Tips from trio rated tops in the fitness profession

— North America’s top fitness professionals don’t necessarily train celebrities and professional athletes or badger overweight reality-TV contestants into shape.

Instead, they work with recreational runners who want to get faster, they inspire virtual clients online and they make fitness classes innovative and challenging.

These three fitness phenomenons were all recently honored by their industry as the cream of the crop.

Jason Karp

Karp aspires to be “the Jillian Michaels of running.” He is a big fan of the objectivity and the science of the sport: In races, there’s a start line, a finish line and one winner. “I’ve always been interested in what makes someone faster than another person and how they got there,” says Karp, the 2011 IDEA Health and Fitness Industry Personal Trainer of the Year,who works in San Diego.

Karp’s top tips:

Polarize your training. Recovery is the secret behind improvement; it can mean taking a day off or working at a lower intensity. With runners, Karp stresses going all out on hard days and relaxing on easy days. “Most people - especially gym goers - make their workouts all in the middle,” he says. “It’s the same thing every day. With really hard days, you force adaptations that cause stress; then you recover by working easy.”

Ease into it. If you’ve been sedentary for 40 years, don’t sign up to run a marathon in six months.

Make interval workouts harder. Many runners try to do this by running the intervals at a faster pace. Instead, decrease your recovery time between intervals, make the interval period longer or increase repetitions.

Nicole Nichols

The 29-year-old Nichols, recognized as “America’s Top Personal Trainer to Watch” by the American Council on Exercise and Life Fitness, has been on both sides of the fitness fence. As a teenager growing up near Cincinnati, she developed unhealthy exercise and eating habits - even though she thought she was working out correctly. In college, she struggled, bouncing from intense workouts to bagging exercise and gaining 40 pounds.

“I was miserable,” Nichols recalls. But as she learned more about personal training, she discovered “how to practice moderation, not just in food, but exercise,” she says.

Nichols’ top tips:

Morning exercise works. Get up 15 minutes earlier to squeeze in a short workout.

Don’t work out on an empty stomach. “It’s not going to result in greater fat burning,” Nichols says. “What’s most important for weight loss is burning total calories. If you are not eating in the morning or for a long time before you exercise, you won’t be able to work out at an optimal level, and that’s more detrimental,” she says.

Walk - even if you can run. Walking is an important part of an exercise plan, even for fit people.

Leigh Crews

Crews, IDEA’s Fitness Instructor of the Year, has what her husband jokingly calls a “certification addiction.” Over the last three decades, the 55-year-old dynamo from Alabama has taught everything from step aerobics and glide classes to her current favorites: TRX Suspension Training and Batuka, a choreographed dance-fitness program.

Her passion is training other fitness professionals, which she does through her company, Dynalife.

Crews’ top tips:

Find what you like. Then do it. “Make that the cornerstone of your workout, because if you don’t like it, you won’t stick to it,” she says. Round out that activity with something complementary. If you like to run, for example, then run. But balance it with yoga or strength training.

Don’t hang out in the back row. Group fitness classes can improve your odds for success, as the class tends to become one big family, Crews says. But if you’re uncertain about your abilities, “let the instructor know you are a newbie, and position yourself where you can see yourself in the mirror and see the instructor,” she says. “It will be much easier to follow, learn and look like you already know what you’re doing in there.”

ActiveStyle, Pages 28 on 03/26/2012

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