What to Look For in a Personal Trainer (from a personal trainer)
I have been a personal trainer for over ten years now and have worked with clients ranging from beginners to competitive athletes. I’ve come across many different trainers in my career; some I have hired personally and others my clients have worked with. I’ve seen firsthand what works, what doesn’t, and what keeps people consistent for years.
With my experience training at Body Renew (a gym in Anchorage), I work alongside even more personal trainers who have filled me in on their own experience as well. With that, I have come to the conclusion that there have been many client-trainer relationships that have gone sour due to poor experience and misaligned goals.
I am writing this to share my real-world experience with you. I want you to avoid painful trainer relationships by knowing what to look for in a personal trainer, ultimately finding one that will suit your own goals and lifestyle. In my opinion, there are a few things in particular that are more important to focus on, including their experience, character, and the principles they live by. Let’s flesh these out a bit more so you can save this list and find one that you can work with long-term that will be well worth your investment.
1. Relevant Experience That Aligns with Your Goals and Lifestyle
Before even starting the search for a trainer, map out what your personal goals and current lifestyle look like. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:
What is my monthly budget?
How far am I willing or able to drive?
Am I focused on weight loss or strength training?
Is there a specific event I am working to prepare myself for?
Where do I want to be a year from now? Five years from now? 10?
All of these will help you honestly assess where you are at and direct your focus toward your fitness goals. I do want to also encourage you to be honest, yes, but be willing to push yourself. Saying “10 min is too far of a drive” might be too constraining. Create boundaries that are within reasonable limits.
On the other hand, don’t bite off more than you can chew. If you’re just starting your fitness journey, you may need to find a trainer that can help you build from that level before you can run a marathon. In that case, a personal trainer who can adjust to your fitness level as you grow over time is crucial. This trainer, like I do myself, will frequently measure your strength, endurance, and movement quality to modify your training program as you progress.
If you don’t know where to start and just want to be healthier longer-term, our personal training team has helped many Anchorage, Alaska locals improve their long-term health and physique.
2. Prioritization of Safety
Above everything, this comes first: a good personal trainer will prioritize your safety. I don’t care about how many awards, credentials, or accolades they have. If someone puts you in harm's way, that’s going to cost you long-term physical, emotional, and financial health.
Yeah, not good.
A competent personal trainer will prioritize form right from the start and set you at a smaller weight, carefully and slowly increasing the weights. They will also always, and I mean always, incorporate a thorough warm-up before any exercise. Someone who prioritizes safety will respect your own limitations and acknowledge any pain you feel; as soon as you feel pain (other than normal muscle burning that comes with a workout, sorry, you need that) they will stop you, readjust, and address what your body is telling you.
If you come across any personal trainer that doesn’t do that, run.
3. They Adapt To You
Now that we have laid out the importance of aligning your goals with your trainer’s expertise, as well as safety, it is important to find one that will adapt to you while they also push you. Both are important and here’s why.
Say for instance, you have decided to run a marathon and have hired a personal trainer to coach you to that goal. A solid personal trainer will thoroughly assess your fitness levels to form a starting point that you both work off of. Similar to what I mentioned with safety, they will constantly do this throughout your training to determine if you are physically sound enough to take it to the next level.
What a good trainer will not do is have a set, cookie-cutter template that they take all of their clients through. This can look like weekly increases in difficulty that aren’t truly adjusting to your body. A personal trainer may have a playbook they work out of, but a good one uses it more as a guide to adjust to your body as it adapts.
Find a trainer that will meet you where you are at and show you what you need to do to grow, taking it step by step. This happens when a trainer encourages consistent change over time; they won’t let you be stagnant, but they won’t put you in harm’s way either.
Before and after shots of clients who’ve enrolled in personal training at Body Renew Alaska.
4. Do They Practice What They Preach?
This might come off harsh, but assess your trainer. Have they made the physical changes to their own body that you desire to achieve? Many times what can happen with any type of trainer is they preach “best practices” that can be theory-based and not realistic all of the time. A trainer who has walked the walk will better understand how to help you narrow focus to what will be the most effective for you.
I will give you a real life example from my experience: I was being instructed by my own personal trainer on the proper form when free-squatting. I tried to push my knees out and arch my back to oblivion, which felt extremely uncomfortable. This trainer struggled themselves with lifting heavier weights and didn’t have the strength I was aiming for. I learned later when I started working with a different trainer who had the strength I wanted to focus more on my muscle control (along with breath control) and balance than contorting my joints.
At the end of the day, someone with real-world experience is going to be able to better zero in on your specific goals than someone with just the book-knowledge. Knowing the theory is essential, but even more so is someone who can offer their own insights based on their own struggles; much richer and more helpful than faceless internet advice (trust me, I have seen some of those responses).
5. They Encourage a Stronger Community
This one might sound random and honestly it’s my own personal opinion, because one of the most valuable parts of training is the community it can build. This is especially important nowadays with many people working remotely or being too plugged-in. Depending on your environment, like here in Alaska where days are cold and often short, you may make a beeline for your home and often overlook social events.
That’s a major problem for our long-term health and statistics show it. One in 6 people worldwide report being impacted by loneliness. We weren’t built to do life alone, and yet many of us are because it has become so easy and convenient to live more isolated lives.
As I say though in training, convenience is often the death of progress.
That’s why personal training can be such a powerful tool for helping bridge this gap and give you a chance to form a stronger community. For instance:
You can join a group fitness class and meet like-minded people striving for the same goals (something we offer here at Body Renew).
If you are working one-on-one with a trainer like me, that’s a great chance to build connections face-to-face rather than online.
A personal trainer can point you to the right resources, groups and fitness challenges to get you more involved in the community and make more connections.
Fitness is about so much more than your physical health; it’s your mental health too. A solid personal trainer will help you strengthen that as well by encouraging a healthy community in your life.
6. Trust is Built Rather Than Dependency
Finally, and I think this is true for any type of a service provider, they teach you how to do the thing instead of requiring you to depend on them.
I have seen business owners where their whole model makes it extremely difficult for the client to ever consider leaving them. They have to rely on their product that “works better than anything else,” otherwise it would be a huge headache and cause financial strain to turn to anything else.
This may sound counterintuitive for the trainer, but really it builds trust. From my own experience, that has also paid off for me and resulted in even more referrals, returns and business.
A strong, trustworthy trainer will show you what to do so you can take that knowledge with you for the rest of your life. They are invested in your long-term success and that’s what really makes them tick (myself included).
Final Thoughts: A Personal Trainer That Sticks
Finding a good trainer might seem like finding a needle in a haystack, but if you keep these points in mind, it gets a lot easier. Schedule a time to meet with them in person where you will be working out. Ask them questions and pay attention to how they answer. You can also ask them for referrals (I highly recommend this) and see what their current clients say about their own experience. If they have the experience, the solid principles, adapt to you and help you work towards your goals, you will walk away like I did and love it so much that you become a personal trainer yourself!
If you are in Anchorage and ready to take the next step, go ahead and schedule a free consultation with me, or another trainer on our team, to see if we’re the right fit. We will meet in person so you can review each of these steps and see if we are a good match to help you meet your fitness goals.
About The Author
Chris is a seasoned personal trainer here at Body Renew, working one-on-one with clients to help them reach their fitness goals.
