Hiring a personal trainer can be an expensive way to help you reach your fitness goals, but does it really help, or are you wasting your money?
The good news is that I can categorically state that personal training does help you achieve your goals faster, and in this article, I will explain the importance of personal training, and how it is far more effective than training on your own.
I’ve had years of experience as a level 3 certified trainer In London, but I have no intention of selling anything to you in this article, so you also know everything I say today is totally unbiased.
Sound good?
Let’s go…
There’s no doubt about it, hiring a personal trainer is a big commitment in terms of both time and money. Before you dedicate yourself to paying for a trainer and going to the gym several times a week, it makes sense that you would do a little research beforehand.
I’m glad you have because I am about to tell you why it might be one of the best decisions you make.
Why personal training is important
- You’ll push yourself harder with a trainer
- You’ll be more committed to reaching your goals
- You’ll receive expert advice
- You’ll be using proven training methods
- It’ll renew your interest in training
- It’s tailored specifically to your goals
- You’ll be taught how to train yourself
- You’ll be tested to ensure results are coming
- You’ll be consistent
- It’ll take you out of your comfort zone
You’ll push yourself harder with a trainer
I’ll level with you, lifting weights hurts, sprint training’s tough, and most exercises that have any effect will leave you out of breath and wondering why you are putting yourself through all this.
Once things start to get tough, it’s very easy to stop and say you’ve worked hard enough. I know exactly how this feels, you get to rep ten of twelve, and when it’s really hurting you hear your brain saying “that’s it, we’ve done enough for this set, we can stop here”.
On your own, you might end up listening to this annoying little voice in your head, but with a trainer, if it’s a set of twelve reps you’re supposed to be doing, you’d better believe you’re doing twelve reps! (you may even end up doing 13).
Your trainer knows this is important because those last few reps where you really need to push yourself past the point of pain are the ones that really make the difference and get you the results you’re after.
Why do you think you see personal trainers working out together? It’s so they can push each other way past what they would usually do themselves. Your trainer will push you far harder than you would yourself, getting you results in half the time.
You’ll be more committed to reaching your goals
Even with the greatest of intentions, it’s really hard to motivate yourself enough to get in that gym and work out on a consistent basis. Just go into any major gym chain on the 1st of January to see hundreds of brand new members who have all sworn that “This year is the one!”, only to end up going twice and never again.
Reaching your goals takes time and effort, and doing it on your own gives you plenty of opportunities to give up and say “well, I tried, but I guess exercise just doesn’t work for me”.
A trainer would never let you give up this easily, and not just because they want you to keep paying them (maybe a little), but they really do want you to achieve your goals, your success helps promote their training.
By working with a trainer, you will see results, which gets you in a fantastic positive cycle where you will want to see more progress.
Having a session or two each week booked in with a coach also makes you far more likely to attend each workout rather than sacking it off to go to the pub after work with your buddies.
You’ll receive expert advice
Who would you rather be taught by, an expert that has spent years qualifying and has been assessed by other experts in the field to make sure they have enough knowledge to be able to teach others, or from a few articles you quickly read through on your lunch break?
I really hope the answer is obvious here, you should always be taught by an expert.
Can you make progress with your own research, yeah, of course, you can, but will you be training in the best way possible for your body type or your genetics? maybe not.
Personal trainers spend months and sometimes even years attending courses, studying, and getting qualified in specific fields so that you never have to worry about whether or not you are working out in the safest and most efficient ways. PTs really learn a lot to give you the best service possible.
The money you pay for a trainer isn’t purely for their time, you’re paying for access to their vast knowledge, just in the same way that an Olympic athlete would pay for a coach to help them be the very best at their chosen sport.
You’ll be using proven training methods
There is some real garbage out there on the internet in terms of training methods, and in the course of my years in gyms, I’ve seen people doing some really dumb things.
I’d love to think that those videos you see of people doing really ridiculous exercises in gyms are all made up, but I can tell you they aren’t.
Personal trainers know what works, they’ve trained tons of people with all different body types and will be able to prescribe exercises and programs to you that will work. They don’t want you to fail, they want you to get results, so they aren’t going to be giving you a load of rubbish that won’t have any positive effect that brings you closer to your goals.
If you say you want to lose weight, they will show you the most efficient and proven methods to do so. If you want to gain weight and increase muscle mass, they again will be the best way to do that. You won’t end up wasting months of your life following a training regime that some D-list celebrity swears got them the results they needed after two weeks.
It’ll renew your interest in training
Results motivate, simple as that.
If you train for months on end and see no difference in the way you look or feel, why would you carry on? It doesn’t make a lick of sense does it?
It’s not uncommon at all for people to join a gym, struggle for a while, leave and then in a few year’s time give it a go again only to have the same thing happen. Hiring a trainer will give you access to more knowledge, understanding of how and why exercises work, and more importantly, you will enjoy it more.
Your trainer will give you new exercises every few weeks to keep things interesting, and constantly seeing yourself progress will motivate you.
It’s tailored specifically to your goals
Every person is different and the way their bodies react to exercise and diet will also vary. That’s why following a cookie-cutter workout program or diet you’ve found on the internet might not help you as much as you would think it might.
A personal trainer is just that, personal.
They look at your goals and will take into consideration many factors, such as lifestyle, time available to train, dietary requirements, injuries, posture issues, and tons of others. This helps them put together a training program that will not just help you reach your goals but will be achievable for you on a personal level.
When you are paying for a premium service like hiring a PT, you should have a completely tailor-made experience, which is exactly what you get.
You’ll be taught how to train yourself
Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach him to fish, and…….well, he’ll have lots of fish I guess.
Plenty of people walk into a gym without having a clue what they’re doing, which means they’ll probably quit after a few months without achieving anything.
When you hire a trainer, you aren’t just paying for them to stand over your shoulder and count reps, they are there to teach you how to exercise efficiently and safely. You can take this knowledge with you for years to come, so if you decide after a few months or even weeks that you don’t feel like you want or need a trainer anymore, you have still learned what you need to do to get yourself results.
There were plenty of clients that I had that called our sessions “lessons”, which when I thought about it made plenty of sense, I was teaching them how to exercise, so in a way, they were lessons.
You’ll be tested to ensure results are coming
Very few people will track and monitor their progress as meticulously as a trainer would with a client. The reason they do this is because they need to make sure you’re getting results, after all, if they don’t get you results, you leave and then they have to go through the hassle of finding another client.
It’s really important to test and measure, so a personal trainer should be taking measurements every few weeks or so to make sure things are going in the right direction. If it turns out that little to no progress has been made, your trainer has the opportunity to make a few tweaks to your program to fix any issues they find.
It’s really easy to join a gym and exercise three times a week for months on end, only to find you’ve achieved nothing (probably through no fault of your own), a trainer won’t let this happen.
You’ll be consistent
Consistency is key to learning and progressing with anything. If you wanted to learn to play piano, would you practice once every now and then for different amounts of time? No, you’d probably want to practice several times a week for an hour so that you can get good at it in a fairly short time.
The exact same thing happens with exercise, you need to be consistent or you’ll really struggle to get anywhere with it.
A lot of people join gyms and train every now and then, and to be honest, it really won’t help that them much at all. It’ll burn off a few calories here and there, but any changes will be minimal.
Hiring a PT gets your butt in the gym several times a week, a few times with them, and a few times on your own. They bring routine to your workouts, and you’ll quickly find that following it and making exercise a priority really isn’t that difficult.
Being consistent in your training is vital to getting you results, and as long as you can do this, you’ll start seeing them pretty quickly.
They’ll take you out of your comfort zone
Free-weights areas, pretty scary places huh?
The big sweaty guys grunting, groaning, and throwing weights around don’t make many people feel comfortable, so they tend to stay away from this area entirely unless they feel very confident in what they’re doing.
This is a massive mistake for most gym-goers, as some of the best results you can get from a gym are made in that very location. Hiring a personal trainer will give you the confidence to get into that area and feel comfortable whilst you’re there.
If you’ve never even considered doing deadlifts, squats, or bench presses because they are for people that want to get big and muscly but you only want to lose weight, you are really missing a trick. Using free weights is a very efficient way of losing weight and developing a great shape for your body, so being nervous about it and sticking to the cross trainer is a massive waste of your time and effort.
A trainer will help build your confidence in the gym so you can get the most out of the equipment there and help get the most from your membership. You’re paying for all the equipment that’s there, if you’re only using the same three bits of kit each time you go, you’re wasting a ton of money.
Conclusion
Personal training really does help, I’ve seen fantastic results from my clients and other trainers’ clients over the years. At their most basic, you could consider a personal trainer a teacher, and the knowledge they will give you will help you to train yourself more efficiently and get those results you’re after way faster.
If you’re wondering about whether or not you should give personal training a go, I would say at least try it for a while. You won’t need to spend thousands of pounds, just take enough sessions to learn about how to exercise more efficiently and what you need to do to reach the goals you’re after. Once you know what you’re doing you can carry on by yourself.
Go get’em!
If you liked this article, please feel free to share it or link back to it.
