"Abs are made in the kitchen, not the gym" - Socrates

Okay, maybe not Socrates...but if you're in the fitness industry, chances are you've heard that theory more than once. 

So you've got your TrueCoach clients rocking and rolling on their workouts, but what about the other 23 hours of the day? In this article, we'll share some ways our coaches have leveraged the tools in TrueCoach to help provide their clients with nutrition programming and take on nutrition-only clients. Every coach is unique in their approach to nutrition coaching, so take the ideas you like and leave the rest! 

MyFitnessPal (MFP) Integration:

Along with the tips below, you can have your clients connect TrueCoach to their MyFitnessPal account! Making nutrition coaching and tracking easier than ever for you and your clients!

Do you have to sync with MyFitnessPal (MFP) to coach your clients to their nutrition goals? Nope, but if you want to you could! Check out the MyFitnessPal integration knowledge base here!

If you have your clients weigh and measure their food, this is the perfect foundation to understand your clients' eating habits. Our nutrition tracker allows you to see daily entries of your clients' macronutrient intake so you can see how compliant they are with the goals you've assigned them. 

Read more on setting nutrition goals here

You can see from the chart that overall, Jane is doing a great job of following her numbers. This makes it easy to see when your clients trend high or low on a specific macronutrient, so you can adjust a meal plan or make some suggestions as needed.
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Metrics let you track progress on any specific measurement. While these work great for movements or physical tests, this is also the best place to track things like bodyweight, body fat percentage, and anatomical measurements. Your clients can update these numbers as often as they'd like right from their profile in the app.

Create a metric set for the information you need to make sure your guidelines are right for each client.

Once your clients start updating their metrics, we'll graph each data point for both of you to see. Losing weight can be discouraging when you don't see a difference in the mirror every day! We're sure you've had plenty of clients who don't see their progress as clearly as you do, so providing a visual graph is a great way to say...hey, check out how you HAVE improved so far.
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Read more on Metrics here

One of our favorite parts of TrueCoach is the workout builder. You could write anything in the exercise field, shoot a quick video, and have your clients doing the macarena with shake weights in either hand. So, what's to stop you from using the workout builder to collect nutrition info?

Idea #1 - Write a Meal Plan

Start adding short recipe videos to your exercise library for a quick reference and thoughtful touch. If you build specific meal plans for your clients, this would be a great way to track their compliance with what you've assigned them. If you have meal plans stored as PDFs or word documents, you can always upload those to 'files' under the nutrition tracker as well 👍 

(client view)

If this works well with your clients, make a series of meal plans in a Program! This way, you have a collection of meals and recipes that you can easily assign out to other clients as needed.

Idea #2 - Daily or Weekly Check-Ins

If you collect information or updates on a regular basis, the best way to do this is in the workout builder if you don't want to remind your clients in a message each week. You could assign clients a weekly check-in and have them update their metrics right from that workout. You could copy and paste this workout on every Sunday, or even include it as part of a Program!

Read more on how to link metrics to workouts here.

Now that we've established a couple of ways to use the workout builder for nutrition, it's likely you'll use similar methods for multiple clients. Rather than using copy/paste like it's going out of style, save all of these 'workouts' in a program! 

Read more on Programs here

With a handful of recipes loaded into the exercise library, customizing the amounts assigned for each food/meal would be done just like customizing the number of sets/reps for a back squat. Save yourself some time by creating several programs:

Clearly, those are just some ideas, and you can get as broad or specific as you'd like!
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Chances are you've got clients who might need more/less fuel on certain days based on their workout program. For example, a client training for a triathlon might need significantly more calories on a mock race day than a rest or recovery day. If you use the skeleton tool to plan out their training, you can also use it to plan out their nutrition.

If you can't tell, there are tons of ways to make TrueCoach your one-stop shop for all of your client's needs. We're always looking for fresh ideas, so if you have any to share please send them our way!