One of my favourite parts of my job as a personal trainer is guiding someone through their first gym session with me. It’s an experience that’s often not dissimilar to a first date (although I’ll stress that the goal is very different!) in that it’s when you truly start to get to know someone.
Whilst my relationship with a client always starts with a consultation – either via phone or face to face – these tend to be slightly more formal, and it’s understandably once they start to actually train and get a little more comfortable in my company that more of their personality is revealed. Following a first session, I often receive similar feedback, so what is it that people find so different?
Assessing someone’s fitness
For the majority of people, being assessed sounds terrifying. It gives the impression that this is a pass or fail situation, and that you might be graded. For me, it’s nothing like that.
During the consultation process, someone tells me a lot about their body, and I’m always aware that this is their perspective. Once we get to the gym floor to train, I can begin to form my own picture of how someone is moving, and where their natural strengths and weaknesses are.
My preference is to see someone perform their current version of some key movements. This does depend on the individual as there may be some things that someone isn’t able to demonstrate, but all of this is information for me. There are some movement patterns that are critical to our day to day lives, and one of my goals for the majority of clients is to improve these over time. In order to do so, I need to know what our starting point is, and the best way I’ve found to do that is by making certain exercises part of a session. This allows me to subtly assess their movement, whilst developing their comfort and experience within a gym setting.
Not using much gym equipment
One of the most frequent requests I receive from prospective clients is that I, “show me how the machines work”. I find this such an interesting choice. It’s as though people think that learning to use the confusing masses of metal that are resistance machines is the key to their progress, and that they think they must work from machine to machine in order to complete a workout.
I see things differently. Machines have pros and cons, and one of my key aims is to have people understand that machines aren’t an essential way to structure a gym session. I think that a lot of people are reliant on machines as little islands of security, but there’s then a big problem: what if the machine you want is either in use or broken? Take away the comfort blanket, and gym users are suddenly incredibly vulnerable again.
So I start educating them from their first session at the gym in Horsham that workouts don’t have to involve machines in order to be effective. The majority of first sessions I run will make use of dumbbells and kettlebells, plus occasionally a cable column. Even if I knew someone had experience, I probably wouldn’t programme any barbell movements, because my other aim is to underestimate a person – I would much rather have them walk away thinking that the workout was achievable or easy, rather than too difficult; the former tends to boost their confidence and leave them wanting more, rather than frighten them and put them off. And that leads me to my final point…
Sessions don’t leave you exhausted
Even when someone has been with me a while, it’s rare that they will leave physically depleted having maxed out. Exercise, when done right, can energise you even when you’ve been pushed. I like to prove that sessions can be challenging whilst still leaving you with enough in the tank to go about the rest of your day, perhaps even with a spring in your step!
Part of this is because one of my own key concerns when I started training was that a workout would leave me physically exhausted. None of us has the luxury of being able to burn ourselves out like that – the gym is part of our lives, not the entirety of it, so we have to make sure that we can still fulfil our other obligations and enjoy life away from training.
When participants finish one of my sessions, they will know bodily that they have trained, but they won’t need to lie down immediately afterwards to get their breath back, or take a day off work. If that happens, I haven’t listened to their feedback during the session and adjusted accordingly. The intensity my clients train at is individual – it is tailored for their ability and needs.
One more thing that people find surprising about personal training sessions
How could I forget? Something I regularly hear – and love – is that people are keen to come back for another session. That’s when I really know that I’ve done a good job.
Want to find out what it’s like for yourself? Get in touch…