The transtheoretical model and strategies of European fitness professionals to support clients in changing health-related behaviour: A survey study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: The transtheoretical model of behaviour change (TTM) is often used to understand and predict changes in health related behaviour, for example exercise behaviour and eating behaviour. Fitness professionals like personal trainers typically service and support clients in improving multiple types of health-related behaviour. Research on the population of European fitness professionals in general is lacking. And studies on strategies used by fitness professionals to support clients in changing health-related behaviour is even more scarce. The purpose of this paper is to present the first explorative European study on this subject. Methods: An online survey was performed using the European Register for Exercise Professionals (EREPS), counting 6,681 professionals (January 2015). Most professionals are personal trainers, with a total of 5,222. Additionally there are 1,620 level 3 fitness instructors and 39 at level 5 (exercise for health specialist). Professionals of five countries were surveyed in the first quarter of 2015. The survey was send out by email to 3,497 fitness professionals. Results: In total 178 fitness professionals participated. European fitness professionals use a mix of strategies to support behaviour change of health related behaviours. The most addressed type of behaviour was exercise, followed by nutrition. The support mainly focused on clients in the preparation and action stage of the TTM. Reaching the desired goal and too expensive were the main reasons for relapse with respectively 51.7% and 38.3%. Conclusion: European fitness professionals use a wide range of strategies to support clients in changing health-related behaviour. This study draws a first picture of the used strategies within the TTM framework. Future research should focus on other frameworks for behaviour change and other populations, for example fitness professionals on other parts of the world. Ultimately, research should test the effectiveness of strategies to increase the adoption and maintenance of health-related behaviour of clients, and client retention of professionals.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".