10 Reasons to Hire a Personal Trainer P1 of 2

There are many reasons to hire a personal trainer, especially as New Years is just around the corner. But before you make your New Years resolution or hire a personal trainer in NYC, let’s go over some staggering stats about New Years resolutions:

According to the University of Scranton Journal of Clinical Psychology, the #1 New Years resolution of 2012 was to “Lose Weight”. Unfortunately, it states that 8% of the people that do make a new years resolution actually achieve their goal. Then there’s the 24% that never succeed and fail on their resolution each year.

If you think about it, these stats aren’t all that surprising at all, considering the common fitness cycle = January is super packed with fitness enthusiast, February starts to die down, and by March the gym is back to the “regulars”. This is why I believe it’s important to hire a qualified personal trainer to keep you on track.

If the statistic weren’t enough to motivate you, here are 10 reasons to hire a personal trainer:

1) Intensity

I believe a big reason why people don’t obtain the results they want is because of the intensity they perceive to be working at. As a personal trainer, it’s all too common to hear, “I really workout hard and push myself”. But once I get to assess the workout, I find that most don’t actually work as hard as they may think. Usually the issue is that the weight is too light or they are taking too much rest between sets. This is why it’s important to have a qualified personal trainer by your side, the trainer should give you feed back on what if anything should be adjusted on your workout.

2) Accountability:

A personal trainer can hold you accountable to hit the gym and commit to the time that you guys scheduled. After all most personal trainers have a 24-hour cancellation policy, so if you don’t show you lose a personal training session. This may not be the best method to you hold you accountable but it is a good initial incentive to stay committed until fitness becomes a lifestyle.

3) Lesson

In an ideal world we all would be able to get in a training session 3x a week with a qualified personal trainer, unfortunately personal training can be expensive. But a great way to afford a personal trainer is to spread out the training sessions. Once you find a qualified and reliable personal trainer, you and the trainer should create a game plan to efficiently utilize the training package (i.e. meeting every other week and having a strong program to work off of). We’ll expand on this more another time. The point is that most personal trainers want to be able help out those that want to be helped.

4) Focus on the right exercises

Too many people focus on the wrong exercises, for the lack of words. They think that a squat is a squat or getting your heart rate up = getting into great shape. The truth is that a squat is not a squat- if you do x100 body weight squats or 5×10 squats with appreciable weights, I can confidently say that the 5×10 (with appreciable weight) will make a bigger impact.

Finally while heart rate is a great indicator of how hard you’re working, it’s not enough. You also have to look at working out as a whole – strength and conditioning. For example- take someone that just jogs, I’m sure there are heart rate will get up but are they stimulating the body to build lean muscle vs. someone that does a complex of both weight training and cardio? In my experience building lean muscle mass has made lasting body composition changes vs. just cardio workouts. They also seem to tolerate carbs better, keep the weight off longer, and get the look they want with less total work. With that said this does not mean that you’ll get bulky, as we all know by now building lean muscle mass is not as simple as lifting weights.

5) Save Money

It may sound funny, “hire a personal trainer and save money???” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had clients tell me, “I’ve saved so much money from buying new clothes”. Not only do you fit in your old clothes but you’re going to look DAMN good in them. While personal training can be an initial investment, it’s a good investment in yourself to ensure that you’re on the right track and work efficiently toward your goal. In my opinion I believe your return is greater than the investment itself. And as we stated earlier, while not everyone can afford personal training x2-3 a week, you and the trainer can figure out something to ensure quality of training and make sure that you’re on the right path.

Conclusion

That’s it for today, we’ll go over 6-10 reason to hire a personal trainer next week. In the mean, if you do decide to make a New Years resolution, make you that you “explicitly make it. Based off of the Scranton Journal research, they found that “If you explicitly make a resolution you are 10x more likely to attain your goal then those that don’t explicitly make it.”

Hope this was helpful and if you have any questions please feel free to contact us in the comments below or email us.