Considering a Personal Trainer? Read This
Ready to kick start your fitness? Here are some considerations to keep in mind when hiring a personal trainer.
Know Your Goals
The first thing to think about before hiring a personal trainer is why you’re wanting to hire one. Is it to slim down after one too many bowls of pasta over your European summer? Or to boost your cardiovascular fitness before next year’s half marathon? Or perhaps you want to learn how to create your own fitness routine that you’ll stick to forever?
Get clear about what you want to get out of your personal training sessions, and find someone with the right expertise accordingly. Some personal trainers will be better at helping people gain muscle, others will be better at helping people lose weight, and some will be absolute masterminds of motivation. If you want to a bit of everything, find yourself a generalist rather than a personal trainer with a focus area of expertise.
Find Someone with Qualifications
The next thing to think to look for in a personal trainer is appropriate qualifications. You’ll be trusting this person to give you sound health and fitness advice, so you want to make sure that they’re experienced enough to give it. These days, anyone can create a social media page and call themselves a personal trainer, so ensuring they have the right qualifications is an important box to check.
While personal trainers don’t need to have diplomas or degrees to work professionally, they do need to have either a certificate III or IV in fitness. And if you’re doing one-on-one work with a personal trainer, which most people do, they’ll need that certificate IV. Any other qualifications they might have in exercise therapy or sports nutrition are an added bonus.
Find Someone Who Asks the Right Questions
Once you’ve found yourself a personal trainer with the right expertise, and you’ve signed up for your first session, pay close attention to how they start the personal training process.
Are they asking you about your current levels of fitness? Any health concerns they should know about? Whether you need nutrition advice? What you want to achieve during a session? The best personal trainers will be entirely focussed on you and your needs.
Trust Your Gut
As mentioned above, a good personal trainer will have a genuine interest in helping you reach your goals in a safe, sustainable way. If you feel like your personal trainer is pushing you to a point where your fitness or nutrition habits are unhealthy, take a step back. Your health is more important than your personal trainer’s results.
It’s also important to keep tabs on whether you’re making genuine progress with this personal trainer. We’d suggest re-evaluating after every few sessions to see whether you feel like you’re getting value for money, or whether you feel like you’re ready to go solo with your gym sessions.
Need More Advice?
The personal trainers at Planet Fitness Gyms are all fully qualified with certificates III and IV, and are more than happy to answer questions about your health and fitness, or make recommendations around personal trainers, gym memberships and group exercise classes. Visit our contact page to get in touch.