What To Look For In A Personal Trainer
The other day I had someone ask me about what to look for in personal trainer and health coach and I thought it was a great question that seems to not get asked enough. The problem is that many gyms hire their own personal trainers who get paid close to minimum wage and generally don’t have the skills and techniques that really make a good personal trainer.
You may be one of those people who was willing to spend your good money on hiring a trainer but then felt that the cost was much more than it was worth and you could have trained yourself better by just reading up on the exercises.
This is a pretty unfortunate situation and I think like with anything you need to be pretty smart about who you chose to help you with making the right advances with your training regimen and overall health.
Now many of you may think that you can’t afford a personal trainer yet you are willing to spend hundreds of dollars on eating out each month and then feeling extremely down on yourself for not being the healthiest you can be. Take this seriously because this can lead to a negative downward spiral of your self-confidence and self-worth. Cut your spending in another avenue so you can budget for a good personal trainer who will help you look rocking in the next set of clothes you buy, this feeling you will see is absolutely priceless.
With that said, perhaps it may be easier to talk about what to look for in a personal trainer by going into what you should avoid instead! I’ll make it easy for you and put this into bullet points…
- The personal trainer doesn’t look that fit themselves! You would think this is an obvious one but I see it time and time again. It’s almost like the blind leading the blind. How can you take the advice seriously when the trainer doesn’t really follow their own rules, eventually you will begin to ignore what they have to say, so save your money and skip these trainers!
- The personal trainer doesn’t ask for continuous feedback. You’re not paying someone to treat you poorly, again eventually you will being to resent that person and it will become a huge dread for you to see them again and you may even go as far as avoiding going to the gym all together. A good trainer always asks for feedback to make sure you understand everything.
- Your trainer pushes you so hard that you are sore for days and days afterwards. It’s ok to be sore the next day or two, but if your trainer pushed you so hard that it takes a week to recover then you know this person is not qualified to know how hard to push you.
- The trainer isn’t giving you feedback about your posture. This is ultra important because even with a mirror it’s hard sometimes to know how your posture is, and your trainer should be giving you great conversation about this matter. Without this info you are risking injury
- Focus is barely brought to your core when you are training with weights or even during your cardio. Having a tight core is essential to making sure you get the most of your workouts.
- The trainer is not keeping track of your progress. Again, the only way you will really push through and gain great results is by tracking your exercises, their reps and sets.
- They are yawning or looking bored during your workout. This should obviously be pretty offensive because you are paying them for complete attention and motivation to your workout. A great personal trainer will always be giving you positive encouragement and getting you pumped to push harder at each session.
- Always challenging you and switching up your exercises to keep your energy and motivation high. Personally I can think of over a thousand different exercises I could throw at my clients in any given session and many of them don’t even use weights! You know you have found an experienced trainer when they are able to make you laugh because the challenge is so great each time you workout with them.
Conclusion: What To Look For In A Personal Trainer
I honestly feel like I’ve given you quite a great list of things to keep in mind when looking for a high quality personal trainer and health coach. Now I’m currently in the process of creating a membership section which I can offer affordable online training to many more of you than I would be able to do here in Vancouver. My idea is to offer you a 12 week program where we attack a fitness and diet program and each week you will get the chance to ask me your specific questions via a live online video session. For those of you who want more, you’ll also get access to numerous fitness plans, exercise how-to instructions, a huge database of healthy meal and snack recipes, and much more. This is all stuff people pay several hundred dollars each month to get from their personal trainers, but I’m going to offer a package which will be affordable to all of you, that is my promise!
I’m just in the process of developing this new membership section, but if you want more information on what will be included and be first inline to get some special bonuses please make sure to sign up here – Online Personal Trainer.
If you have any questions or other ideas of what to look for in a personal trainer please leave a comment below…
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Thank you for visiting! Weight Loss and Training is a health blog which features all the best weight loss tips that I have learned over my 20 years of training. My background includes a degree in Kinesiology from the world renown Simon Fraser University, certification in nutritional sciences from UBC, and Personal Trainer Specialist certification from Can Fit Pro.
One more that I might add. It’s bad if the trainer is out of shape, but there is such a thing as being in too good of shape. I tend to call these people “supertrainers” and they can be just as bad for two reasons:
1. A lot of times, supertrainer tends to be a former high school or college athlete. This wouldn’t be a problem, except that they’ve been in incredible shape since they were twelve, have really only been around elite-level athletes, and don’t really have much of a clue how to deal with a total beginner.
OR
2. (This is especially true in bigger cities) Personal trainers are the new waiters, the go-to job for out-of-work actors or models, and will drop you as a client when a paying job comes along, or possibly a professional bodybuilder who will drop you when he has to start training for a show.
I’ve seen both happen, so buyer beware.