COUTURE IS IN
How To Bridge Gaps In Your Wellness Routine
Couture Fitness – Bridging The Gap Between Training, Diet, and Wellness
By Dr. Nicholas Crawford
Here’s an important question in 2020. Who is in control of your fitness? Is anyone?
Let me know if any of this sounds familiar. You get your squat tips from a ripped influencer on the ‘Gram. You get supplement tips from the cashier at Whole Foods and meal prep advice from the guy you overheard that one time at the gym. You get diet advice from a paid promotion on Snapchat and occasional bursts of motivation from Nike ads. Does any of this sound like you?
Are we really in control of our fitness? Or are we at the mercy of massive marketing departments that figured out how to effectively target us? (Don’t feel bad. We are all in the same boat!) You thought you knew how to do a push-up until you saw a Hemsworth doing it a different way. Are you doing it all wrong? You felt good about your yogurt choices until you saw 17 Foods That Are Destroying Your Gut. Has your whole life been a lie?
That’s the problem. Far too often, the health and wellness advice we receive is not a product of the most accurate and helpful info out there, but rather a product of the most effective ad and marketing campaigns out there. There is so much content, so many advertisers, so much information–and yes, misinformation– out there that it’s incredibly difficult to find and maintain a healthy, useful, and effective fitness regimen.
Enter Couture Fitness
What is Couture Fitness? Think of Couture Fitness like a concierge service for all of your fitness needs. It’s highly focused, highly individualized care.
Clients pay a monthly or annual retainer in return for constant 24/7 access to a qualified individual who understands your total health and wellness lifestyle and uses this to formulate a plan and guide you through the process. What’s important here is that the nature of the relationship leads to progress and interactions that are more productive, less transactional, and more effective.
You might pay a small premium, but the level of attention, expertise and detail is worth it. So what are the real benefits of Couture Fitness? Let’s find out.
Individualized Fitness Based on a Relationship
Google “best workout for weight loss” and let me know when you’ve found the answer. There’s no shortage of general and even very specific good advice out there, but not all of it is good advice for you.
The best financial planners look at your whole financial picture and make small, granular decisions based on how everything interacts. They know how your investments affect your taxes, how your tax rate affects your retirement timeline, how your insurance and banking interact, etc. They know that it’s not only the specific investments you make that are important, but also the structure of your accounts and how you utilize them.
Couture fitness is the same thing, just in the realm of health and wellness. Couture fitness is the individualized guide for your overall fitness goals.
Fitness is NOT a one size-fits-all proposition. Working out twice a week and not losing any weight? The trainer mopping the floors at the gym might tell you to shred some squat lifts. Your favorite influencer might recommend going vegan. Your cousin might tell you to wake up earlier and workout while you’re fresh in the morning. Ask a hundred different people and you’ll get two hundred different recommendations. And here’s the thing. Most of that advice is probably good advice, in a general sense.
But Will The Couture Fitness Model Work For You?
You need someone who understands that you’re a single mom with kids who need breakfast and the morning trip to the gym just isn’t an option. You need someone who understands every little injury and quirk you have. You need a relationship that extends beyond a 30 minute training session twice a month. That’s a couture fitness coach.
There are some tenets of health and wellness that are universal, tried-and-true. Proper diet, exercise, and some mindfulness should be a great start toward health and wellness for just about anyone. Burn more calories than you consume and you will lose weight. Simple, right? Unfortunately, no.
In an ideal world, we all work out five days a week, we eat salmon, rice, and healthy proteins, and we never eat carbs. But it’s not an ideal world, and although the introductory philosophy of fitness is universally understood, the path toward it varies greatly depending on the countless little iterations and choices we make in our own unique lives.
We get random shoulder pain. Some of us love cardio, and some of us can’t stand it. Some of us like to indulge a Snickers bar every once in a while. And unfortunately, so much of the fitness advice we seek out in the world at large is not applicable to us, simply due to the fact that we are unique individuals with unique lives.
Couture fitness understands that. Couture fitness develops and maintains a plan based on a relationship that centers around understanding our unique circumstances in life.
Eliminate The Noise And Focus On You
Sure, most personal trainers will give you advice on a protein shake (usually you don’t even need to ask), but is that the right one for you? That magazine will tell you 16 ways to isolate your glutes, but how often do you actually take that technique into the gym? There’s so much information and so much advice, but most of us are confused, a little overwhelmed, and frankly terrified of embarrassing ourselves. It’s human nature.
For an industry and lifestyle that has been studied to death, fitness choices are still mostly passed on through word of mouth. We find something that works for us and we pass it on. We all do it, and there’s nothing wrong with it. But “telephone game” fitness tips are not sustainable. Eventually the message gets watered down from person to person or warps into something so completely unrecognizable that it wisps away into the land of dusty old treadmills and 80’s workout tapes, never to be seen again.
Because here’s the thing: most of the help you get is going to be either cursory or transactional. The cursory help we get– the offhand comment from an online bodybuilding forum or watching someone in the mirror at the gym to see how she does it– is usually impersonal, incomplete, and not always applicable to us. And the transactional help we get– fitness trainers, classes, etc– usually starts and ends at the credit card machine. If you pay for an hour with a trainer, you’re going to get an hour’s worth of advice. And this is the extent of it. Lift this and drink that. See you next week.
A couture fitness style relationship removes that transactional aspect and makes it hyper-personal, hyper-applicable to you. Wondering why your triceps aren’t popping yet? Let’s talk about it. Curious about epsom salt for muscle recovery? Text me. Having a stressful week and worried it’s affecting your health and overall fitness levels? It is, and I’ve got some ideas. Let’s see which ones might actually work for you.
So What’s The Difference Between Traditional Fitness And Couture Fitness?
If it seems like a fine distinction, it is. But that fine distinction is what makes it work. It’s an adjustment to the areas of your fitness lifestyle that you want help with. If you have a decent understanding of your fitness but seem to have a thousand little questions along the way, you need couture fitness. If you have a gym membership but the idea of paying a trainer to watch you push a weight sled around the gym twice a month doesn’t excite you, you need couture fitness.
How does Mark Wahlberg achieve his fitness goals? He’s got a whole team that understands him. They understand his goals and his lifestyle and his likes and dislikes. And we’re willing to bet that when Marky Mark texts his trainer at 5 AM with a question, he gets a response. That is couture fitness. His trainer and his workout buddies and his chef and his doctor all know each other, communicate with each other, and work together.
Now, if you don’t have Funky Bunch money to hire a whole team, get a couture fitness coach. One person who knows health and wellness, who knows the medical and physiological side of things, and who is willing to take the time to get to know you as an individual to help you achieve your goals.
Couture fitness isn’t scalable (center slot on the marketing buzzword bingo card), which is why you don’t see it that often. Due to its very nature, it requires individualized solutions, and individualized solutions cannot be applied to a large audience. That’s what makes it so special. You get advice that is highly specific to you.
Final Word
Can you go it alone? Absolutely. Can you also spend years and years, thousands of dollars, and untold trips to the gym just trying to figure out what the heck your personal fitness regimen should be, and then still feel lost? Absolutely. Most of us know how to curl a dumbbell and most of us can probably find a decent protein shake with a little bit of research. We don’t need much help there.
But without proper guidance, we are at the mercy of social media algorithms, large ad spends from marketing powerhouses, sleek packaging, and whatever fitness influencers may or may not be getting paid to shill this week.
We need help putting it all together, concierge style. We need an Obi-Wan Kenobi to slow down our overactive minds and emotions and to say I understand you. Let’s sort it all out.
For any one individual, the state of modern fitness is too big, too out of control, and too overwhelming. We need couture fitness.
Dr. Nicholas Crawford
Dr. Crawford is a board certified osteopathic medical physician with a special interest in guiding patients to their full health potential, integrating mind, body & spirit.
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