Personal training

Along with a healthy diet strength training and aerobic/cardio exercise are essential to healthy sustainable weight loss. Get a Santa Fe personal trainer for the ultimate fast-track to your goals. If you live in or near Santa Fe we can train at Santa Fe Spa, your apartment/condo gym, or your home gym. I can help you design and equip a home gym. I’ve designed several home gyms in the Santa Fe area as well as the Zia Vista and Nava Ade gyms.

Working with a personal trainer is the royal road to weight loss but you don’t have to be royalty to afford it. Smart intense 30-minute workouts save time and money. Discounts and payment plans are available through PayPal which offers free financing with no interest when you pay in 6 months with the Bill Me Later option: Get in shape now and get 6 months to pay for it without interest.

“All parts of the body which have a function,

if used in moderation and exercised

in labors in which each is accustomed,

become thereby healthy, well-developed,

and age more slowly,

but if unused and left idle they become liable

to disease, defective in growth, and age quickly.”

Hippocrates, Greek physician who was a real doctor:

a teacher who took the time to teach people how to care

for their health rather than merely mending the machine.

Positive training

There’s a trend in dog training called positive training promoted by the Humane Society which emphasizes positive reinforcement and encouraging praise over harsher methods of training. It’s similar to the tendency in humanistic psychology, positive psychology, and positive adult development to view human beings as essentially healthy and encouraging them to actualize their full potential.

This trend in dog training has occurred simultaneously with a militant trend in fitness training towards ‘boot camps’ and ‘drill sergeant’ old-school trainers as seen on TV who tear people down and shame them into healthier behavior through criticism and yelling – a short-term ‘shock and awe’ strategy using fear, guilt, and intimidation. This is tarnishing the image of personal training.

If positive training is good enough for dogs

isn’t it good enough for people too?

Positive Personal Training

While some do indeed respond to this type of treatment, it’s not for everyone. There are more humanistic, more humane ways to motivate. Traditional old-school approaches create negative associations: diet and exercise become associated with self-deprivation and punishment, hardly things people want to adopt as long-term lifestyle habits!

A healthy lifestyle is actually quite pleasant and the more pleasant you make it the more permanent it can be. Positive experiences are sustainable over time, while negative experiences can only be endured temporarily – better to flow with our nature than to fight it: harness the ‘pleasure principle’ in the service of your goals.

There are any number of reasons for the militaristic trend in fitness training, among them the militarization of the Bush years and the modern medical military model which reacts to the obesity epidemic with a militant attitude within an allopathic frame as if obesity is a communicable disease caused by germs rather than a degenerative disease caused by underlying lifestyle behavior: ‘combating’ ‘fighting’ ‘battling’ or ‘killing’ obesity through patient ‘compliance’ to doctor’s ‘orders’ and medically ‘approved’ ‘protocols’ within a hierarchical authoritarian relationship.

The culture wars playing out in physical culture

These influences predate reality TV which is a reflection of these underlying worldviews that have existed for centuries asserting themselves in physical culture as art imitates life: the culture wars playing out in physical culture.

This is near and dear to my heart. When I hear about a PE coach humiliating a student, a physician scolding a patient, or a drill sergeant fitness trainer yelling at a client, I wonder how this encourages people to enjoy being active as well as what the founders of personal training like Jack LaLanne and Joe Weider would think of such tactics (both living well into their 90’s, in contrast to an average life expectancy for physicians of 59, and for the general public of 74, according to data compiled by Ancestry.com from the Social Security Death Index).

A Doctor of Chiropractic, Jack LaLanne was a product of holistic living. Joe Weider, through his fitness magazines and contests, tirelessly reminded fitness revolutionaries of our cultural debt to classical Greek humanism without a hint of militarism.

Paradigmatic form, function, and fit

An important aspect of finding the best trainer for you is to find one whose worldview and values match your own so you’re speaking the same language.

Which worldview are they grounded in? From which epistemology do they see and interpret reality? From which enactment paradigm do they operate on the reality that they see?

Do they operate out of a Biblical-era traditional religious paradigm, an Enlightenment-era modern medical/scientific mechanistic empirical paradigm based on classical Newtonian physics, a 20th century postmodern holistic systems biopsychosocial paradigm based on evolutionary biology and postmodern epistemology, or a 21st century integral paradigm that honors them all?

Do they see the body as the temple of the Lord to be honored with clean living religiously, as a machine to be measured and fixed scientifically, as part and parcel of a complex adaptive system to be optimized holistically, or some sort of synthesis or integration of these interpretations that gives due respect to each?

Do they define health as the absence of sinful living, the absence of overt disease symptoms, as positive fully functional flourishing, or as an integration of these dimensions of health?

Since real lasting change occurs from the inside-out, you have to start with the ghost in the machine: Choose a trainer who shares the same worldview so you’re speaking the same language and enacting the same paradigm in the service of your goals.

Holistic training for the whole person

Personal Training Santa Fe Style™ trains body & mind: the whole person. Lose weight with a positive trainer in your journey to a better life: to a fit bodymind worthy of your potential. You’re the designer of your destiny and I’m a positive personal trainer who can help you get there faster and safer.

1. “Here it is natural and fitting to set forth ...
   

2. the means whereby body and mind are kept in health;
   

3. ... the proportion or disproportion between the soul and body
   

4. themselves is more important than any other;
   

5. ... there is one safeguard:
   

6. not to exercise the soul without the body,
   

7. nor yet the body without the soul,
   

8. in order that both may hold their own
   

9. and prove equally balanced and sound ...
   

10. One who is intensely occupied
    

11. with any intellectual discipline
    

12. must give his body its due meed of exercise
    

13. by taking part in athletic training;
    

14. while he who is industrious in molding his body
    

15. must compensate his soul with her proper exercise
    

16. in the cultivation of the mind and all higher education;
    

17. so one may deserve to be called in the true sense
    

18. a person of noble breeding.”
    

19. Plato, Timaeus
    

Train different in The City Different

Why don’t we make training a pleasant experience so you will want to adopt the behaviors necessary to lose weight in a healthy way as conscious practices that can be habituated into the automatic habits of your new healthy lifestyle?

Fitness Training Santa Fe Style

As you would expect from a Santa Fe style approach to weight management, the Santa Fe Way is natural, healthy, holistic, casual, fun, fulfilling, and sustainable.

The journey or way is as important as the destination if you don't want to crash on your way there. Journey and destination are inextricably bound, you can’t have one without the other: they’re two aspects of traveling. So if you want to reach your weight loss destination then make the journey sustainable. The best way to make it sustainable is to make it enjoyable.

“No citizen has a right to be an amateur

in the matter of physical training . . .

what a disgrace it is for a person to grow old

without ever seeing the beauty and strength

of which his body is capable!”

Plato, Republic

Personal Trainer Santa Fe Style

If you, like me, are not motivated by the traditional militaristic ‘boot camp’ drill sergeant approach, nor by the conventional scientific materialism of the aging allopathic modern medical military model, you have a clear alternative: a postmodern humanistic holistic positive approach to personal training, a reaffirmation of the physical culture of classical Greek humanism that spawned the noble Olympic movement, a healthy nonviolent alternative to militant combat that channels competitive energy into civil sportsmanship and inspiring athleticism.

The American fitness revolution, an outgrowth of postmodern Humanistic Psychology and the Human Potential Movement, is a renaissance of classical Greek humanism. Integral Yoga and the Integral Movement build upon this by adding holistic health and personal growth practices East & West such as yoga, the martial arts, and meditation for yet broader wellness and deeper wholeness.

“Jeff brings wit, humor and broad intelligence to a workout. He is encouraging and supportive. He prescribed a food plan, (not a diet) that is working for me; and I have lost 12 pounds in 8 weeks. I have another 10 to go and am confident I can achieve it. I recently had a stent procedure that went without a hitch (no pun intended) to which I attest the conditioning Jeff helped me with for the past few months. I signed up for a year and it was/is a good decision.

“I heartily recommend Jeff Nailen for your Fitness Training and Health needs.”

Howard Rubin

Pinon Ranch Land & Water Co.

Santa Fe Personal Trainer Jeff Nailen

(505) 216-9829  •  jeff@santafeway.com

Personal Trainer Santa Fe Style

Positive Personal Training is about working with a supportive trainer who inspires you, not a drill sergeant who yells at you.

Old: boot camps & drill sergeants

New: Positive Personal Training™

Positive Personal Training™

Welcome to a new 21st century

positive psychology approach to

Personal Training Santa Fe Style:

• Fun is more effective than fear

• Kindness is better than criticism

• Inspiration trumps intimidation

• Encouraging is better than yelling

• Humor is better than humiliation

• Praise is better than punishment

• Enthusiasm is better than criticism

• Encouraging is better than judging

Your positive alternative to boot camps and drill sergeants.

Joaquin after Santa Fe Trainer Jeff Nailen

“Working with Jeff has been very beneficial to my boxing career...Jeff took the guesswork out of how to eat for performance and he applied advanced training techniques such as plyometrics and interval training... Not only did Jeff help maximize my strength, speed, and power, he also helped me make weight a lot easier with the specialized diet that he put together for me.”

Joaquin Zamora, Pro Boxer

Santa Fe, NM

Former WBC U.S. National Welterweight Champion

#6 ranked welterweight in the world

Pro record with Jeff: 3-0 (2 KO’s)

Overall pro record: 18-3-1 (12 KO’s)

Laura with Santa Fe Trainer Jeff Nailen

“I was astonished by how easily I could gain strength on Jeff’s program. ... I have lost over 60 pounds while becoming one strong lady compared to how much I could lift before starting Jeff’s program. I am now working out with 445 pounds on leg press and bench pressing 50 pound dumbbells!”

Laura Godfrey, Veterinary Technician

Santa Fe, NM

“When I started working with Jeff I weighed 225 lbs. Today I weigh 190 lbs, reflecting 35 pounds of weight loss. What’s compelling is that I lost that weight while increasing muscle mass, so I’ve likely lost somewhere between 40 and 45 lbs of body fat.

“Before I started working with Jeff I was pre-diabetic, clinically obese, and hypertensive. My cholesterol and triglyceride levels were off the chart. I was a heart attack or stroke patient waiting to happen. I was also dealing with issues related to stress and anxiety.

“All of these conditions, to date, have been remediated. This was accomplished without the use of drugs, dangerous chemicals or hormones of any sort.

“Jeff is by far the best fitness trainer I’ve ever known.”

Christopher Ihlefeld
Portfolio Manager, Managing Director

Thornburg Investment Management

“I think your training and coaching program is great. I feel great and haven't been sick since I started your plan. This is the longest I've been healthy in the last 2 years — I attribute that to your eating and training plan. The training plan was a surprise to me — as you may recall I wasn't that interested in the training plans as I thought I knew what I was doing :-) But I see a difference not only in my muscle tone but in my strength and cardio fitness. The improvements in health and well being and the new muscle strength and cardio fitness really help to keep me motivated to keep up the program. This, I think, is key to life long success with diet and exercise.”

Martha Formosa, IBM

Santa Fe, NM

“Since I started training with Jeff, I have lost 35 pounds. But that is the least important accomplishment! My strength on practically every exercise has nearly doubled. I have gone from not being able to do a push-up to being able to knock out twenty. I recently played my brother in tennis and he was shocked that I was serving harder than I ever had before. When you get a whole lot stronger, lots of things get better.

“My waist is six inches smaller, my neck is two inches smaller, and my muscle tone has changed from flabby to solid. My confidence about my appearance is much improved. My entire outlook on life has become more positive.

“You might imagine that such results required spending all day in the gym. Jeff is very knowledgeable about the state of the art on how to get optimal results. His program for me consisted of two workouts per week and each workout was UNDER 45 MINUTES LONG!

Edward Maran

Portfolio Manager, Managing Director

Thornburg Investment Management

“Jeff’s program is outstanding. I noticed improvement in my strength within weeks of starting, and reached my goals within months. Jeff Nailen designed a program for me which helped me achieve significant improvement in strength with less pain and agony than I anticipated. Jeff is highly professional and intelligent. He teaches the physiology of strength-building and nutrition, making the training sessions very interesting. I highly recommend his program for anyone looking to get into shape.”

Kimberly Stertzer

Santa Fe, NM

“I’ve spent 20 years training as hard as I could for rock climbing, martial arts, and general fitness. I thought I was pretty much at the limits of my abilities and performance given my physiological build and age. By teaching me how to work smarter instead of longer and harder, Jeff allowed me to make significant gains in a very short time. For example, although I’ve been training for 20 years, I doubled my strength in several exercises in just three months while actually spending less time in the gym than before, and I now plan to use these principles to push my performance even further.”

Jeff Inman

Software Developer

National Center for Genome Resources

“He is there for his clients every step of the way and his program is 100% effective if followed as he sets it out. I couldn't be more pleased or gratified with his work and the tremendous help it continues to be to me. Jeff is absolutely wonderful to work with. For example, his keen observation and creative approach resulted in his devising specific exercises that are reversing years of muscular atrophy I was experiencing due to a former accident that my physical therapists were unable to treat and eventually gave up on.”

Dr. Frederick Schuyler Fox
Santa Fe Opera

Train different.

Lose weight sustainably by enjoying the journey.

Fitness Santa Fe Style™

How do you lose weight and get in shape the smart way? Welcome to a new fitness paradigm of balanced growth. Fitness Santa Fe Style™ promotes balance across complementary capacities or components of fitness: strength, stamina, mobility, and flexibility, for balanced physical development of the body.

It also encourages natural growth by gradual progression over time through beginning, intermediate, and advanced stages of development within each fitness component approaching training systems appropriate to each developmental stage with Beginner’s Mind, an attitude of eagerness, open-mindedness, and lack of preconceptions as a beginner would approach new learnings.

Fitness Training Santa Fe Style

What’s the safest most effective way to train? What’s the best fitness training system? The matrix below shows where the main fitness training systems fall along the major dimensions of Fitness Santa Fe Style™. The horizontal dimension represents balance across fitness components and the vertical dimension growth or progress within them. Pilates, P90X, and CrossFit are examples of partial integrations of some of the systems and stages, especially on the left side of the matrix, into larger metasystems.

Fitness Santa Fe Style™

                             Balance (Yin)

Growth (Yang)

Safer,

Easier,

Controlled

Higher

Intensity, Impact,

Results, & Risks

Balance Across Fitness Capacities (Yin aspect)

From a systems perspective you are a complex adaptive system (CAS), a term coined in Santa Fe by the founders of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), the world’s leading center for studying complex adaptive systems. Your interrelated subsystems can be categorized in any number of ways: physically and mentally, structurally and functionally, quantitatively and qualitatively, etc., and any combination thereof. Regarding functioning or performance, fitness components or capacities, likewise, can be classified in any number of ways, and indeed there are several taxonomies out there with no consensus among them.

Santa Fe Way integrates three topical dimensions for classifying fitness components into developmental capacities, abilities, domains, or lines of physical development along with the temporal dimension regarding growth, development, or progress through these capacities over time. These are functional capacities or abilities that can be developed through training and progress measured through testing. Human physical development is the common denominator or contextual glue integrating the four dimensions:

Total Health & Fitness

Mental & Physical

The compound bodymind has two major aspects or dimensions, body and mind: the exterior objective physical body in the world of the terribly obvious that can be seen, and the interior subjective consciousness that is aware of the body as an object of consciousness, the subject who is seeing.

Interior consciousness: Mental health & fitness (developed by learning, state training, coaching)

Exterior body: Physical health & fitness (developed by nutrition, fitness training, personal training)

Physical Health & Fitness

Form & Function

Structural body composition and the health of component body systems, sometimes called ‘health-related components of fitness’ are dimensions of structural ‘health’ rather than functional ‘fitness’ per se, the combination of which are the components of ‘health & fitness’ broadly speaking, whereas the focus here is on functional fitness.

Structural form: Health (structural integrity of body and body systems, anatomy, vital signs, etc.)

Functional fit: Fitness (functional capacity, performance, physiology, work)

Physical Fitness

Intensity & Duration

One topical axis within functional fitness is the qualitative/quantitative continuum between intensity & duration and their corresponding structural adaptations, using the general terms ‘Strength’ & ‘Stamina’:

Qualitative intensity: Strength (broadly meaning strength, speed, and power)

Quantitative duration: Stamina (systemic cardiovascular endurance and local muscular endurance)

Static & Dynamic

And an intersecting axis of dynamic movement of the body and its limbs represented by the term ‘Mobility’ regarding the efficiency of motor unit contraction to create movement, and static plasticity of the body and its limbs regarding elasticity of motor units that allows movement called ‘Flexibility’:

Dynamic movement: Mobility (agility, accuracy, balance, coordination, etc.)

Static elasticity: Flexibility (of joints, tendons, ligaments, and muscles)

Progress Over Time (Yang aspect)

The temporal dimension arrays the ‘stages,’ ‘grades,’ or ‘levels’ within each of these lines of physical development into general beginning, intermediate, and advanced stages of development. Progress through these developmental stages forms the vertical Yang dimension of the matrix.

Milo of Croton: Inventor of progressive resistance exercise

Milo of Croton was a sixth century BC wrestler who was determined to make himself the strongest wrestler in all of Greece. One day early in his career he decided to lift and carry a newborn ox and walk around a stadium bearing the extra weight.

Milo would repeat this exercise every day and as the calf grew heavier Milo grew stronger until he eventually carried a full-grown bull across his broad shoulders. By this time he was widely acknowledged as the strongest man in the Western world. For 24 years he was an undefeated wrestler and the champion at six consecutive Olympics.

“Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being

while movement and methodical physical exercise save and preserve it.”

Plato, Republic

The secret to losing body fat: Building muscle & bone mass

Milo’s strength-building system was a crude form of what we now call progressive overload or progressive resistance exercise: a gradual increase in exercise intensity and/or duration over time to elicit desired adaptive responses in the body, building functional capacity like strength and endurance and corresponding structural integrity in muscle and bone mass, the structural adaptations to functional demands.

Form follows function: the body adapts to the exercise you give it. Exercise builds muscle mass and bone mass, molding the body. The more muscle and bone you build the more fat you burn, even while sleeping – once lean tissue is built it has to be maintained. Muscle is the most metabolically active body tissue burning more calories than any other. Building muscle helps you burn fat and then keep it off.

“That which is used develops,

and that which is not used wastes away.”

Hippocrates on the principle behind strength training,

referring to muscular hypertrophy and atrophy.

Relative Fitness vs. Line Absolutism

One of the main benefits of Fitness Santa Fe Style™ is the recognition, often forgotten in fitness fads, that a person’s fitness needs are relative to their current fitness level, age, goals, and preferences. It provides context: there’s a place at the fitness table, so to speak, for every training system and metasystem according to its contributions and limitations. It includes the contributions of each while excluding only their advocates’ claims to absoluteness as being the best training system for everyone all the time.

“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”

Abraham Maslow

There are zealous advocates of High Intensity Training (HIT), High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), Pilates, Bikram Yoga, P90X, CrossFit, Kettlebell Training, Functional Training, etc., who tend to believe their system is best, some of whom believing everyone should use their system regardless of fitness level, needs, goals, age, or without gradual progression. This results in unnecessary injuries.

Line absolutism is the fallacy whereby one line, method, or system of training is believed to be the only real or important or true training system to the exclusion of others which are deemed wrong, bad, or false. Absolutism results in denying, dismissing, excluding other aspects of fitness training so is therefore faulty thinking from the perspective of inclusive network logic and systems holism.

From an evolutionary epistemology perspective each of these training systems is valuable to some people some of the time or they would have been selected out of existence. Each deserves due consideration and integration into a larger framework that honors the contributions and limitations of each.

Which is the best training system? All of the above.

These are all great fitness systems with impressive research and impressive practitioners. Each makes a valuable contribution to the fitness spectrum while none has a privileged view of reality. Naturally, each system has it’s strengths and weaknesses — the perfect training system that does everything for everyone all the time does not exist. Fitness Santa Fe Style™ encourages you to apply discerning/discriminating wisdom and flexibility in your choice of fitness training systems:

1. 1)Honor their contributions: Adopt an open mind about each of them.
   

2. 2)Honor their limitations: Adopt healthy skepticism about their claims.
   

3. 3)Try stage-appropriate fitness systems according to your needs, level of fitness, and goals.
   

4. 4)Trust your body’s feedback and your intuition while trying them.
   

5. 5)Use gradual progression within each system and among systems.
   

6. 6)Strive for ‘progress, not perfection.’
   

Personal Training Santa Fe Style

What’s the difference between fitness training and personal training? Although they’re sometimes used interchangeably, technically fitness training, sometimes called physical fitness training when the emphasis is on the physical aspect of the bodymind, is what you do when you workout, exercise, or train for fitness on your own — and you can get great results when you know what you’re doing.

However, just as a piano teacher or voice coach can help you develop your musical talents faster and more effectively than trying to figure it out on your own, working with a professional personal trainer can take your health and fitness to a higher level of results faster, safer, and more effectively. We motivate clients by providing goals, feedback, and positive accountability. Proper exercise prescription by a trainer results in improved body composition, physical performance, heart condition, and health outcomes1.

Moreover, personal training has been shown to exercise behavior patterns, improve the benefit-to-concern ratio for exercise (decisional balance), and increase confidence in choosing fitness instead of other time demands (scheduling self-efficacy)2. Personal training results in higher strength, higher workout intensity, and higher perceived exertion during exercise3. People working with personal trainers use heavier loads than those who don’t, one reason for better results. But the main reason is that you work smarter.

Positive Personal Training™

Personal Training Santa Fe Style

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