How To Choose A Good Personal Trainer-Part I?
No matter whether you are a personal trainer looking to be at your best at your job or someone who is looking to hire a personal trainer, you need to do this. Make the right choice by having the right mindset and asking the right questions.
Before we even get started, we all truly accept that hiring a personal trainer is not about simply walking into a gym and hiring the services of anyone who is free at that moment. After all, it is about your health and there just cannot be any compromises. You will be spending your hard-earned money and giving the best of your body by performing intense workouts. Moreover, you will be increasing your chances of achieving success with whomever you end up working with if you are discerning on the front end.
Let us deflate some of the biggest myths about how to identify a good personal trainer. We will be doing this by discussing the basic and advanced qualities of a good personal trainer so that you know what exactly to know and ask any trainer before hiring them.
Is a cut, fit, and jacked personal trainer a better choice?
One of the biggest myths about training is that the strongest, biggest, or leanest people on the social media or in the gym are the most qualified people to be treated and respected as great personal trainers. Sometimes they are, but usually they are definitely not!
First off, the very notion that most people have that someone must have personally attained a specific level of success is a reliable source of valuable information is false. Yes, you read that absolutely right!The world has seen some of the greatest players turn out to be the most terrible coaches. On the other hand, some who never played the game turned out to be the most successful names in the history of coaching. Not only they assisted teams or individuals to realize their potential but they also assisted the sport to grow, redefine, and explore itself.
Now comes the big question -- what did these non-talented but successful coaches had in them that the biggest stars of the game didn't? Well firstly, they had a deep and intricate knowledge of the tactical and technical aspects of the game. Secondly, the successful coaches spent days, months, and years learning the minute tips and tricks of the game when the biggest stars were riding high on their success and were just bothered with getting ready for the next big competition. Thirdly, the willingness and ability to communicate and simplify the "gained" knowledge in ways that can be used by athletes to their advantage turned the tides in the favour of the "successful" coaches. The same things can be said for the successful personal trainers.
Not to mention, saying that you have to possess the same kind of personal experience and achievements to train someone is just like saying that male trainers cannot train their female clients, and vice versa that is just so not true. Let us just talk about the sport of tennis. Britain’s No. 1 Andy Murray is coached by Amelie Mauresmo and Sergiy Stakhovsky who brought an end to the run of 36 consecutive Grand Slam quarter final appearances of Roger Federer was advised by Olga Morozova. The legendary Goran Ivanisevic was coached by Jelena Gencic who also went on to coach the greatNovak Djokovic. There are hundreds and thousands of similar examples from different sports and we all are well aware of them. Aren’t we?
Should you be judging a personal trainer by how their clients look?
Should you be judging a trainer with their list of clients? In a normal gym setting, you should absolutely not! This is simply because a big majority of personal trainers usually work with clients who are recreational exercisers. In other words, they work with clients who are actually chasing general fitness or weight management objectives. Moreover, these clients are not really deep into becoming gym hulks who organise their entire lives around the kitchens calculating calories and hitting the gym with the same level of enthusiasm and zeal. Truly, these are not the best and most amazing situations that a personal trainer can include in his success books.
But this does not mean that the personal trainer is not performing a wonderful job as most of his or her clients are just not interested in altering their eating habits or just engaging in workouts to offset all the foods they adore to eat. Put another way, you just cannot blame the trainer for someone who is not fully committed or ready to make drastic changes. No trainer in this world can produce miracles if someone trains just once or twice a week and then head back home and eat like a super-hungry teenager or consumes endless bottles of liquor while socialising with friends and colleagues, and doing nothing rest of the time.
In the second and last part of this two-part series, we will be reading more about how to choose a good personal trainer. Stay tuned!