Deciding to undertake Personal Training may be the best decision you have ever taken for your health and fitness. Personal Trainers are there to expertly guide you through what can be a difficult time. Whether you need the support network and skills to help you lose weight safely, or you simply want to look good for the adoring public, ensuring that you pick the correct Healthcare Professional is key!

How to choose a personal trainer
 

It is highly important that you are comfortable with the person you select because you may be spending more time with them than most of your friends. Don’t rush into hiring anyone.

Firstly take your time looking around the gym and perform some “mystery shopper” research. Your looking to see how the PT interacts with the local gym members, clients and how they workout themselves. Ask yourself these questions.

• Are they friendly and interacting with all members of the gym? Ensure that the PT (Personal Trainer) is interacting with all members and see how the members react towards them. It’s always a good sign if an old member is chatting away, or asking for weight loss advice. It usually means that the PT takes pride in their job and cares for the members and not just the new ones, or good looking ones.
• How do they train their clients? A very important point! As mentioned before a PT should take great pride and care in their job, regardless of how long they have had a client. You should be able to tell this by just listening to them passionately speak about the work at hand. Watch out for PT’s that repeat the same workout for every client, don’t interact with the client, answer the phone when training someone (It actually happens!), don’t look to correct exercise techniques and spend too much time chatting (Your paying to be trained!).
• What is their Personal Workout and diet like? It never ceases to amaze me when I talk to Personal Trainers who don’t have any specific training routine. How does that work? The PT you choose should be training regularly and at a high level. Looking into their diet may be tricky and I’m not saying it has to be perfect, but as long as you don’t see them tucking into KFC every day of the week you should be ok. Remember PT’s should “Practice what they teach!”
• What do they look like? This may sound very superficial, but believe it or not I have seen people walking around the health club trying to find clients, when it looks like they are the ones that need to be trained!
• How do the PT’s clients train and what do they say? A good PT should have given their clients workouts to perform based on their own specific goal. Furthermore the client should be confident enough to perform their own routines, depending on experience. Don’t be afraid to ask the member for some advice and what they think of Personal Training.

What to Ask in a Personal Consultation

A consultation should be free and is a chance for you to get a look inside the workings of the Professional Trainer, as well as getting a quick M.O.T. Depending on your own specific goal, the questions you ask will vary slightly, but here are some that should always be asked.

• How long have you been Personal Training and what is your background? Asking both sections to this question is very important. Someone may be new to the job, but might have a great background in sports and development. Their past experience or reason for getting into the job will reveal their true passion and character.
• What are you trained in? This is more to do with how they answer really. You’re looking for someone to start talking passionately about how they have furthered their skills and experience with specialist boxing camps, functional training work shops or even just that they research and constantly revaluate their information to ensure they are up to date on the industries developments. Personally I don’t think a degree is necessary and too many people mention it as a selling point. A degree can be extremely useful to people who know how to put it into practice. However for those who just rely on the degree and don’t continue their further training, might as well have done a foreign language.
• What are your client’s achievements? The main reason you’ve decided to take on a PT is to see results, so it’s always good to know if the talk matches the end product. Furthermore does the trainer praise their own skills or actually commend their clients for putting in the hard work?

With the above questions asked you should have an idea of a PT’s skills, character and what drives them to be a Personal Trainer. Let’s not forget the reason why someone goes for a consultation though; they want to see what state their health is in and would like to know what it would take to increase fitness. So here’s a brief outline of what should take place in a consultation.

1 hour free personal training consultation

• Questions: Past experience, present diet, why you have decided to take on PT
• Achievable long term and short term goal setting
• Diet breakdown and correction
• Type of fitness test
• Functional strength test and correction
• Flexibility and correction

There is no set way to perform a consultation, but it should include the above. At the end of the first session you should have an idea of your strengths and weaknesses, physically, nutritionally and mentally. Whether you choose to remove these weaknesses is up to you!

I hope you have realised from this article that being a health professional is about knowledge combined with passion, drive and willingness to help people. Lastly……..

ENJOY THE EXPERIENCE AND GOODLUCK!

For further questions please don’t hesitate to ask me via my Fit2Talk fitness profile “Jason Garratt” or Facebook “Jay Ptrainer Fittotalk”. Sign up for your free Fitness Profile and to interact with members and health professionals in your area.