Hiring a personal trainer has become more popular these days.  Also, everyone who works out can call themselves a personal trainer.  I am always amazed at how much people get their fitness info from just the guy at the gym instead of a professional.  Now you can get a personal trainer at many different levels of expertise and cost.  There are online personal trainers now and trainers at just about every gym and some gyms are training only.  When hiring a trainer there are a few things to consider.

First is the personal trainer qualified to be a personal trainer.  Some trainers have college degrees, some even advanced degrees, and others are certified.  We believe the best qualifications for a trainer are having a college degree in the field like exercise science or exercise physiology and having the NASM certification.  There are plenty of certifications out there and we believe that NASM is the best one for personal training.

Second you want to look for what is the trainer going to do with you.  The biggest problem with personal training industry is that too many of them are strength only.  Most trainers only know how to do strength training with their clients.  This leaves major gaps in someones overall results.  Also, unless your goals are strength training specific you may never reach your goals if the trainer doesn’t know how to do anything else.  For most people a good cardio program is essential to do with a personal trainer.  Interval training is considered the most efficient way to burn more fat all day while you are not exercising.  Be careful some uninformed trainers like to do intervals training combined with strength training.  This is where you might run on a treadmill for 5 min. and then do some weight lifting exercises.  This isn’t very effective.  Most trainers do this back to the point about too many only know how to do strength training and have to add strength training to everything.  Optimal cardio should be done on its own just as optimal strength training should be done seperate. 

The last thing is do you like the trainer’s personality.  The word personal is in the word personal trainer for a reason.  Even if they are the most knowledgeable, if the trainer’s personality doesn’t mesh with yours it will never work.  The trainers ability to communicate with their client is the most important.  With the right support, people using personal trainers are the best way to see results.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 26th, 2006 at 9:54 am and is filed under Personal Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.