Let’s explore some reasons why you should hire a personal trainer!
Everyone, including you, has a different reason for visiting or joining a gym. Some of you will go it alone, whilst some of you will be weighing up the options of hiring a professional coach.
Coaches offer a number of unique benefits and can be the difference between achieving your fitness goal and not. This could include the ambitions of losing weight, losing body fat, increase muscular size, or just generally feel more healthy.
However, hiring a coach is an investment and one that many are unsure on what to expect from. So if you have been thinking of hiring a coach but are unsure, let’s cover a number of reasons why you should:
01. You Don’t Know Where To Start / New To The Gym
Starting off in the gym can be a complicated and intimidating experience.
With so many types of equipment and an ever-growing world of conflicting information at our fingertips, it is understandably hard to know what sort of plan is best for you.
Hiring a coach can help you identify exactly what you want to gain from being at the gym. From this, they can create a complete tailored program, as well as taking into consideration the following:
The Right Activities/Exercises for you – Maybe you don’t know what would work your body, the schedule you should be on or even the equipment that is available.
Understanding The Basics Of A Programme – A coach can help guide you in how to start and how much exercise you can handle at first. They will teach you the aspects of frequency, intensity, time, and why you are doing the type of workouts you are doing and the how and why of manipulating those elements over time.
Help You With Your Schedule – This can often get just as confusing as what to actually do in the gym. A coach can help you go through your calendar and figure out when you can workout and what you will do on those days you’re not working alongside a coach. This will help you maximise your time while keeping you within your own abilities and limits.
This will save you hours of wasted time spent working on ineffective plans and help you see results more efficiently and effectively.
02. Accountability & Motivation
Motivation can come in all different forms and is unique to each and every individual. However many of those that lose sight of their fitness goals do so because they are not held accountable.
When working with a coach, you’re less likely to skip workouts – Once your committed to someone, you are more obligated to go. Your coach is there, waiting for you to show up and if you don’t you’ll have to answer for why you didn’t!
Yes, you can find this from a good training partner, but your coach has a vested interest. Not only do you want to see the results, but your achievements are a direct reflection on your coaches skills and expertise. It is our job, livelihood, and if you succeed, we succeed.
Spending money is a great motivator. You pay for your coaches knowledge and expertise within the fitness industry and because you want to achieve a personal and individual goal. If you are investing your own hard earned cash into reaching your goal, will you really just not show up or not give 100% to each session?
Accountability during your workout. Exercising is and should be tough. It’s tiring. Not only can a trainer make sure your programme is aligned with your fitness goal, but they hold you accountable whilst your working out. There are no skipped reps when you have a trainer by your side. They will ensure you do the right exercises, even the tougher ones, with the right weight to reach your goals.
03. Improve your nutrition
Regardless of your goal or the reason you’re attending the gym, you can push your body to its limits but unless you are eating correctly, you will have little to show for your efforts.
Though you do have a wealth of practical and great information about good fitness nutrition out there, it’s also just as much of a minefield of negative and self opinionated information. Alongside that, the ever conflicting information on all media platforms about the next big superfood or diet that will “burn the fat right off your body” or the next toxic food that is the leading cause for this and that illness.
One thing a good coach will not do, is embrace these latest nutritional fads, or put you on a restrictive diet that involve a radical behavioural change. They will follow three principles in order to guide your actions towards helping you eat healthier for the long term.
Keeping it simple. Nutrition, although appearing complex at times, it can actually be very simple when approached in a less than over – complicated manner.
Aim to create a sustainable change. As with exercise, nutritional change must be sustainable. This means the approach that any coach should be equally insightful and timely.
Essentially all diets work, they just don’t last. What a coach should be asking is:
“Can we work together to help you improve your nutrition over time, just as we’ll be making you fitter, in a way that is painless as possible”.
That is the art of a behavioural approach to improving nutrition.
Focus on eating habits. In order to be effective with nutritional change, a coach will build a profile of the habits their clients exhibit. This is just not with the intake of food but rather all the circumstances that surround the act of eating. They will be looking at what you are doing at the time, what you feel like, what you eat/drink, and what you feel afterwards. This is then used to create a wealth of potential changes that the client could slowly action to improve their nutrition.
04. You are not seeing results / Wanting to boost your efforts
So you have been exercising consistently for weeks or even months. It was going well to start with, you were seeing results but it’s all come to either a full stop or you are just barely seeing results.
What gives?
Over time, your body will naturally plateau, this is your bodies way of signalling that your body has become accustomed to the same style of workouts and therefore your results become slower, harder or none existent to achieve.
Put simply your body is not getting challenged in the same it was way previously.
Here are a few things a good coach can do to overcome this plateau, help boost your efforts and help regain momentum:
Look at your current program. A coach will look at ways to change your workout to make them more efficient and/or effective.
Push you a little harder. Often people do not see results because they’re not working hard enough or working as hard as they think they can. It’s easy to slack off or fall into the trap of becoming comfortable when you’re by yourself, having someone there to challenge you might be the difference between achievement and stalling.
Teach you how to lift weights and do other exercises. It’s a common sight to see people focus their efforts on cardio to lose weight or either gravitate towards them out of comfort. However, you need to include strength training and core training in order to make it an effective and efficient workout plan. These are things a coach can teach you how to do the right way.
You may find that you are getting results, just not in the way you expected, something a coach may see more clearly from the outside.
05. Injury prevention or overcome a current injury
One of the top reasons to work alongside a coach is that they understand form and how to execute an exercise correctly. Ignorance and poor execution are catalysts for injury.
A knowledgeable coach will understand form and will improve your exercise execution and skill. By learning a new exercise directly from an experienced coach, you can help to avoid developing any serious injury.
More importantly, a coach will offer you the chance to help overcome existing injuries you might be suffering from.
However, make sure your trainer has experience with any condition you might have and always get clearance by your doctor first.
Take away note…
One key note to make is that many think you hire a personal trainer to mainly help you workout or just the tick boxes to the above, however personal training should be a lot more than that.
What you will see all too often within the fitness industry, is coaches charging for a service that they don’t put thought processes into. With no plan, winging it when a client turns up for a session, with no real individual programming that is tailored to the client involved.
They are told a few basic nutrition tips in the early stages, and months down the line nothing has been reviewed, adjusted or changed. Just a quick jump on the scales and a random check here and there to see if anything has happened.
If you’re investing your money, you have every right to expect a level of professionalism and high quality service.
So before you make your investment in a coach, please do your research and ask as many questions as you can, make sure you are working with a professional.
I hope this helps you when choosing your personal trainer that is correct for you!
Any questions? Feel feel to email me at [email protected] or contact on Instagram at @rms_weightloss_management
Written by Coach Rich – Follow us at @rms_weightloss_management
