A Consumer support blog for people seeking a personal trainer
Approx. read time 3.5 min.
If you were on your death bed and did an inventory of how you spent your mental energy and time. Would you regret your health related pursuits? Would you regret the time spent thinking about what you see in the mirror? how you feel in your clothes? and how much time you’ve given to losing weight?
One of the greatest time/ energy wasters in the world is failed attempts at becoming healthy. It’s becoming easier to understand how this happens given the sea of crap you have to sift through in order to find information that’ll help you in any longer term capacity.
This summer I was playing on my Monday night softball team with my wife and in-laws. In this league you pitch to your own team but they have a rule where if the batter hits the ball and it touches a pitcher, you’re automatically out. It’s a dumb rule… So we were losing by 4 runs and my wife was up to bat… So naturally she drills a ball right up the middle and skims it off my leg! Should be an automatic out according to the rules but no one really seemed to noticed. I would have been the next batter up and I was one swing away from tying up the game! Every part of my soul wanted to shut my mouth and go up and crank a dinger… But I told the truth… My wife was out and the game was over. Then I endured a solid 20 minutes of people declaring their distaste for my existence (I’m 50% joking).
Normally with softball there’s an umpire to take the brunt of what my family could dish out but because we play in such a rinky-dink league, we had no umpires! Business is the same way, if someone lies, cheats, steals and misleads, there is no reasonable way to keep them accountable.
The truth is that humans are flawed and the only thing that’s keeps us from acting in the best interest of ourselves is a strong value system.
“if you tell the truth you never have to remember anything” mark twain
This all seems pretty obvious, but when you are unhealthy, weak, out of shape, overweight and/or needing to make some changes to your health then you’re likely going to approach your next health endeavour from a position of humility. This is a good thing, unless you’re engaging with healthcare that shows one or two of these types of bias.
The FIRST type of bias we are used to seeing. That’s health care practioners being poorly incentivized to put your needs (short term and long term) at the centre of your care. This is the healthcare equivalent to your significant other hitting you with a baseball and being mad at you for not lying about it after (sorry Laura). It’s not the end of the world, you might even receive pretty decent service, it’s just hit or miss and it likely won’t be the best… As an example, imagine a gym where personal trainers are required to train their clients a minimum of twice per week(this is very common). Sounds reasonable but if eventually you’ll see the personal trainer bugging you about booking extra sessions when you’ve gotten sick or taken a week off for Christmas. It also eliminates the prospect of your ever lowering your training frequency. What if you wanted to training twice a week on your own (when you’re ready) but only once per week with your personal trainer to keep you accountable?
The SECOND type of bias you’ll need to be wary of, is the level of ‘personal enthusiasm’ the person you’re consuming from has. Whether it’s your personal trainer, an author, a YouTube blogger or your vegan cousin who does crossfit(yikes). Personal enthusiasm and passion often look the same but the definitely aren’t! These trainers likely aren’t experienced enough to see what happens on the other side of these overly enthusiastic health pursuits. Everyone done the pendulum… This is when you go on a health craze and then find yourself neck deep in Haagen Dazs on the verge of diabetes only 3 weeks later. This sort term pendulum can happen in a long term sense to, I’ve seen lots of personal trainers kill their career by getting fat after 5 years of nothing but salads.
Find someone who’s actually investing in their career as a personal trainer.
A lot of people become personal trainers because they discover fitness, have fun with it, see some results and then they decide it’s time to make some money out of it. A LOT of trainers chose this career path out of some sort term personal enthusiasm, not because they’re legitimately looking to build a strong reputation as a credible personal trainer. Like these folks
What do the best personal trainers look like?
There a lot of professional career trainers out there who have a passion for helping their clients to meet (and surpass) their expectations. These trainers are all extremely evidence based with how they approach research as they develop and refine their training styles. Finding a personal trainer with values like this in a facility that incentivizes them to continue to build those values is the sweet spot when it comes to client service.
Concluding Cautions:
Whenever you’re approaching anyone or anything that could help you with your health and performance, ask yourself this. Does this sound like a passionate practioner who has built their passion on compelling evidence? Or does this look more like someone trying to make a living selling their personal enthusiasms?
