What A Personal Trainer Should Do For You

The Olympic Games began over 2,700 years ago in Olympia, Greece and since then people have been training to improve in competition. Paying someone to train you or guide you in what to eat has only been around for a short period of time in comparison and the student teacher roles are still being straightened out.

To make things worse, many trainers are doing it for the wrong reasons, don’t look at the science, and provide unrealistic expectations. There are a few negative signs to watch out for:

• Acting like less of a coach and more of a friend. They shouldn’t be there to chit chat.
• With a trainer you are trying to make progress and if they aren’t tracking changes they can’t be quantified.
• If you can’t get detailed responses why you are doing things they may not understand concepts as well as they should.
• If your trainer isn’t at, or has never been at the level you would like to get to you may want to question if they know what it takes to get there.
• More interested in their own reflection than your progress.

With some of the negatives of trainers laid out, there are also many positives. There are many reasons you won’t see results and an educated objective point of view with new ideas or techniques may be exactly what you need. Many people first getting into a sport or working out don’t even know where to begin and someone that is well seasoned will help guide you away from making many of the mistakes that they have. On the other side of the spectrum I see a lot of people that have been in a sport or in the gym and hit a plateau and using a trainer could help make them accountable to push through preconceived limits.

It’s natural for someone to ask their trainer about their body since it’s an extension of what they are doing for you; However, don’t mistake their area of expertise for knowing everything about the body. They don’t replace your doctor or physiotherapist and often even in those fields they are many specialties because nobody can know everything.

Diet Plans

There is a large misconception with regards to how a diet plan should work. Many believe that once they get a diet plan they just need to follow it and it will lead them to where they would like to go. The truth is that there is only a small amount of work for the beginning diet and the real work and expertise comes in for manipulating the diet based on the changes of actually following the initial plan. There isn’t a trainer on the planet that will be able to provide someone one diet and it will be what they should always use and allow them to optimally reach all of their goals.

If a personal goal for someone is to lose 20 pounds they shouldn’t just drastically cut calories as their body will get use to living on very little and when they decide to begin eating like normal again they will rebound and end up with more fat and less muscle than they had before. The proper approach would be to make smaller incremental changes based on how the body is responding. The same can be said for people trying to add more muscle. You shouldn’t massively increase calories as you will gain too much fat. Small incremental changes is key.

Diet Complications

Specifically, when it comes to a diet that has a goal of bulking, dieting, or for health reasons there is no one right direction for everyone. When trying to adjust your diet to heal something there are many different diets out there to accomplish different things and not a one size fits all. If you are bulking or dieting, some people have great insulin sensitivity and do well with carbs and others will store fat just looking at rice or potatoes which often means they do better on a higher fat diet.

To make matters worse, each person changes over time, it isn’t just a variability from person to person. The best first hand experience I’ve seen with this is a national level bodybuilder was competing in two shows 9 weeks apart. We had a goal of moving him up in weight classes after the first show because he barely made weight and it was the ultimate goal to move up at some time so let’s not hold his body back in a direction it wanted to go. The interesting part of it was that in 9 weeks apart from show to show his body’s stubborn fat locations (the last spot of fat to go) was in different locations and his caloric intake and types of calories was different for each content preparation.

For someone to think they can take one diet they find or pay for and believe that will take them to where they want to go, they don’t understand just how lost they are. What you are paying for is the monitoring, changes over time, and accountability.