6 Reasons to Work With a Personal Trainer
If you’ve been exercising for some time, you know your way around a workout pretty well. This may lead you to conclude that personal trainers are not for you. If so, you may be missing out on some serious training benefits.
In this article, I’ll lay out half a dozen compelling reasons why personal trainers are not just for beginner exercisers and may be able to help you to take your training to the next level.
Every time I go to the gym I see people doing exercises incorrectly. Many of them have been doing the same exercises the same incorrect way for years. Not only are they robbing their body of the benefit that should come from their efforts, they are also risking potential injury.
Yet, if you asked them, each of these people would swear that their form is on point. That’s why there is great value in having an objective, expert 3rd party standing by to observe your form and make the needed adjustments. That’s what a personal trainer does.
The longer you go on doing an exercise the wrong way, the harder it will be to correct. Even a single session with a personal trainer can help to identify and correct bad form.
Motivation to stay regular is a constant challenge for all of us. Internal motivation will only take us so far. Sometimes we need an outside push to keep us on track. A personal trainer fits the bill perfectly.
Personal trainers know how to bring out the best in their clients in terms of motivation to exercise and keep consistent. A good trainer will adjust to your personality and motivate you accordingly.
They will help you to set both long-term and stepping stone goals. Workouts that they set will be challenging at your level, giving you an achievable target to aim for each session.
The trainer will be able to assess the game plan you’ve been following to date from an educated, experienced point of view. They will then discuss it with you and help you to implement any needed adjustments to make your workouts more effective. The improved results you see will feed your motivation.
The very fact that you are paying for a personal trainer is a strong motivation in itself. You don’t want to waste money on a session that you bail out on, right? Then there’s the social pressure to show up for your session. You don’t want to let the trainer down - and you don’t want to have to explain to the trainer next time why you failed to show up.
A good personal trainer will stay plugged into the fitness community and be on top of any new exercise innovations and research findings. By the same token, she will also be able to see through the endless stream of fitness trends that have no foundation and can lead to a whole lot of wasted time.
Your trainer will be able to introduce new training ideas and align them with your exercise goals. This will infuse variety into your training and help prevent training monotony.
It can be quite easy for an exercise routine to become rote. We begin with a burst of energy and then, after a couple of weeks, slip into monotony. We end up mindlessly ticking off exercises on a checklist with little eagerness or enthusiasm.
That is not the way to reach your workout goals.
A personal trainer can infuse your workouts with a shot of adrenaline. They can help you to get your excitement about exercising back by helping you set challenges and then working with you to meet those challenges.
A trainer might encourage you to enter a competition or to train for an event, such as a 5 or 10K run. Transformation challenges are great to keep you zoned in on a specific goal. Working with a personal trainer will make it far more likely that you will find success with such challenges.
A trainer will also help you to benefit from progressive resistance. It’s very easy to get comfortable with a set, rep, and weight scheme and do the same thing week in and week out. Unfortunately, your body will not respond to this type of training. Your workouts need to be progressively more challenging for adaptation to take place.
A personal trainer will ensure that you are constantly working to increase your resistance. At the same time, they will be on hand to monitor your form so that you aren’t compromising exercise technique to push more weight.
Here’s a workout program that can help you get started:
When you are coming back to exercise after an illness or injury, you can’t afford to do movements that are biomechanically incorrect. You also need to follow a program that is going to help you get better, not exacerbate your condition. A personal trainer has the experience and qualifications to guide you through your rehab training.
If you are pregnant or coming back to exercise post-pregnancy, a personal trainer can help you to follow an appropriate program.
If you are dealing with chronic back or neck pain, a personal trainer will guide you to the best exercise selection and performance technique to strengthen the erector spinae muscle that runs up and down the spine.
One of the main reasons that people do not work with a personal trainer is the cost factor. Usually, you are paying more for a single personal training session than a whole month’s membership cost at your local gym. The benefits of working with a personal trainer usually make this a smart investment.
But what if you simply can’t afford it?
Most personal trainers will have small group training options. This will allow you to join with 2 or 3 friends in each personal training session. This can reduce the per person cost considerably.
If you have been exercising for some time, you may not need several sessions per week with a trainer to reap the benefits. With just a single session at the start of each month, the trainer will be able to:
- Assess your training form
- Set a monthly training program
- Help you set short, medium, and long-term goals
- Provide you with a monthly motivation boost
Ready to breathe new life into your training with a personal training session? We’d love to hear how your experience with a trainer has helped you to achieve your fitness goals, Share your experience in the comment section below.
