unhappy with, perhaps even ashamed of, how we look.

We will unpack these in more detail in future posts, but I bet you a thousand leprechaun gold coins that at least one of the above problems will resonate with you.

So first, let me make this very clear:

If you struggle with any of the above, you’re not alone. This is a socio-cultural problem that didn’t start with you, but you’re in a unique position to do something about it.

I’ll tell you how.

What Fitness Means, and Why It Matters for You

What’s it like when you do have a body you’re happy in and with? Let’s look at where we want to get to, before mapping out the path to it.

Imagine hiking all day, sprinting to catch a flight, or falling without breaking a bone. That’s fitness in action. Physical fitness is what allows your body to do what it needs to. A more eloquent definition from a 1985 public health report is as follows:

“the ability to carry out daily tasks with vigor and alertness, without undue fatigue and with ample energy to enjoy leisure-time pursuits and to meet unforeseen emergencies” (PMC1424733).

Fitness is often divided into components: the health-related basics that support long-term wellbeing, and the skill-related abilities that make you sharper, faster, and help you perform better.

The health-related components of fitness are:

·       Strength

·       Cardiovascular endurance

·       Muscular endurance

·       Flexibility

·       Body composition

The skill-related components of fitness are:

·       Speed

·       Power

·       Agility

·       Coordination

·       Reaction time

·       Balance.

While all of these are influenced by genetics and other factors such as age, the good news is that every single one of them can be improved through physical training regardless of your genetics and age. For example, while you won’t be able to build the same amount of muscle at age 90 as at age 20, you will be able to build muscle if you start lifting weights at age 90. It’s good to start early, but better late than never.

So even if you’re currently very inactive, very disconnected from your body, and perhaps very unhappy with how you look, there is hope. You can get better at all the 11 things listed above.

We know what the solution is. Start moving. Start training.

So why don’t people do it? Why don’t you do it? What stands in the way?

Ditch the self-blame and get curious.

Why Fitness Is Hard: Common Barriers

There are many reasons why keeping fit can feel hard. Most of us have to think consciously about moving our bodies. Our ancestors didn’t need motivation to move: survival demanded it. It wasn’t a question of willpower. In fact, in an environment where food was hard to come by, not moving unless you had to was a smart strategy. It helped you conserve precious energy.

Fast forward to the modern day and our environment looks completely different: a strange combination of convenience, with practically unlimited food you can access without leaving your house (I’m looking at you, Deliveroo), and the paradoxical busyness that often means working even when we’re not at work, and investing time and energy in things like maintaining a social media presence and making sure our children aren’t brought up by the TV. Most of us are constantly striving, with little downtime, and little thought for our bodies’ true needs.

Movement slips down the endless to-do-list. But often it’s not really about time as much as how daunting the effort seems, given that we’re permanently exhausted. Stress is a major culprit here: when we’re emotionally overwhelmed, we just can’t face the prospect of physical exertion. Ironically, exercise is one of the best things for stress, but getting started can seem like an impossibly huge task. I’ve written in more detail about the connection between mood and movement, and what you can do to break this vicious cycle.

When movement gets pushed out of our lives by the very stressors that make us need it the most, our health suffers across the board, but what tends to cause the most worry, because it’s one of the earliest and most visible signs of a sedentary lifestyle, is excess body fat. Overweight quickly becomes an emotional problem, interpreted as some kind of personal failing, inducing feelings of guilt and shame.

In a world overly focused on aesthetics, where we are constantly bombarded by carefully curated and edited images of young, lean and attractive women and men, we can feel so far away from our perceived ideal that starting a fitness journey seems pointless. Exercises through the negative-self talk is like shovelling coal in kitty heels: unnecessarily hard.

But if we’re all in the same boat, someone has surely figured out a solution to all this by now, right? Well, kind of! There is indeed a whole industry built around helping us get fit and healthy. Except the mainstream fitness industry is often the worst place for people not knowing where to start. Many trainers are great at their jobs, and many gyms strive to be welcoming, encouraging and inclusive places. But huge segments of the fitness industry remain unwelcoming, overwhelming, and anxiety-inducing for some. With the rise of social media influencers and self-proclaimed experts, the messaging around fitness is often shallow, unscientific, and confusing, making fitness feel inaccessible to many.

But fear not.

There is a different way.

Fitness, Reimagined: A Mind-Body Approach

Here are two seemingly opposing truths: the body matters, and nothing about the body can be changed without considering the whole person.

We live in our minds and bodies at once. Emotions show up physically:  a compliment makes your stomach glow warm; stage nerves make it churn. We also tell ourselves stories about what happens in our bodies: “Uh-oh, my knee’s playing up again, I must be careful!” or “This tea will help my digestion; I’m being good to myself.”

And, of course, we have feelings about how our bodies look. Whenever we’re working with the body, as in personal training, we must also work with the mind: hear and rewrite the stories being told (“I’m weak” to “I’m stronger than I was last week!”), and hold self-critical feelings with tenderness until they soften.

Your body is not an inconvenience: it is how you experience life. It is you. It was built to move, and deep down most of us crave movement. Fitness should never be about punishing the body or beating it into shape. It can be a source of joy, nourishment, and even self-respect.

Like life, fitness requires both compassion and effort. Some days you rest, other days you show up even when you’re tired. In my blended practice, therapy and personal training are underpinned by the same principles. In therapy, my role is to accept clients unconditionally (and I’ve written a guide on why that’s important, and how therapy works). In personal training, my role is to guide them through effort they might not choose alone. Both roles require a dance between acceptance and encouragement, with different emphases.

So, what does all this mean in practice?

How do we get fit without exhausting our willpower?

Fitness at The Therapy Gym: How to Get into Shape While Being Kind to Yourself

At The Therapy Gym, the part of my practice that includes movement, everything rests on one belief: mind and body are inseparable. Even if you come to me just for physical training, the principles remain the same. These four foundations guide all my work — and they can guide you too.

1.       Bringing Joy Back

Results matter, but so does the journey. Training doesn’t need to be 100% fun (what in life is?), but it can absolutely bring joy. You can work hard and still laugh. You can push yourself and still feel proud. Your experience is important. This is what holistic personal training means.

Joy is a powerful motivator. You can find it in achievement, discovering potential, receiving praise, connecting with your body, the skills you’ve cultivated, or simply the raw exhilaration of effort. The point is, training can be hard work and deeply enjoyable.

And when you love movement, it stops being something you have to squeeze in, and becomes something you miss and look forward to. In fitness for beginners especially, cultivating joy is key to long-term success.

2.       Exercise vs. Training

Movement almost always beats inactivity. If the choice is move or sit still, move! But you can go further. With the right strategy, movement becomes training and creates lasting change: not just calories burned today, but strength, stamina, speed, agility, and muscle that build over time.

At The Therapy Gym, we don’t just exercise to feel better in the moment. We train for adaptation, for growth, for long-term capability. We replace the hamster wheel of exercise with continued progress, allowing results to motivate and inspire you to keep going.

3.       Sustainable Fitness: Training as Self-Care

Movement isn’t for a quick fix;  it’s for life. A holiday, a photo shoot, or a burst of effort might spark motivation, but consistency brings the real rewards.

Most of us want strength that lasts. Weight we can lose and keep off. To look good and feel good, rather than be smaller but miserable.

That’s why we play the long game. We celebrate the immediate mental lift of training, the early strength gains, the muscle that builds over months and years, and the independence it gives us in later life. The rewards compound, and we care about them all.

Yes, it is an investment of time, effort, and sometimes money. But when we look ahead, we get a sense of just how many rewards we’ll reap along the way. Like a video game, except life-changing.

4.       Fitness Where You Live

Gyms can be fantastic, but unless you can build one in your garage, getting there often takes extra time and energy.

I firmly believe in integrating fitness into our lives so that training can feel like a natural part of our day. This means doing some of it right where you are, instead of always having to travel to a special place.

The Therapy Gym is a dedicated hybrid space; part living room, part gym. This is intentional. The equipment and exercise selection can be relatively easily replicated or modified and carried over to home workouts. This is functional fitness: we train for in a way that stays close to life, not removed from it, while still enjoying flexibility, variety and challenge.

You don’t need long evenings at the gym. You can weave movement into your everyday life.

Start Small, Start Today, Change Your Life

Where does this leave us?

Whoever you are — fit or unfit, young or old, happy or struggling — you can get fitter, healthier, and happier. The best time to start is now.

That doesn’t mean a full life overhaul. Quite the opposite: it starts with small, sustainable steps you can actually stick to.

·       If you’re inactive: get moving. Take the stairs instead of the lift. Do ten bodyweight squats. Walk at lunchtime. Take up a fun sport. Even going from 2,000 to 5,000 steps a day is a massive win.

·       If you can afford it: consider a personal trainer. It’s an investment, but the right coach will smooth the path, guide your progress, and motivate you until you feel confident flying solo.

·       If you’re active but not resistance training: start now! You don’t need fancy kit. Use dumbbells, bands, your bodyweight, your dog, your cat, a couple of chinchillas. There’s a wealth of free guidance online, and you’ll be amazed at how quickly resistance training transforms you.

·       Whatever you do, aim for results but also look for joy. When you find it, it’ll keep you going.

And if you’re in Glasgow and want to train in a private space with the right balance of effort and compassion, with someone who understands the messy, emotional side of fitness, come and work with me. We can just train, or we can train and talk (and yes, there’s always some talking).

Curious about any of this? Have questions? Send me a message. I’d love to hear from you.

Here’s to new beginnings.