What is Personal Training?

A difficult question to answer as opinions differ from person to person and personal trainer to personal trainer. Below are my thoughts on what a Personal Trainer is and is not.

4 things Personal Training is NOT (or at least, should not be)

1. An Authoritarian Hierarchy - The image above depicts this. For most people, shouting is not an effective communication technique. In organisations such as the Army, it is deemed necessary. In personal training, it is simply a lazy way of getting people to move.

2. A social media contest - Most personal trainers have a background in sport or at least enjoy exercise. They have typically spent a good portion of their adult life training or exercising either for improved performance or aesthetics and sometimes both. A PT’s attention should be solely focused on you during your session, not on social media content.

3. All about numbers - most of us like numbers, and data can be a very useful way of establishing if something is working or not. Focusing obsessively on numbers, however, is unhelpful. Once a goal or target has been established, attention should then shift to the process or journey of working toward that goal. In coaching, this is where the balance between art and science begins to play out. Personal training is predominately about the process.

4. Off the cuff - A thoughtful PT will have an outline of the session they want to deliver before they arrive. Ideally, this has taken into account the overall goals for that period. Personal Training is not babysitting whilst you randomly switch between exercises. If in doubt, ask questions. A good coach loves questions.

4 things a Personal Trainer should aim to be

1. Personal - The clue is in the name. Personal Training should always be personal. This may seem fairly obvious but it is difficult to achieve. The average PT in a mainstream gym will have upwards of 30 people to see each week. The model most gyms follow is volume-based. The cost is low and the numbers are high. What this means as a customer to this system is you are one of around 500 people receiving personal training every week in your gym. The latest fix for this is gym PT’s now have tablets with software that generates programs for each person they work with. Practically, this appears like a good solution, in reality, your PT spends more time on the tablet than with you and a slave to the plan. Personal Training must always focus on your needs as an individual. This goes down to how they greet you when you arrive. We can learn a great deal about someone before they have even said ‘Hello’. I spend a significance amount of time between sessions working on the overall plan, the structure of our next session and arranging accountability calls. The people I work with appreciate the fact I’m present with them, always listening and working through the session, professionally and enjoyably.

2. Holistic - Despite common beliefs, there is a lot more to personal training than exercise. As a minimum, exercise and some nutritional guidance should feature in a quality PT repertoire. From my own experiences working within Specialist Weight Management and more recently as a Sports Coach, the knowledge or information we have is a very small part of the equation. Behaviour change techniques such as habit-forming and nudge theory are essential for us to communicate our specific knowledge to the people we are working with so that change occurs. We’ve all had that teacher, wonderfully intelligent but unable to get their point across. From my perspective, Personal Training should take a holistic approach, utilising all available techniques and appropriate disciplines so that you receive guidance not just on how to move during a squat, but also why eating before bed may not be the best idea.

3. Effective - I feel that most people appreciate that if something isn’t working then something needs to change. There is a good, but an overused (and misappropriated) quote that sums this up. It is said that any diet will work for 2 weeks. I think this is true, so long as the diet is followed! Effective means different things to different people. From experience, most people are interested in losing weight/becoming stronger/running faster/feeling happier for more than 2 weeks. But if you buy a 2-week plan and follow it, does that count as effective? Sadly, a lot of this stuff now exists in the health and fitness world. We all love a quick fix and the marketing is geared precisely for that itch. The primary question we need to ask is - what do I want to achieve? From here, we can then begin to look at how that can be tackled. The job of the PT is now to use this information to build a plan. Of course, this is only 10% of the job. For this to be effective, it has to work and affect a change (results). We make it work by building the plan into your life. Gradually, a new routine is formed, fresh habits are garnered and change occurs. Effective is also adaptable as the body is one smart cookie. Our physical body or physiology has a memory similar to our brain. We must continually review our practices and change our methods to ensure the body doesn’t get too smart and begin stalling.

4. Honesty - REPS is the official registrar for qualified personal trainers and where you can check if your PT is legitimate and insured. As there is no official consensus on how a person should lose weight (only guidelines) this gives free rein for PT’s to use whichever methods are seen fit for clients and create grandiose goals, from weight-loss to muscle gain. Having this flexibility is a privilege, as it affords us true freedom to be as effective as possible with the people we are working with. We also have a responsibility to explain where reality ends and fantasy begins. Occasionally, I receive requests from people asking for help to achieve something that goes beyond reality and into dangerous. I see my duty as trainer to guide these people towards a more realistic, healthy and safe goal. This is not an easy task and sometimes I spend my own time and money ensuring the reality of the situation is realised. Honestly is absolutely integral to my training as it lays the foundation for trust and openness which paths the way for fun and effective sessions that deliver life-long results.