Increasingly more and more people are turning to personal training instructors in order to shed a few pounds, improve general fitness or to help with their body building aspirations. No longer is the personal trainer simply just for the wealthy. With mounting affordability coupled with increasing leisure time, more and more people are seeking out ways and means to reach their heath and fitness aims.
As with most other services and commodities we purchase today, some consideration should be given to quality and cost. As the number of people calling themselves ‘personal training instructors’ continues to swell, we must shop around and avoid jumping at the first opportunity. There can be a vast gulf after all, between a well meaning yet miss guided individual compared to the qualified and experienced professional.
If we talk about specific sports coaches often they’ll emerge by way of playing the sport to a reasonable level and then later specialising in couching. The personal trainer however, could have little real fitness training experience and in extreme cases may actually be dangerous and be misguiding their clients.
The best personal trainer will have a broad understanding of many different sports and will have built up a knowledge of how to motivate while understanding the sensible limits of the body relative to the age and fitness of the client. Ideally certified with a recognised institution, they should also have liability insurance coupled with first aid and CPR training. With these fundamentals in place we can be more assured of getting good advice with our fitness programme. After all, you want to get value for money, and there can be no better measure than knowing your coach has some good credentials.
There will inevitably be individual choices to make when it comes to preferences over the gender of your coach. There will also be considerations over their personality. But don’t make the mistake of looking for a new best friend. If you are truly focused upon your heath and fitness or general well-being, then you don’t want to spend more time drinking coffee or beer in the bar than sweating those pounds off.
If you are doing most of your training in the gym you’ll be met with a vast array of training equipment. This will include the obvious treadmills, exercise bikes along with free weights and general strength equipment. Increasingly you may also get to workout on a combination of cross trainers, rowers and even boxing equipment. Heart rate monitors are also fairly commonplace. Knowing how to get the best out of this range of exercise equipment can make a big difference to your training schedule not to mention your health and fitness. Haphazard or improper use of such equipment can be dam right dangerous and at a minimum could set back your training by months. Your coach should also give plenty of emphasis on adequate ways to warm up before high physical exertion is entered into.
Away from the gym a good personal trainer will offer advice about diet. We all know that it’s no use training hard and them erasing the entire effort by munching high calorie rubbish. While not pretending to be a full-blown dietician, nevertheless the well-meaning coach should at least mention diet and point you in the right direction.
With all this in mind it should soon become apparent if your personal training instructor knows his or her way around the gym and has a proper understanding of fitness coaching. But don’t’ leave it to chance, verify those credentials, get good advice, get value for money and then get fit.
This article is free to republish provided the resource information remains intact.
Richard Wallace, head of Scorpion Fitness, a fully qualified personal trainer based in Northern Ireland.
