The top 5 reasons to use a personal trainer

The top 5 reasons to use a personal trainer

OK I admit I am a little biased with this blog being a personal trainer myself but I wanted to give you my top 5 reasons why you should consider using a personal trainer.

1. Motivation

This is often the main reason people want a PT – to motivate them to stay on track with their fitness. Of course you can train on your own but if you take it easy or start to slacken off, there is no one there to push you.

How many times have you gone to bed and said to yourself, ‘Tomorrow I’m going to wake up, go to the gym, and do an hour workout before I get ready for work’, and then woken up and decided to sleep for another hour instead of exercising?

This is where a Personal Trainer is critical to ensuring that you commit and stick to your fitness goals. If you’ve made an appointment to meet your trainer for a session, then you are far more likely to still go than if you are just telling yourself you should go to the gym.

2. Correct form

This is a big one, you must have the right form before you start any training routine.

Having a Personal Trainer beside you to demonstrate the correct posture and technique is invaluable. A Personal Trainer will ensure you are performing exercises correctly and efficiently, in order to maximise results. If your form when exercising is not correct (and almost everyone I start training needs some moves corrected), then you are at increased risk of injury as well as not achieving your goals (because nothing kills a dream like 10 weeks of prescribed bed rest!).

3. Sessions just for you

I teach many group fitness classes – sometime up to 50 people. It is impossible to correct everyone’s form or give everyone your 100% attention during the class.

But whether you are doing a 1-1 or 2-1 session, you have the trainer’s undivided attention – they are focused just on you. Everybody is different, and that means everyone’s abilities and requirements are different when it comes to exercise. This could be anything from having an old injury that requires special exercises to having a phobia that may impact on where or how you workout.

For example, if you have an old knee injury that required surgery, but since then you haven’t done anything to rebuild the muscles or improve mobility, then you are going to need different exercises and goals than an athlete who is training to run a marathon. This is where a Personal Trainers experience can make a huge difference to your training program.

4. A good PT can help you with more than just exercise

All Personal Trainers should have a Certificate IV in Fitness have to complete additional work on nutrition. Some PTs like me do additional education outside of this by completing a specific Nutrition course. By choosing a Personal Trainer who has undergone specific nutrition education, you know that they will be providing the right nutritional advice to achieve your goals.

Often a lot of the time when exercising with your Personal Trainer you will be telling them about your week, how work is going, and what’s wrong with your life at the time. A Personal Trainer is there to help with your fitness goals, yes, but they’re also there to help improve your overall wellbeing. Having a Personal Trainer can be like having an unofficial therapist (and a lot cheaper too). We care about how stressed or unhappy you are, because that will impact how motivated you are in your sessions.

5. A PT helps you set goals and reach them

Everyone wants to achieve their goals straight away, whether it is weight loss, cheese grater abs or Hulk-like strength. But these are not always achievable, and if you don’t hit them then you may be discouraged and backslide.

A PT will not only help you set realistic goals that you will be able to achieve – if you put in the effort, of course – but they will also be able to keep you on track to hit those goals. For example, if your goal is to achieve a ‘bikini body’ for summer, it’s not just about doing 100 crunches a day for a month to work your abs. It’s about altering your diet to eat the correct foods, mixing cardio and weights to work the right muscles, and setting a realistic timeframe in which this can be achieved.

As well as helping you set realistic goals, Personal Trainers are the perfect tool to help you achieve a specific goal. This is ideal for those who are training for a specific event, or need to achieve a certain level of fitness before they are able to do something they really want. For example, if you have a bucket list with ‘Skydiving’ on it but are over the maximum weight, then hiring a Personal Trainer to assist with helping you lose weight is a great start to achieving this goal. Or if your goal is to be able to run a marathon in six months, then hiring a Personal Trainer to put you on the right track could be all you need to complete a marathon.