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Experience

As with any skilled profession, experience is important. A personal trainer builds this by spending time in the gym training clients and themselves. I’ve known some fantastic trainers who are less experienced with clients, but they are often exceptions to the rule.

The quality of experience is arguably more important than the quantity. Someone with 5 years’ experience teaching classes may not be well suited to building your strength, and a bodybuilding trainer may not be super experienced at helping you with that nagging knee pain.

Helpful Questions to Ask in a Consultation

• How long have you been working with clients?
• What type of clients have you been working with, i.e. what were the common goals you helped people achieve?

PT Passions

Personal trainers have a love/hate relationship with carving out their own niche. Different PT styles come with certain stereotypes which trainers either embrace or reject. Likewise, you might find certain trainers appealing or off-putting. Knowing what aspects of training your prospective trainer engages in will tell you a lot about your compatibility.

If you want to build strength but your trainer only does running in their own training, you should be questioning their ability to deliver your results. It shouldn’t be a an instant dealbreaker, as it’s possible to be a well-rounded trainer whilst engaging your passions. It just depends on how hard the trainer leans into their niche. For example, I really enjoy kickboxing and Olympic weightlifting, but I rarely do these with clients.

Helpful Questions

• Do you prefer a certain training approach? How will this benefit my goals, if at all?

Outlook

The world of health and fitness is full of contentious topics. Body image, perfect technique, mindset; there any many trainers that will have strong opinions on these topics. It’s important that you and your new PT can agree on the topics that are relevant to your goals. Bonus points if they display some ability to understand the alternative side of the argument too.

Side note: In my opinion, your personal trainer’s stance on fitness topics should never involve them treating anyone else badly. Many people seek out trainers that will be “tough” on them, call them out on their “bullshit” and so on. Whether you think this is a valid training style or not is one thing, however it’s important to remember where your boundaries lie as a human being. A common red flag is fatphobic, misogynistic or homophobic language being used as a form of negative reinforcement by “tough-love” trainers. This behaviour is not a “coaching style” or “opinion”. It’s just poor, unprofessional behaviour.

Helpful Questions

• There are a wide range of fitness topics that you might need to know your trainer’s views on, so it’s hard to pin down specific questions. However, in talking to your prospective new PT about your goals and experiences, you may notice certain patterns that tell you where their opinions lie.
• I believe that your consultation with a new trainer should consist of them initially asking lots of questions about you and doing lots of listening. I admit that this could just be my personal preference though.
• Listen to how they coach other people, or have a trial session.
• Check out their social media. If they’re using social media to advertise their craft, they will probably be broadcasting their position on many of the topics I have highlighted. Even if they’re not using their social media as a portfolio, they may provide some clues about their personality.  

I hope you found this guide useful and find the right trainer for you. If you haven’t found the right in-person PT for you yet, but you’re not local to Liverpool Street, then maybe you should consider working with me online. Use the contact form below to find out more.

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