How To Figure Out if Your Trainer is Awesome or Just a Hack

Hey Everyone!

Hope everyone is staying safe and keeping healthy!

Today, I wanted to talk about training and, as the title so bluntly states, how you can figure out if your trainer is awesome or just a hack. These days more than ever before, the barrier of entry into the industry is low. I doubt you’ll find a single trainer who’s been in it for more than a couple years who will contest that. Cornerstone certifying bodies like the National Academy of Sports Medicine and National Strength and Conditioning Association are vying for top spot in the certifying game and who would want to get certified by a company whose pass rates are lower than others? Just check the stats - every year, pass rates trend upwards. That doesn’t even account for the hundreds if not thousands of Certified Personal Trainers who are freshly inducted into the personal training rank and file who train for a few months before realizing training has a lot less to do with working out than it has to do with being a relatable human who should ultimately care (and deeply so) about their clients. Pardon my french but giving a sh*t is one of the rarest qualities in this industry alongside work ethic and knowledge / self-betterment. If you find a trainer with all three, you’ve struck gold.

It doesn’t really matter how many certifications a trainer or instagrammer has (or claims to have) as certifications are mostly a get-what-you-put-in type of deal. Even some of the industry standard certs like the FRCms (Functional Range Conditioning Mobility Specialist) and a number of the PRI courses (which aren’t really certifications unto themselves but are often touted as such) are weekend courses with some pre-course material that can either take months of thorough studying or can be skimmed the night before. The point being: some of the ‘most certified’ trainers out there barely know what they’re talking about, and some of the seemingly ‘least certified' trainers out there have a rare depth and breadth of knowledge.

Then there’s the smoke and mirrors of social media where aesthetics and followers are the implicit criteria for who is ‘legit’ and who ‘isn’t.’ Now while some of these biases are quickly dismissed for anyone who doesn’t buy into the cure-all program/product/subscription, it’s still hard to sift through the remaining thousands of trainers to really parse who ultimately cares and who ultimately doesn’t.

Figuring this out, like anything else really worth your dollar, becomes either a matter of luck or hard work. “But I just want to lose 20lbs - what’s the big deal?” a prospective client might ask. To such people, I’ll say this: you’re looking for a person who’s going to not just help you lose those 20lbs but keep those 20lbs off, not hurt you in the process — in fact, make you stronger and more resilient than you can fathom — and give you the tools to stay healthy not just for a few months or even a few years but for the rest of your life. You’re looking for someone who doesn’t just have relevant expertise now but will continue to keep their expertise relevant months and years from now. Then, there’s the matter of personality; you want to find a trainer who you vibe with. This is a person you’ll spend at leas 8+ hours per month with. You need to get along. Not that trainers and their services are analogs of any other product or service like, say, a car, but if you’re looking for a Ferrari, Roma I hate to break it to you but a Honda Odyssey isn’t going to cut it, even if both cars will take you from Point A to Point B. Ok — maybe that was a confusing analogy — but you need to find someone you get the sense wants to work with you and, more importantly, that you want to work with.

Of course, there are the nuts and bolts of the thing. You have to work within your budget, examine what services are being offered. Usually, a good sign for personal or virtual training is that the trainer will make themselves available to you and will be able to provide you with a plan for which every exercise, workout, week, month, and any changes they make they can explain to you with evidence-based rational thinking. Entirely unhelpful but totally true and relevant to this trainer selection process is the age old advice to trust your gut . Let the excitement of any flashy webpage or video or post wear off, reach out (and most trainers will provide a free consultation) , and then evaluate the conversation you had with them. You’ll know. If you don’t, consult your friends or myself. Taking the time at the outset will pay dividend later.

I know it’s a bit unsavory to talk price points, and they are not always the best gauge of value. You would not believe the number of trainers who charge an exorbitant rate (I’ve seen $300/session) who will have you religiously run sprints (even though you might complain of knee pain) and encourage you to essentially starve yourself (and maybe even give you a stern talking to if they suspect you aren’t) so that (A.) you will feel like you’ve really worked out and will likely see results and (B.) have something — you — to blame if things don’t go as planned. They might even blame you for tendinitis or weight gain, pointing to their six pack as proof that they know better. BUT often times price points can be an honest reflection of how a trainer values themselves and/or are valued. I’ll take myself as an example. Right now, I have enough time for fifteen clients regardless of what I charge. Why? Because, beyond the 30-40 hours I need to train these fifteen individuals, I need the rest of my time to program for them, send them their on-their-own workouts, communicate with them about successes and needs, nutrition, etc. I need to stay on top of the most recent research, run the back end of my business, so on and so forth. Could I take on 30 clients and charge less for everyone and provide a much more dilute service? Of course I could but I’d rather not. Every trainer comes to a point of reckoning - either they want to raise the quality of their service or they want to crank the numbers. Some trainers, like myself even as recently as February, will do both, but it’s not sustainable. Inevitably, when a quality trainer wants to cap their clientele, the price will have to reflect that. It’s that balance of cost and quality. So goes the saying, you get what you pay for.

The last question here is: what do you want to pay for? After prospective clients complete the intake process and we have our consultation, I share with them the Eisenhower Matrix (pictured above). Everything falls within one quadrant of the Eisenhower Matrix: Do, Decide, Delegate, Delete. When the issue of enrollment comes up, I see it as a moment of countenancing oneself. Do you want to train? Do you want to really begin the difficult process of realizing self-change? Or do you just like the concept of it? If you want to be my client you need to feel the urgency and importance of what training is. That’s how much I value it and I only want to work with people who meet me eye-to-eye in that respect. Curiously, those that do, find that enrolling into any facet of my training (personal, virtual, and programming) see it for what it is: an investment.

Of course, most people don’t take the time to think through the selection process or haven’t arrived at a moment in their life where they feel the urgency or importance of fitness. That’ also totally OK. Maybe it’ll come later or maybe it won’t but training will never be valuable to that person until it is. If/when it does, my advice is to take your time. Reflect on your goals and values as they relate to fitness; consult trainers and see if your goals and values apply to them; and assess the feedback they give you. The decision you’re making can be a life changing one no matter how it turns out. Perhaps a hack of a trainer will con you and turn you off to training forever, thus compromising what you think is possible and what you accomplish. Or perhaps you find the right match and you become healthier and happier with your body and yourself, more so than you ever thought possible.

For those of you who are on the cusp of such a decision, I hope you found this helpful!

Until next time,

PJ