Earlier in 2018 I had a middle aged couple come to a consultation to get fit and improve health…

They were absolutely shattered from overworking and their health wasn’t in good condition. They both had stressful jobs and as a consequence they were neglecting their health, living off take-outs and fast food bought from petrol stations…

This type of lifestyle caused weight gain, stress, poor skin, low energy and mood swings – and was ultimately causing the marriage to breakdown as they were both inflicting stress onto one another lives.   

At the same time they weren’t spending very much time together because their travel schedules meant that one of them was nearly always on the road. 

In this post I’m going to discuss how exercise played a huge role in not only improving their health but also their relationship…

#1 Getting Priorities Straight 

The first thing we addressed was factoring in time that they could workout each week. One of them decided to drop down their working hours to 30 hours per week, and work more from home. This enabled us to book in sessions in advance so that we could start working on improving their fitness.

Alongside the personal training they also seeked marriage counselling taking advice from places like  – Regain.us  the aim was to work on both health and fitness (with me) whilst at the same time improving the relationship with a specialist helping them.

#2 Fun Personal Training Sessions

Due to them both being unfit (neither of them had worked out properly for 5+ years) I decided to make the sessions less intense to begin with, the aim was to just get them moving more. 

I also did games to help them build confidence, have fun and get them working together as a team. For example I would create a 1000 rep workout where they had to work together to complete the reps… 

For example the first exercise would be 100 squats – the first person would do as many as possible (e.g. 20 reps) then the second person would go, whilst the other rested – the aim was to complete as many reps as possible so that the other person wouldn’t have to do as many! Once 100 reps were completed we then moved onto the next exercise.  

#3 Marriage Building Exercises 

They trained with me 3x per week for 1 hour, but outside of sessions I also got them to do extra exercise – 2x per week they had to complete a resistance band workout at home. It was only 20 minutes but allowed them to burn calories, and not take up too much time. 

The other thing I did was get them to commit to 1 long walk at the weekend (at least 10,000 steps) – this was to get them moving, and burn calories but also to get them to spend quality time together away from phones, computers, the TV and other distractions! 

The final thing I did was get them to write down 3 things they loved about one another each day in a diary. Then at the end of the week they would have to share 10 things with one another that they wrote down.