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Self-Help: Holistic Personal Training

After the punishments of a long, boozy summer, we spent six weeks with a nutritionist and trainer, desperately trying to put the pieces back together.
Last updated: 2015-11-09
In an attempt to reverse the downward spiral of your mental and physical wellbeing, in Self Help we bring you suggestions of classes, sporty things, team events, volunteering and educational stuff that might just pull you out of that boozy tail-spin.



Holistic personal training


For this one, we spent six weeks training with an American guy called Jason McClure. He’s a qualified personal trainer and nutritionist and he works with clients in a holistic way, helping them sort out their overall health and fitness through a combination of gym sessions, nutrition advice, health education and even some spiritual work.

You tell him what you want to achieve -- with your fitness level, your body size, your stress levels, your goals and ambitions, even your working life -- and he’ll help you achieve it through a combination of hard physical work and dietary adjustments, examinations of your habits and moods, and discussions about anything else you need help with.

Some days he’s a personal trainer, others he’s a counselor. Everything’s one-on-one, and he works with anyone, old or young, male or female, regardless of where you are in life and what you’re hoping to achieve. He calls it the Prize System. He generously spent six weeks training me because it would have been hard to get a sense of all this, and test out the results, in a shorter time. Here’s what went on.

What you need


Gym gear. An open mind. Commitment. Time. A gym membership is also going to help, and it would be even better if you got a membership for him, too, or arranged with your gym to let Jason come in to train you. This is not easy. We started off training in my gym in Ambassy Club, but it wasn’t long before we were kicked out of there. They have their own personal trainers and didn’t like the idea of me bringing my own. After that we went to a gym in the Jing’ansi Community Cultural Center, which was only 10rmb a session and they let Jason in for free because he wasn’t really using the equipment, just coaching me. Big-up Jing’an community services!

But, ideally, you’d have some sort of arrangement where you sorted out a temporary membership for Jason to your gym. That’s not going to be cheap. But then none of what we describe here is cheap, as you’ll see.



What happens


He asks to meet clients at least twice a week. Each session lasts at least an hour, but that usually turns into about 90 minutes.

For a typical gym session, you’ll start with a discussion of how you feel and what you’ve been doing. Then he’ll check your joints to see if there’s any problems with their motion. He picked up straight away that I have a slightly dodgy knee and we spent five or ten minutes of each session gently working on that and improving its flexibility. This is cool. If it weren’t for him, I would have just ignored that until my leg fell off or I needed an operation.

Then you get into some warm-up exercises and then the main workout. Jason is adamant that most people use gym time very inefficiently. In our first session he pointed to the rows of people slogging away on treadmills, bikes and cross trainers and told me that most of them were wasting their time. They would not lose much weight or get into shape working out like that. In his opinion, most of us don’t understand how to use gyms or how our bodies burn fat and put on muscle, which is why so many of us go to the gym but fail to see the improvements we want.



In this, he soon proved right. He showed me ways to exercise, both cardio and strength training with weights, that were many times more exhausting than what I’ve been doing at the gym for the past few years. His techniques involve concentrating on the muscles you’re working, actively engaging them and feeling them work, exercising muscles very slowly and using them until they are on the point of collapse.

Working this way, after about 20 minutes I would be exhausted. Almost passing out. Then some breathing and visualization, some cooling down and the session was over. With these short bursts of exercise my health improved more in six weeks than it had through the past few years of working out on my own in the gym.

Once or twice a month you’ll have a session out of the gym which is just talking over your progress. That could happen in a café or a park, anywhere. He also throws in the occasional session exercising out in a public space – we went to the community running track at Luwan Stadium, and spent one session at the climbing wall down by the river. He even offered to do a session on the Metro with one of those newfangled TRX strap things. I declined, but this is what that looks like.




Other sessions, he might take you shopping for food so you can discuss dietary stuff and what produce to buy. In short, he is not just interested in helping you lose weight. For him, it’s all wrapped up together – what you eat, how you sleep, your stress levels and your exercise regimen. You have to work on it all to see results.

When he starts to work with you, he’ll also help you get your body fat percentage tested. This we did at a place called Intelametrix China. They sell kits to help individuals and families test their body fat percentage at home, and they also provide a service where you can go to their office to test your fat percentage. Over time, you can keep testing it to see whether you’re making progress and in which areas. More about that right here, with contact info if you want to test your fat percentage.

What happens next


After about three weeks, I was eating better, I had more energy and I was fitter than I had been in years. I also stopped craving and eating most of the food that was bad for me. I just stopped eating fast food and processed snacks. I started eating a lot more raw food, too. Energy levels were great. Moods were unusually balanced and even.

After six weeks I felt better than I had in years. There’s no denying it, going to a gym with a trainer gives you a far better work out, but the dietary stuff was also crucial. I was eating better, sleeping better and I had more energy.



Who goes in for this


Jason coaches a wide range of people in Shanghai. Old people, young people. He has a couple of families, where he coaches the parents and the kids. Anyone who wants to improve their physical, mental or spiritual wellbeing is going to get something out of this. He speaks pretty good Chinese, too, enough to coach locals, though I imagine most, if not all, of his clients are foreigners living in Shanghai.

How much of your life will this take up


Quite a lot. The actual time you spend working out isn’t very much, but with the talking and recovery time, you’re probably together about 90 minutes for each session.

In addition, he gives you homework: stuff to read, watch and listen to. This ranges from audio files about nutrition and organic diets to books on spirituality or documentaries on pollution and the causes of cancer. It’s all part of the program and he expects you to find the time to consume all this. He also gave me a meditation program and told me I had to meditate for 20 minutes every day, without skipping a day or I had to go back and start the whole program again. Hard to find the time to do that if you have an erratic life.

A lot of what he gave me to read I didn’t buy into, but that was never a problem. He gives this stuff out to start you thinking and asking questions about health and nutrition. He is anything but dogmatic and we could always laugh about the areas where we disagreed. He’s a teetotal, vegan Christian. I’m a heavy drinking, flesh-eating atheist. But we had a surprisingly large amount in common and many very interesting discussions.

So, how much of your life does this take up? Four or five hours a week at least, and that’s ongoing for as long as you see him. This is not a six-week course. This is a forever thing, and clients continue to see him in perpetuity. In short, it takes up a lot of time, but then it’s your health we’re talking about, so maybe it should.



How much does it cost


It’s expensive. He charges 700rmb per session or 2600rmb a month for one session a week, 4800rmb a month for two. He also offers family sessions and 30-minute sessions on request. If more than one person per household is training, there are further discounts.

On top of that, if you follow his advice on diet then you’re going to start buying healthy, organic food, which can be much more expensive, or cheaper, depending whether your diet currently consists of French goose liver or Munchies. If you have to buy him a gym membership, that’s going to be another large expense.

So this could be a major expenditure in your life, but the potential rewards are vast. This is the sort of thing that could put years onto your life, improve your energy levels, your appearance, your health and fitness, your mood and your chances of getting into Heaven.

Plusses


In terms of losing weight and getting fit, this is the best activity I’ve found. Only boxing and maybe kickboxing came close to the same intensity of workout. Having a personal trainer means you turn up at the gym, you don’t skip sessions even when you’re hung over or tired, and you use your gym time in the best way.

The advantage of this guy over a regular personal trainer is that he’ll sort out your diet and address other health issues. He’d be great if you were trying to give up smoking or another addiction. He’ll also talk you through problems you might be having in your personal life, goals you want to achieve in your working life and questions you have about food and nutrition. And you get to talk about spiritual issues if that’s your thing.



If there’s stuff you’re curious about and he doesn’t know the answers or have the resources to help you, he’ll go off and find them. He’s just a supremely friendly, affable guy who seems to love helping people get the most out of their life. Nothing is prohibited. He’s not going to try to make you turn vegetarian. He stresses that everyone’s different and there’s no one right way of achieving all your goals.

He’s also very flexible. He can fit in around your schedule, come to you, find a place convenient to you to work out when you want to do an outdoor session, and he’ll find stores near your home or work where they sell healthy or organic food.

Minuses


It’s expensive. The gym membership issue is a tough one. One way around it would be if clients joined his gym, though obviously that’s not going to suit everyone.

Some of the material he gives out is a little random. Some I had trouble swallowing. There’s a lot of talk about visualization and healing energy. That’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. However, I just went with it all, and the results worked, so who am I to complain? He’s not going to force anything down your throat. This is all about you, so if you wanted to keep things on a purely materialistic level, he’d be cool with that, I imagine.



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For more information about Jason McClure, see his website. Or you can email him here.

Photos by Josh Tintner

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