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Where to start? First, you should be willing to invest some time and effort in finding the best match for your fitness needs. Ask yourself a few questions:
What certification will my ideal personal trainer possess?
What rate am I willing to pay?
What qualities will my ideal personal trainer possess to ensure I meet my fitness goals?
How do I want to measure my success? Losing inches? Losing pounds?
What Should I Expect from a Personal Trainer?
When embarking on your search for a personal trainer, you’ll likely find trainers with various backgrounds, specialties, training locations, certifications, rates, and personalities. It’s important to set some parameters for yourself before you begin your search to ensure you narrow it down to those personal trainers who will best work for you.
You may find personal trainers who specialize in certain areas. For example, a personal trainer who specializes in weight loss, or one who specializes in helping athletes achieve their goals. Ask the candidates what their specialty is, if any, and evaluate how that fits with your own goals.
Most personal trainers offer hour-long sessions. Some also offer half-hour sessions, but you should consider whether you will be able to achieve results in half-hour sessions. The most common formula is two hour-long sessions per week. Hopefully the personal trainer you select will also keep you accountable for any exercise you do outside of those sessions.
Part of the service a personal trainer provides is ensuring you stay motivated. Ask candidates how they motivate their clients. Your first meeting should include a goal-setting discussion. Ideally, the trainer will conduct a fitness assessment and record your measurements prior to your first workout. Then, the personal trainer should measure periodically to compare results and assess progress toward meeting you goals. Benchmarking between 4- and 6-week intervals can help quantify your success and ensure you stay motivated to keep training.
Personal trainers may conduct their sessions at a gym, in their home, in your home, or a private studio. You may want to consider finding personal trainers who conduct their sessions in a preferred location. For example, if crowds intimidate you, you may want to avoid trainers who train at a gym. Also, don’t underestimate home gyms. A good personal trainer needs minimal equipment to provide you with a well-rounded workout. If you’re more comfortable training in a private environment, find a trainer who can accommodate you.
Most importantly, remember that just because a person calls themselves a personal trainer does not mean they are worthy of the title. Do your homework, and go with your gut instinct on making a decision.
How to Conduct an Interview with a Personal Trainer
Don't be afraid to ask questions! You can learn a lot about a personal trainer before ever going into a workout with them. Consider the following as part of your interview:
Do you have any certifications? If so, which ones? Is your certification current?
What is your educational background?
Do you specialize in any specific types of clients or clients with specific types of goals? i.e., weight loss, athletes, postpartum mothers, etc.
Do you have liability insurance?
What is the scope of the service you will provide? Will it be limited to exercise and fitness? Will it include discussions about nutrition?
How do you keep your clients motivated?
How will you measure my success?
Where will we train?
What should I expect from our sessions?
Will stretching be part of our workout?
How to Find a Personal Trainer in Your Area
If you belong to a gym or a fitness club, most have personal trainers on staff. Many gyms offer reasonably priced personal training packages. However, determine whether you will be assigned one trainer or whether the trainer will vary with each session. You are most likely to have the best results if a single personal trainer is tracking your progress. Also, gyms have different requirements for trainer certification, so ensure their personal trainers are certified through one of the more rigorous programs. Also, keep in mind that large gyms typically pay trainers less, and so they more likely to quit and go elsewhere. This may be disruptive to meeting your fitness goals.
Let your fingers do the walking through the local yellow pages. However, most self-employed personal trainers try to keep their expenses down and do not list with the yellow pages, so this should not be your only source.
Many of the personal training certification programs maintain online databases of participants. This is great place to start, since the question as to whether the candidate is certified is already answered.
Of course, if you can get a referral from someone who is already working with a personal trainer, this would be a great starting point. Your contact can give you first-hand experience as to what it is like to work with the trainer and clues as to their training style.
In closing, a personal trainer can help you meet your fitness goals! See More - Author E Smith
Is your personal trainer an ex-con?
ACCORDING TO THE New York Times the National Federation of Personal Trainers recently revealed that it has certified 300 former prison convicts as trainers in New York alone since 1966. Is yours among their chain gang? Here's a little checklist to see if your fitness instructor is selling goofballs in the shower:
[] After recommending more roughage in your diet, he volunteers to toss your salad.
[] He often refers to the weight room as the yard.
[] The one time you missed a payment, he threatened to sell you to another trainer.
[] He does sets of 6-8 but lets you off with 4 for good behavior.
[] He refers to his spotters as accomplices.
[] He jokes that the deadlift is more of a coverup than an exercise.
[] He refers to the triathlon as the Shoot, Loot, and Scoot.
[] All his buddies still live upstate.
[] He keeps promising to "work your ass out good," but you never do squats.
[] Everything he owns is attached to a rope that hangs around his neck.
COPYRIGHT Weider Publications
COPYRIGHT Gale Group
Renovating the Status of the Personal Trainer
Club Industry
Twenty years ago, personal training was barely recognized as a legitimate business. Recently, however, personal training has evolved into a profession with a variety of credentials, continuing education requirements, and comprehensive support organizations, such as IDEA, ACE and NSCA.
Despite these changes, trainers can labor in conditions that isolate them from professional development and peer support. My business partner and I assert that trainers could benefit from a working environment that offers in-house professional development. Few facilities regularly connect their personal trainers to information about career development, continuing education and personal growth.
Back Bay Fitness in Costa Mesa, CA, provides its personal trainers with peer support and professional development. The center of the program is the Personal Trainer Roundtable where personal trainers discuss and share information about a given topic, such as trainer burnout, client issues, career development, goal setting, time management and best practices in exercise science. The roundtable is designed to foster an environment in which trainers can acquire skill-specific information. The following categories explore some dimensions of the profession.
* Business Development Roundtable
Offers advice and counseling on developing and transforming a personal training business into a profitable vocation. We discuss client payment plans, billing options, collections, marketing, saving plans and tax planning, as well as creating a professional business relationship with clients.
* Client Issues Roundtable
Client-related issues are bound to surface and unresolved conflicts between the trainer and his or her client affect the outcome of each session. We encourage trainers to share their stories and ideas for managing these issues before they do damage to the business relationship.
* Personal Development Roundtable
Personal training can be rewarding, but it also challenges trainers' emotional and physical health. We encourage our trainers to focus on personal survival skills, such as time management, physical and emotional health goals, and intrapersonal strategies to help them identify elements that will contribute to burnout.
* Career Guidance Roundtable
Opportunities for business expansion are emerging, and it is no longer sufficient to say you want to be a trainer. What type of trainer? Who is the next target audience? How can trainers expand their skills to serve new client populations? How can he or she grow professionally to avoid repetition and burnout?
* Continuing Education Roundtable
Best practices and new exercise strategies emerge at such a rapid pace that trainers, isolated in non-supportive facilities, cannot renovate themselves or their clients' workouts. Tedium, stagnation and burnout can follow. Back Bay Fitness coordinates an in-house continuing education program to encourage trainers to stay abreast of developments. Some meetings offer immediate benefits, as trainers can apply for CEUs by attending the education roundtable. The facility also hosts a library and resource center with industry journals and texts. In addition to maintaining a list of conferences, we encourage participation in attending conferences.
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