How To Write Meal Plans To Improve Your Clients’ Health

Writing meal plans is a great value add-on for your personal training clients. Proper nutrition guidance help your clients reach their goals faster and will increase your expertise in their eyes. Preparing these meal plans does not have to be difficult and using a template is essential for quickly putting together these meal plans for a variety of training goals.

There are four steps to creating meal plans: essential nutrition guidelines, food category recommendations, caloric intake and macronutrient recommendations and specific food recommendations. This article will provide you with the first two steps and then walk you through the other two steps. This will allow you the cheat sheet to writing meal plans to improve your clients’ health, weight loss and muscle gain.

The first step to creating meal plans, essential nutrition guidelines is based on four nutritional habits that will be the backbone of your meal plans. Three of these habits translate across all three training goals and the other has one specific recommendation based on the training goal. Eating every two to four hours, consuming vegetables with every feeding opportunity and consuming complete protein with every feeding opportunity are habits that are appropriate for any training goal. Consuming starches only within a two-hour window of the client’s workout is a suitable habit for those training for health or weight loss, but not for muscle gain, as those clients need to consume it with every meal as well.

The second step, food category recommendations relates to the habits as outlined above. These recommendations are outlined simply to provide you, the personal trainer, with an idea of what category the majority of the food, and ultimately calories and macronutrients should come from. These are very straightforward recommendations and are specific to each client’s training goal. The most basic food category recommendation is for those clients looking to lose weight. Their food intake should be mostly comprised of vegetables and lean protein. This isn’t to say that this is all that those looking to lose weight should eat, but the bulk of their caloric intake should come from these two food categories. Clients whose objective is health will build upon that base of vegetables and lean protein and add more healthy fat and fruit. Finally, those looking to gain muscle will take the recommendations for your health clients and add more starches like potatoes, oatmeal, rice and pasta.

Based on these two steps, the outline of your meal plans should look like the following:

*Post-Workout Meal (to be substituted for any meal if consumed within two hours post work-out)

-Starch
-Lean Protein
-Vegetables
-Fruit
-Healthy Fat

With the template provided above, step three is to provide caloric and macronutrient recommendations based on their training goals. We will use the active recommendations as it can be assumed that your clients will be training with you multiple times per week. To determine caloric intake, your clients looking for weight loss will multiply their bodyweight in pounds by fourteen, your health client’s will multiply seventeen by their bodyweight and the multiplier for your weight gain clients is twenty-two. The macronutrient breakdowns for your weight loss clients are thirty-five percent protein, twenty-five percent carbohydrate and forty percent fat of their total caloric intake. For health clients a diet consisting of thirty percent protein, forty percent carbohydrate and thirty percent fat is ideal. Muscle gain clients will need to consume twenty-five percent of their calories from protein, fifty-five percent from carbohydrate and twenty percent from fat.

Simply providing the meal plan template and the caloric intake and macronutrient recommendations may be enough for some clients to help them reach their goals. However, some may need more guidance and this is where the most difficult and time-consuming step comes in. Providing the specific food recommendations will require the personal trainer to research the serving size, caloric amount and macronutrient breakdown of a variety of foods. This process will be made easier by using the meal plan templates provided in order to know what types of food to search for and where to place them within the client’s daily meal schedule.

Creating meal plans can add value to your personal training or provide you with another billable service. There is no doubt that, regardless of the specific training goal of your client, nutrition will aid in your clients’ success and the speed at which they reach that success. A system to develop these meal plans and a template will improve your ease and rate at which you can produce these meal plans for your clients.

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