5 Reasons to hire a Personal Trainer

More and more people are turning to the help of a personal trainer in an effort to increase their exercise levels. The reasons for doing so are varied, so here are my top five reasons to consider booking in with a PT to help get you moving.

A change of attitude towards exercise

One-to-one personal is proven to change a person’s attitude to exercise. One study done in 2003 showed that in a sample of 129 volunteers, around 75% recorded a better attitude towards exercise after spending 10 weeks with a personal trainer.

This change of attitude, or readiness to exercise results in more exercise done. So for people who know the value of exercise, but can manage to bring themselves to do it, hiring a personal trainer, is proven to help change that, not only for the time that they are with the PT but afterwards too.

Training effectiveness

Training with a personal trainer can take the guesswork out of exercise. They can show you how to complete an exercise correctly, and therefore increasing an exercise’s effectiveness massively. One thing that gets spoke about a lot about personal training, is that people ache after booking in with a PT. Most of this first session ache, is down to doing exercises correctly, and therefore waking up muscles and ranges of motion that have more often than not been asleep. Making clients ache the next day isn’t our motivation, or it shouldn’t be if your personal trainer is worth anything, but there is a marked difference, a physical difference, with training with a coach and not.

The coach effect

Having someone plan a watch over your exercise can be extremely motivational, both positively and negatively. Positively, meaning you want to do more exercise: your attitude changes towards it, as mentioned in the above study. And negatively, meaning you will carry on going, even when you don’t enjoy the work, just because there is someone there. In both situations, the benefits are clear: hiring a personal trainer will guarantee you do more exercise, and more valuable exercise, than you would on your own. For some people that difference is staggering and it literally can be the difference between a full exercise calendar, and nothing at all, simply because they’ve hired a personal trainer.

Goals

Who do you support? I want to ask you (or I want to ask you to ask yourself) why do you support that team? How do you feel when they win? Great right? How do you feel when they lose? Pretty bad? Pretty disappointed? But how? How does a ball crossing an arbitrary line painted on a grass field make us feel anything? We’ve been conditioned to value something. Someone has told us to like certain outcomes and we’ve learned to like them too. It has made us feel, made us respond emotionally to events. When we can connect these emotions with positive, achievable outcomes, that’s when our lives improve for the better.

A good personal trainer can turn a dream into a goal, and a goal into an emotion. The effectiveness in which they can do this, will propel you forward, towards that goal like never before.

Externality

We are all our best friend and worst enemy at times. We can praise ourselves for mediocre performance. We can ignore our own failings. Having an external perspective on our performances, can not only provide a more accurate mirror to them, but also influence ourselves to more accurately self-evaluate. We are very good at kidding ourselves when no one is watching. But that changes with a personal trainer present. They hold a mirror up to us. And it's only when a truer picture emerges that we are capable of real profound change.