“Whilst there’s no doubt some individuals might

benefit from some medicated intervention, are we in danger of ignoring the hippopotamus in the living room if we ignore the potential benefits of behavioural intervention?”

2000 to £46.8 million in 2009, reaching its peak in 2007 at £51.6 million.” Whilst there’s no doubt some individuals might benefit from some medicated intervention, are we in danger of ignoring the elephant in the living room if we ignore the potential benefits of behavioural intervention?

As personal trainers and exercise professionals we are on the front line in terms of offering a useable effective treatment. So where does that leave us? Is it necessary to do a degree in psychology as well as physiology training? Perhaps not. In the last ten years there has been an increase in the

demand for new therapeutic styles of behavioural intervention, these include neurolinguistic programming (NLP), cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), hypnosis, and life coaching. These are all techniques or skills that can be learned over a period of as little as two weeks in some cases, but how valuable are they?

l NLP is the term given to a study of human behaviour by John Grinder and Richard Bandler, initially undertaken in the 1970s. The title simply represents the connection between neurological processes, language (internal and external) and behaviours that have been learned through experience. Grinder

and Bandler claimed that if the effective patterns of exceptional people could be observed and replicated, a term they coined as ‘modelling’, these patterns could potentially be acquired and copied or implemented by others. In reality this concept was not as new or ground- breaking as some might think. In the 1930s Napoleon Hill was commissioned by the billionaire Andrew Carnegie to undertake a ‘Study of Success’. Carnegie gave Hill introductions to over 500 of the world’s leading thinkers and achievers of the time (including Edison and Henry Ford) so that he could model their behaviours to look for replicable patterns. Based on this research Hill wrote “Think And Grow Rich”. When Hill died in 1970 it had already sold over 20 million copies, and still tops the best seller list today. NLP may derive many of its

principles from this work. In its modern day format it gives us a practical set of guidelines to identify negative or undesirable thought patterns and behaviours, and shows us how by using our imagination, we can change them.

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The REPs Journal 2012;25(September):15-18