Great Personal Trainers Do More Than Just Tell You What To Do
You want a change.
You may have tried to change before but now you are interested in getting some help.
Fantastic move! By doing so you have dramatically increased your chances of getting a result.
A lot of people come to personal training as a way to lose weight, however there are so many other factors personal trainers help clients with;
- To increase strength & core stability
- To overcome an injury and reduce the chances of it occurring again
- To prepare for an event like a 10K or marathon
- To create a regular schedule in the diary because they wouldn’t exercise else.
Just like any profession it is very likely there is not just one personal trainer in your area and it can be problematic in determining which one is right for you. The worst outcome possible for my profession is you having a bad experience with a personal trainer and deciding never to use one again.
What you are reading now is my way of ensuring you have the best possible experience with a personal trainer by choosing wisely which one is the best for you.
The following is 5 criteria I would recommend to make your choice easier and with confidence.
1. Know your budget but don’t go on price.
It is very tempting if you see personal training as just exercise to search for the cheapest personal training in your city.
If you don’t mind the food you are eating, you’ll hunt out the cheapest food outlet you can find.
Yet, there is so much more to personal training than just exercise.
For example, if you can’t perform a certain body movement you run the risk of getting injured with the majority of exercise out there. However, up to 80% of personal trainers don’t test for it.
Sure you may pay the cheapest for personal training but if you get injured because the personal trainer doesn’t know how to adapt the exercise to your needs, is it a worthwhile saving?
At Aaron Morton Training I test whether you can do this movement along with a host of other tests before we start.
I am not the most expensive personal trainer but I won’t strive to be the cheapest!
2. Be wary of a personal trainer who doesn’t ask you questions & drill down exactly what you want.
It not unusual for someone to go to a personal trainer and say “I want to be fitter” or “I want to lose a bit of fat”.
Whilst this is entirely natural, it is up to a personal trainer to drill down into more specifics and if they don’t this should signal warning bells as they are most likely too focussed on the “££” signs running across their eyes.
“Fitter for what specifically”
“How will you know when you are fitter”
“What does a training session to be fitter look like to you?”
By drilling down on your goal and mapping out the “goal behind the goal”, the motivation behind your goal, it allows the personal trainer to create a programme of training that is right for YOU as the client.
At Aaron Morton Training, you are asked to fill out a questionnaire with questions that highlight your goals. I then conduct a free consultation (either by phone or in person) where I iron out the substance behind your goal so we are both on the same page before we even begin.
Research has continually shown the success of any change work is largely dependent on the quality of rapport between the client and practitioner (personal trainer in this instance)
I ensure this starts from the very first communication we have together.
3. Your first session should be an assessment.
Imagine if you went to a car garage citing a weird engine sound and the mechanic started work changing the wheels. Would you get the hint he hadn’t completely got to grips with what the problem was?!
Well, this is exactly the same as a personal trainer asking for your goal and then straight away getting you to exercise.
The body is a system. It can’t get strong, it can’t get stable, it can’t become more cardio fit if it is not worked efficiently.
This can only happen when you complete a movement assessment in the very first session.
Let me provide an example. A popular form of exercise at the moment is High Intensity Training (HIT). This tends to involve fast, dynamic, full body movements. I was watching a video online of a very popular trainer who is likely to be watched by millions. He was performing one of his circuit routines, which included jumping lunges.
This exercise is popular in gyms. The problem is at least 70% of people you will see in a gym have tight hip muscles and pronated feet (foot collapses inwards due to being flat-footed).
As a result, doing an exercise like jumping lunges with these two issues is likely to severely injure your knee.
Without an assessment, at the beginning this might not become apparent, yet many personal trainer do not provide any assessment other than weighing you.
At Aaron Morton Training, I conduct a very thorough and comprehensive movement assessment so we know exactly how your body moves right now, where your weak spots are that leave you vulnerable to injury and what natural body movements we need to work on to ensure your body performs the exercises correctly.
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4. Your programme should be tailored specifically to you
My biggest bugbear is a personal trainer providing a client with a particular programme simply because it worked for them.
A split-style programme where you train upper body one session and lower body another, whilst being a programme of choice for a bodybuilder, is not suitable for a deskbound professional who sits down 40 hours a week and has tight hips as a result.
Equally, sticking a client on a treadmill for 15 minutes of their PT session because they want to lose weight is a gross mistreatment of a client’s time and energy.
As a client. every exercise and programme you do in personal training should have a purpose towards achieving your goal.
At Aaron Morton Training the choice of exercises and the programme design we follow will be influenced by 2 factors:
- Your goal you’ve come to personal training to achieve
- The results that come from the assessment
This is my way of ensuring I over deliver with every client I see.
5. A good trainer looks beyond the exercise
You can go into an art gallery and just see pictures, discounting the years and level of attention the artist has put into creating what you see in front of you.
It is easy to see personal training as someone instructing a client in how to exercise. To do so will likely lead you to choosing a cheap and mediocre personal trainer.
A good personal trainer views your body and brain as a system where the results are influenced by;
- Your psychology and mindset including beliefs, values & worldview
- Your work and other responsibilities you have in life
- The quality of your sleep
- What you eat
- How your body has been moving for the last 10 years
- What health issues you currently have
This is just a few of the influencers that can help determine your results. To provide accountability, support and guide a client towards the result, a personal trainer HAS to look beyond the exercise.
At Aaron Morton Training I treat the body and mind as a system and as a result ensure I provide the necessary psychology & lifestyle (improving sleep quality etc) advice when required.
Conclusion
There are many personal trainers out there. It is important you get the right one for your needs rather than just going for the cheapest.
Whether you decide to choose Aaron Morton Training or not, I can assure that if you do you will receive an extremely high standard of personal training and a service that is first class.