Do counselors specialize in health and fitness?

Like other disciplines, counselors often have specialties. Counselors who specialize in health and fitness may be credentialed to work with eating disorders or wellness planning. These counselors will typically encourage self-responsibility, stress management, physical fitness, good nutrition, and the development of overall wellness to help their clients avoid illness.

An exercise psychologist job is to understand how psychological factors affect an exercisers exercise and to understand how participation in exercise affects a person psychological development.

An exercise psychologist will help an exerciser build awareness of areas that the exerciser would like to improve on, for example, motivation. Once an exerciser has an awareness of areas of improvement the next steps are as follows: education, acquisition, and practice. In order to develop and improve mental skills to research has shown that is important to include all three phases of psychological skills training.

In the education phase a person must first identify what's important for psychological skills training. During the identification period a person also needs to become aware of the relevance of psychological skills training and how it applies to the their specific needs. For example, a person may think that mental skills training is only for someone who have psychological issues. It's important for this person to understand how mental skills training can be beneficial and applicable in an exercise setting using specific examples of things addressing that person's need and hoping to normalize psychological skills training. In the acquisition phase it's important for people to understand the range of techniques available to help address their needs and how to utilize those techniques. in the practice phase people over learn skills through extensive practice so that those skills become ingrained and automatic and people learn how to transfer those skills to their exercise.

Exercise psychology is concerned with the application of psychological principles to the promotion of physical activity and exercise, the psychological and emotional consequences of physical activity and exercise and the psychological, emotional and health related consequences of the lack of exercise.

Professionals that specialize in Health and Fitness are usually certified through a reputable organization such as ACSM, NSCA or NASM. Those professionals have been properly educated to give reliable and accurate information to help answer questions and provide good support in areas of health and fitness. The HFPN Coaches located on sharecare are NASM certifed professionals that are designated to help people with health and fitness concerns and goals.