There seems to be a strong undercurrent that every client who takes up training with a PT must have some grand goal – to compete on stage, to enter a powerlifting competition, to excel in a sport or to forge some kind of ‘elite’ fitness level. Go on Instagram, and unless you have a body fat level Arnie would be proud of, and can routinely lift a small car without breaking sweat, you’d be forgiven for thinking “I may as well give up now”.
Well, in 90% of cases, that’s simply utter rubbish.
In my experience as a PT – and having trained 100s of clients, and put in around 30,000 training hours one-to-one – most clients do NOT have such lofty goals. That’s not to say that those kinds of goals are pointless; of course they aren’t, and require a huge amount of training, commitment and desire to get anywhere near.
But let me tell you what also isn’t pointless – simply training to be healthier. To lose a few excess pounds. To find a spark of confidence that you thought you’d lost. To be able to run a charity 5k without feeling like you’re going to die at 1km. To take your kid out and kick a ball around without having to stop before the lad’s even broken sweat. To reverse a medical condition brought on by poor food and inactivity.
Because THAT is what training clients is about. That spark, that thrill, of seeing someone do something they couldn’t do just weeks before. Seeing someone get into a dress, a suit or even go to an event they wouldn’t have done before they got their act back together. Yes, it can also be about seeing someone get on stage, or seeing someone win a lifting meet, or excel in their sport – but unless a PT deliberately specialises in those fields, that’s not what the vast, vast majority of personal training is about.
PTs aren’t heroes, they aren’t messiahs with the answer that you’ve been missing all your life. There are no tricks, no magic, no secrets that they can give, no matter what snake oil some might want to sell you. A decent PT gives a damn about you and makes sure you get there, one way or another, and will work with you whatever the obstacles. They provide a bit of a road map to stop you making pointless mistakes, to keep you from getting hurt, and to make you progress at the fastest rate YOU – not some photoshopped model – can.
Find someone passionate, find someone who gives a damn about your goals, whatever they are and however trivial or insignificant they seem, then trust that person to make the process work. It doesn’t matter that you don’t want what half of social media says you MUST want. It just matters that YOU decide what that ‘spark’ is, and go after it.
