Horsham-based female personal trainer, Becky, works with people looking to heal their relationship with exercise and become more confident in the gym. This is how she plans sessions to ensure that her clients actually want to do them…
Time to give away the true secrets of personal training! When you work with me, sessions aren’t thoughtlessly thrown together, or based on what equipment is getting least use in the gym at that time.
The reason I take time to chat to someone when they first approach me about training is so that I can think about what I know will work well for them, in terms of achieving their physical goals, whilst also taking other preferences into account. What it comes down to for me is three things: technicalities, personalities, and practicalities. Let’s look at each in detail…
Personal training tip: technicalities
Fairly obviously, I need to deliver on what my clients are looking for physically. If someone tells me that they’d like to build their upper body strength, but all I programme is lower body exercises, they won’t get what they’re looking for. But it’s a little more complicated than that…
This is where I also factor for any injuries, rehab, or other weaknesses that we’re looking to correct. If there’s an imbalance in one side of the body over the other that we’d like to correct, that gets planned in here.
This is probably the most basic element of what I do, and something that all personal trainers should be looking to achieve.
Next personal training consideration: personalities
Now we’re getting a little more specialist. This is where – as much as is reasonably practicable, because we all need to eat our greens – I think about preferences to an extent. Many coaches will tell you that no exercise is essential, because there’s always an alternative option, and I agree.
I have lots of people who struggle with lunges, so we work up to it rather than me expecting them to jump off the deep end. Very few people like split squats, so they tend to get reserved for those people who do (or who just hate lunges even more).
With me, there’s an added element to this section. I think about someone’s innate character. Again, we all have to do some things that we perhaps don’t love, or that don’t come naturally to us, because life is about developing. But am I going to expect someone who has incredibly high energy and gets bored easily to do an entire workout of slow, focused exercises? No. Because they’ll probably hate it. They might do part of their workout in that style, and spend the rest of the time burning through their adrenaline and really enjoying themselves. That’s how I create balance, and enough of a challenge to keep it interesting.
The clue is in the job title here: personal trainer.
Final coaching element: practicalities
This – if I may toot my own horn – is where I really shine. I try my best to learn about the space a client trains in, and what it’s like at the time they tend to train. When they use the gym I work at, this is easy for me, as I know the place well. If they train elsewhere, it just takes me asking a couple of questions.
I learned this when I was a client myself, before I was a personal trainer: my PT had programmed me a few sets on a specific piece of equipment… which was always busy at the times I trained. And I couldn’t figure out an alternative, then felt I had a programme I couldn’t use.
So I try to avoid the same hazard. I don’t wed people to one piece of equipment for their entire session. I empower them to switch up the order in which they do things – this paralyses a lot of clients, who believe that it’s essential to do things in the order their PT has given them. The reality here is that we’ll have written things in an optimal order – generally, you do the stuff that’s most difficult and requires most energy first, so that you’re fresh. But there are normally workarounds, especially if you’re tweaking with the system occasionally rather than always.
It’s about educating our clients, rather than gatekeeping information. I was once told that the most important factor in the success of a programme is a person’s ability to adhere to it, and that’s why I think about these three things – there’s no harm in making something more palatable, and a situation that someone is more willing and able to achieve. What you’re then doing is setting them up for success -it’s a win win.
Personal training: as simple as that
Yep, that’s all it takes. If I’ve made it sound easy… well it’s not quite that simple!
And if I’ve made it sound like something you’d like to get involved with… send me a message