You hire a personal trainer for one primary purpose – to help you succeed in achieving your fitness goals. Getting started with an exercise program may or may not be daunting. However, it is knowing what to do, and doing it consistently that poses a challenge. You might even have unique circumstances that hinder your progress. What do you do if you ever find yourself at a point where it seems getting the desired result is nearly impossible? A professional personal trainer can turn that into a reality.
How Hiring a Personal Trainer Helps You Achieve Your Fitness Goals
Everyone has their reasons for working out. Some do it to get in shape and stay in shape. It could be a part of a therapy or rehabilitation program. Others might be training for a specific sport or trying to lose weight.
What is your goal?
As you might surmise, it is easy enough to decide why you should get started in a fitness program, except for one thing – how do you get started?
You could already be doing plenty of exercises in the gym or at home. If so, are you getting the desired results?
In case your attempts, thus far, have been anything but satisfactory – then you do need to consider hiring a personal trainer.
1. Get Educated
Just about anyone who is passionate about exercise and working out can offer tips. Only a professional personal trainer can educate you on three key areas – health, fitness, and exercising.
Having decided to take care of your body – the only one you have – the least you can do is to get educated. A fundamental understanding of anatomy, nutrition, and exercise programs is not merely empowering. It is the key to planning a strategy and fitness regimen that can best serve your needs.
But education is not limited to theories. On the practical side, every routine has a purpose – that is the easy part. How you perform the exercise is also of utmost importance. A personal trainer can demonstrate the proper form, posture, and technique.
Maintaining a good form is not only essential to achieving maximum results. It also reduces the risk of injury. For context, the number of injuries while exercising in the United States reached 468 thousand in 2019. In Canada, a third of injuries occurred during participation in a sport or exercise.
You may need only a little tweak or change your form entirely. Regardless, it is the personal trainer’s job to make sure that you reach your goals safely.
2. Personalized Program
If you have an old injury or recently recovered from surgery, the exercise you need to do would not be the same as someone who only wants to stay in shape. For sure, athletes training for a sport would need a specific program. A generic personal training regimen is not going to work.
A personal trainer can take factors, including your physiological condition and other circumstances, into consideration and create a program. First Class Personal Training in Toronto, for example, can also recommend proper nutrition that keeps your body sufficiently nourished.
3. Plan Attainable Goals
Certified personal trainers are so much more than someone who merely tells you what to do. During a consultation, one of the things discussed is your long-term goals. Going from point A to point B is easy to say but challenging to do. For this, you would need help keeping your desire realistic.
Goals should be attainable, which is why personal trainers – the best ones – would create a doable program, along with changes in food and lifestyle necessary to succeed.
The same principle also applies to short-term goals. For example, you might be preparing for an event or sports activity. In this case, the personal trainer would customize the diet and exercise regimen within a given time frame to prepare you.
One thing that you can also expect from personal trainers is they will keep track of your progress. They will do everything in their power to help you attain your short- and long-term goals.
4. Accountability
Sure, you have what it takes to get down to working out – finally. But the question is, can you keep it up? Laziness and procrastination are huge stumbling blocks. Having hired a personal trainer and setting an appointment, skipping an exercise session is not as likely to happen as doing it alone.
5. Do More in the Same Time
Fitness workout is as much a matter of discipline as it is the exercise program. Already, it is quite a challenge to sustain the frequency of sessions. Assuming that you keep mustering the motivation to sweat it out, the next question is, can you take it to the next level?
Some people go to the gym regularly and go through the motion of completing the exercise program. Others perform each exercise with a purpose. Besides guiding you through the process, it is the job of a personal trainer to motivate and raise each session to a new level.
6. More than a Personal Trainer
Being a fitness coach is their job, but personal trainers can be more than that. Because of the time spent together, they can become friends and therapists. For sure, they would care about your well-being and help you get through tough times. At the same time, they can recommend better nutrition and give you exercises to take care of your mental health.
Does an Experienced Exerciser Need Help With Personal Training?
Many people who had been exercising or training for a long time may never have and would never consider hiring a personal trainer. But what happens if you were to fall into a workout rut?
Doing the same thing, again and again, can get boring. As so many other gym rats can attest to, staying motivated is one of the toughest challenges, much more so than the physical strains. Even worse, some people run into a wall – weight loss plateau, for example.
A certified personal trainer, in this case, can come in handy. They are professionals who can introduce variety and spice up your fitness activity. After knowing your goals, seeing your routine, they can adjust the workouts to make it better in several ways – more challenging and fun. In optimizing your workout sets, you gain more improvements.
Exercises do not have to be the same all the time. You can, for instance, consider other forms such as circuit or high-intensity interval training. For strength training, ask about different methods such as supersets or pyramid training.
By bringing in new perspectives and changing the routines now and then, a personal trainer can keep having fun doing different things towards accomplishing your fitness goals.
Gera is the Founder and Head Trainer of First Class Personal Training with over 20 years of professional experience, not only as a personal trainer but also as a nutrition and wellness counselor and a post rehabilitation specialist.
