Four common mistakes that fitness pros make with higher-weight people

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Regular readers will know that I got my first fitness certification right out of high school and teaching group fitness is part of how I paid my way through college. I continue to hold a number of fitness certifications including as a group fitness instructor and health coach as well as functional training specialist and fitness nutrition specialist. I don’t do much group fitness instruction anymore (a guest spot or dance class here or there,) but I still do a fair amount of speaking to fitness professionals about working with higher-weight students/clients (and to higher-weight people about navigating weight stigma within the fitness world.) Today I thought I would discuss some of the common mistakes I hear about from the fitness student/clients/participants I talk to, the instructors and trainers I talk to, and the questions and comments I get during my talks.

Before I get to this I want to be super clear that nobody is obligated to participate in fitness, and participating doesn’t make someone better than those who don’t. In all of my work in fitness, my basic principle is that nobody is obligated to participate in fitness, but every body should be welcome.

Assuming something (or anything) based on the person’s size

This isn’t entirely the fault of the instructor as (weight stigma-based) certification programs (including some of the certifications that I hold) teach us to treat higher-weight people as a “special population” which immediately becomes about stereotypes and making assumptions based on how someone looks.

This can turn people away from fitness since it can be super annoying to be stereotyped, condescended to, and given bad/wrong advice when all you’re trying to do is enjoy a group fitness class or get some evidence-based personal training.

It can harm people of all sizes, including if fitness pros also assume that someone who is thin “looks fit” and therefore has fitness knowledge and therefore doesn’t need extra information or help, say, adjusting a spin bike or understanding the basics in a body pump class.

It can also make the fitness pro look foolish in a hurry when they assume someone is a beginner and it turns out that, for example, that person has more fitness certifications and knowledge than the fitness pro does.

You don’t know anything about somebody’s fitness level, ability, or knowledge based on their size. If you’re in a group fitness class, ask if people are beginners, explain things to everyone, give information about options (sometimes called “modifications”) to everyone and while this is beyond the scope of today’s topic, don’t make a hierarchy of options – try saying something like “here are three different options, feel free to pick whichever one or ones your body feels like doing today!” If you’re a personal trainer, use conversations with clients and appropriate assessments (and I’m not talking about weight or body composition) to understand a clients’ goals and to see where they are.

Blaming clients for fitness’s failures

If your space and/or equipment doesn’t accommodate higher-weight people, if your team or group has uniforms that don’t accommodate higher-weight members, if your gym has merch that doesn’t accommodate higher-weight members that’s something to fix, but in the meantime be clear: the people aren’t too big -  the space, the equipment, the uniforms, the merch is all too small.

If a specific movement, position, or pose doesn’t work for someone, their body isn’t wrong, the movement, position, or pose, doesn’t work for all bodies. You can explain it exactly like that “This option doesn’t work for lots of people, luckily there are lots of options!”

Shying away from strength training

Years ago, I belonged to a gym that offered three free personal training sessions at the beginning of the year. I used to take them just to see what would happen (at the time I was blogging seven days a week and the sessions were always good for a blog post or two!) One year when the trainer asked about my goals I said that I wanted to build strength. He recoiled and said that wasn’t a good goal for me because I didn’t want to “bulk up anymore.” Since my personal experience, I’ve heard similar stories from lots of higher-weight folks and had this question come up from well-meaning trainers.

This is incredibly frustrating because, first of all, research finds that strength training has significant benefits for people of all sizes. Building strength can help people (including people of all sizes) with mobility/ease of movement. All too often when we think of, for example, a power-to-weight ratio, we only think of manipulating the weight side of the equation, which is incredibly unlikely (which we’ll be talking about in a minute) but we can choose to manipulate the power side. I got to go to lunch with several members of the US Olympic Weight Lifting Team. During that lunch I learned something very interesting – while those in the lower weight classes were worried about lowering their weight to improve their power-to-weight ratio, those in the heavyweight classes, where instead of an upper weight limit there was a minimum weight, were working hard to maintain and even gain weight.

I think often this “don’t bulk up” thing is actually part of overall weight stigma in the fitness world – that the goal is making people thin. If we let that go, then we can work on helping people with their goals – like building stamina, flexibility, and strength, all of which are more likely to succeed than intentional weight loss, which bring us to…

Assuming a weight loss goal/recommending a weight loss goal/selling weight loss

While this is the most common issue, it’s also the most complicated so I’ve left it for last. The truth is that there is not a single study of any behavior-based intervention where more than a tiny fraction of people are able to sustain significant weight loss (for at least 5 years). The most common outcome is weight cycling – people lose weight short term then regain it long term – which is independently linked to many of the health issues that get blamed on higher-weight, including higher mortality.

Sometimes the fitness pro either assumes or suggests a weight loss goal. Again, this is something that we are trained to do by certification programs that are not evidence-based. Sometimes the client wants weight loss. If that’s the case, we can be honest with them about the almost certain failure and likely harm. I wrote about how to deal with this for healthcare practitioners here and I think much of that can transfer to fitness pros as well. We can also let them know that research finds that the benefits of fitness are direct (rather than the false notion that fitness makes you thinner which then makes you healthier.)

I also want to add that I think sometimes we in the weight-neutral space can go too exclusively into “enjoyable” or “joyful” movement. That’s one valid relationship with movement, but there are lots of others (including not participating.) I wrote about this in-depth here.

Nobody is obligated to participate in movement, but every body should be welcome.

If you’re looking for more information about this, I have an online workshop on March 27th called “Getting Jiggly With It – Movement in a Fat Body” for movement participants and pros, there’s a pay-what-you-can option and a video recording if you can’t make it to the live talk, all the details are here! I’m also giving a Live Learning Session with the Body Positive Fitness Alliance on March 25 at 1pm EST, they also have a sliding scale and you can find the details for that here!

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More research and resources:
https://haeshealthsheets.com/resources/

*Note on language: I use “fat” as a neutral descriptor as used by the fat activist community, I use “ob*se” and “overw*ight” to acknowledge that these are terms that were created to medicalize and pathologize fat bodies, with roots in racism and specifically anti-Blackness. Please read Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body – the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia and Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness for more on this.