Five Things to Think About Before Hiring a Personal Trainer

PT instructor helping a client with weights

Your personal trainer can be the catalyst to achieving your goals, which is why choosing the right one is vitally important.

But why do people hire training instructors in the first place?

Well for many it’s a case of them knowing what they want to achieve, having the physical tools to do it and just needing a trainer to give them the quickest way to achieve those goals.

However, there aren’t any shortcuts and it does take hard work and motivation.

Essentially, it’s your personal trainer’s goal to support you in achieving your fitness targets effectively and efficiently.

Here I break down five things to think about before hiring a personal trainer.

1. Know Your Why

This is the most personal reason but is one of the most important parts of your fitness journey.

Your why will not only be the motivation to begin your journey but the reason you stay on it.

Because of this it needs to be strong enough to overcome your desire to sit on the sofa and fire up the Deliveroo app.

You must have a strong-enough reason to keep your fitness appointment as you’re far more likely to succeed if you do than if you don’t.

If you only go to the gym because your mate does, what happens when your mate doesn’t go anymore, or you fall out with them?

But drilling down to what your why actually is can take a little time and thought. It’s your own lifestyle, history, desire and motivation that’ll help you find out what it is, but it does need to be strong enough to keep your momentum going.

Perhaps you just want to wake up on a morning and not ache, so you just to be good at life, which essentially means:

• Can I get out of the car easily with three bags of shopping?

• Can I chase the kids around the park?

• Can I run around with the dogs?

• Can I fight off a knife-wielding ninja attack?

Or, you may have had the bright idea of entering the Great North Run one drunken night and are now facing the reality of having to actually do it (this actually did happen to one client of mine).

Or, it could be you’ve put weight on and want to fit into all those clothes you used to wear before.

Or, you might want increased performance in your chosen sport.

Whatever your reason, it needs to be something that will keep you going.

2. Are You Ready to Make a Change?

However, why is only half of it. You need to be ready and prepared to do the work and make the change to achieve those goals.

But this doesn’t just mean physically ready, it means mentally ready too, which can sometimes be harder to work towards.

It does go hand-in-hand with your ‘why’ and having your why that will help you make that decision to get going.

You may have an end point in mind, you may not.

It could be you’ve got a wedding coming up, you’re doing the Great North Run, you want to climb Everest, or you may have reached 50 and decided you’d like to reach 60.

Whatever your end point is, being ready to make those changes and put in the work is the start of your journey.

3. Your Habits

Habits are those things that are often forgotten about when people begin thinking about changing their lifestyle. They’re the small incremental things that you do day-in-day-out that lead to massive changes over the years.

They’re also one of the most difficult things to begin developing but there are ways you can make developing good habits easier.

By making your habits a part of your usual routine, they become far easier to implement.

For me, I wanted to drink more water first thing on a morning, so creating a habit of drinking a pint of water each morning when I’m waiting for the kettle to boil for my morning coffee was the easiest way to start doing this.

If I’d tried to implement this new habit at a time I wasn’t already in the kitchen near the sink, it would have been much harder to do.

By looking at your lifestyle and the habits you currently have, you can far more easily implement something new.

So, if you’re someone who is more awake on an evening, train in the evenings, if you’re more awake first think on a morning try training on a morning.

I had one client who came to me early on a morning but we found that she was sluggish and unfocused, so by changing her session to an evening, she’s been able to develop a good training habit and achieve far more during her sessions.

Essentially it’s about making a new habit fit in with your current habits to make it far easier to stick with and achieve your goals.

4. Making Goals

Goals are another important thing to think about. There’s little point going to a personal trainer if you don’t know what you want.

If you really think carefully you’ll probably know what you want, which goes back to your ‘why’.

But once you’ve got your ‘why’ it’s then a case of looking at how you can achieve this.

The important thing here is planning, and your trainer will be able to help you work out how to make goals.

I often get people wanting to skip this bit and just think they can see how they go, but in order to get where they want to be, there needs to be a plan of some kind.

This doesn’t mean you have to make an impossible plan, or a plan that can’t be changed. It’s more about creating a pathway to follow and then see how you go from there.

Your goals need to be specific so you need to give it a clear definition as to what it actually is.

It also needs to be measurable, so you can’t just say I want to lose weight, you need to set a specific measurable goal so you can create a pathway to achieving it.

It also needs to be achievable, there’s little point setting an impossible goal. You can’t set yourself a goal of climbing Everest in three months if you’ve never climbed before and are 20 stone overweight, it’s not achievable. However, setting a goal of losing that weight over a period of time, is more achievable.

Your goal must be realistic, as with the Everest example, it’s not achievable for the overweight person with no climbing experience, but it might be realistic for someone with 20 years climbing experience whose climbed mountains before. It must be something you’re actually able to win at.

And finally it must be time-bound. By setting yourself a time-limit on achieving that goal, you’re far more likely to stay motivated and keep going.

5. Find Someone You Like

This should be a given, but I have had some people come to see me in the past and say they stopped going to their old trainer because they didn’t connect with them as a person.

It’s really important that you can get on with your trainer (and it’s good for the trainer to train clients they like too) if you find you can have a conversation, chat and even joke together, you’re probably onto a winner.

It’s the same in all life, we’ll do better and achieve more if we’re doing it alongside people we like, respect and enjoy being around.

So, before you pick up that phone to whatever trainer you choose, have a think about these five things and make sure your fitness goals get off the the absolute best start.