Fibion Blog • Personal Trainer Timo Haikarainen is a new Guest Blogger on Fibion.com • Olli Tikkanen
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Personal Trainer Timo Haikarainen is a new Guest Blogger on Fibion.com

Timo Haikarainen is a new Guest Blogger on Fibion.com

Personal Trainer Timo Haikarainen is a new Guest Blogger on Fibion.com

Fibion proudly introduces its new visiting blogger Timo Haikarainen who has long experience from personal training and coaching but also holds a Master’s degree is Sport Sciences and continually aims to bring latest scientific knowledge to practise.

Timo has studied biology of physical activity in University of Jyväskylä, where he graduated from 2008 majoring in Sport Coaching and Fitness Testing. Career choice in sport and exercise was an obvious choice for him as he has been doing coaching from his teenage years.

During the years Timo has accumulated over 15 000 hours of personal training. Practical coaching continues still active even though during last 6 years expert work and education as well as media work in TV and magazines take a big share of his time.

– My goal is toTimo Haikarainen giving a speech help as many people as possible in their change towards healthier and more active lifestyle change and also to help people who are already active to achieve better results and enjoy sports and exercise more.

Even moderate amount of exercise is enough

– Often people start too intensively in beginning. They are thinking that I am now in the square 0 and I want to get to square 100 as quickly as possible. When you do too much too quickly, body is not recovering well and exercise becomes a drag. It is important to remember that even moderate amount of exercise is enough.

– Many people believe that all lifestyle changes related to nutrition and exercise has to be made extreme and needs to result in a lot of agony. Naturally, this is very far from the truth, Timo encourages.

As a full day coach and Personal Trainer Timo started in 2002. Practical field work is still the major part of his work:

”I have customers ranging from overweight beginners and disabled seniors to very goal oriented athletes and bodybuilders”

In his expert roles Timo is educating and mentoring Personal Trainers, lecturing and working in Finnish TV program as exercise coach. In addition he is producing material, for example for KKI-project and RecoApp company which is developing training applications.

Challenges and personal development as driving forces in his work

What makes, after over a decade of personal training, Timo to get inspired day in day out? ”Continual challenges and possibility to develop myself practically endlessly”, Timo answers.

”All the time you learn more about physiology of the body, psychology of coaching, learns to differentiate essential from the non-essential and so on”, Timo continues. Obstacles not only create a challenge, but also a path to learn something new. Timo’s recipe for obstacles is clear:”Handing, management and conversion to development”.

Timo tells that he is reading a lot of literature related to the field and trying still to improve his knowledge on physiology, biomechanics and exercise psychology. He is reading the seminal work as well as scientific articles. All miscellaneous articles in the internet, he is reading with very critical eye, but still open to new ideas

As a coach Timo wants to get above the average development rate shown my scientific studies. ”That is always my goal”. If we don’t get to that, we need to reflect on reasons closely: I am very critical to myself and I always seek for improvements. Genetic factors do not enable extremely good development in all, but keeping this in mind my principle is always to aim for excellent results”.

Timo’s take home message to coaches and people training in the gym.

”Respect the basic principles of coaching sciences: overloading, progression, variance and individualisations. Do what is needed, not what is trendy at the moment (if the current trend doesn’t happen to be the best to achieve the goals of the individual). Go beneath the surface in the training methods and nutrition. What kind of stimulus does this exercise provide to neuromuscular system? Neuromuscular system does not recognize the training tools or methods by name. It only gets stimulus from them and tries to adapt to. Is this stimulus such that it will take you or your customer towards the goals set”

”Be critical, but not cynical. Train hard, but without obsessive attitude!”

Fibion.com can reveal that first blog series from Timo will concentrate on differences between men and women in strength training. He will give answers and new insights, for example, to following interesting questions:

What are the most important factors why women don’t get results in the gym?

Why women should change training stimulus more often than men?

Why men fatigue more than women during strength training?

Olli Tikkanen
Olli Tikkanen

Everyday Activity Scientist

Partner

Fibion Inc.

PhD in Sedentary Behaviour and Everyday Activity

Olli Tikkanen holds a PhD degree in Sport Sciences from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. His ground-breaking doctoral thesis, “Physiological loading during normal daily life and exercise assessed with electromyography”, is one of the corner stones of the research at Fibion Inc.