I have meet many personal trainers who were excellent in regards to their training knowledge but lacked in their communication skills If you are unable to communicate the knowledge across to your customers and demonstrate the benefits as person will get from training with you then your business will no doubt fail. I often see new personal trainers afraid to talk to members, in fear that they might be rejected. When I first started as a trainer I was guilty of this myself.
On the flip side of this I see many personal trainers who to quote the movie Dodge Ball “are about as useful as a cock flavoured lollypop” do well with their business because they able to talk to customers and convince them to invest in their training services. They are ballsy and don’t care if they get rejected, they play the numbers. The fact that they are often completely inadequate as trainers to actually get anybody results is another matter and will be a subject for another blog post.
2, There is no such thing as a perfect programme
Some people search high and low for the perfect routine. They swap and change routines weekly, trying to find something that will turn their bodies into something worthy of a men’s health or shape magazine. The fact of the matter is that there are certain training guidelines to fall within depending on your goal but quite often anything can work for while provided the required effort and intensity is put into it.
Quite often people change programmes searching for the easy way to get results. It takes hard work and consistant effort to produce a body worth admiring!
3, Be wary of experts or gurus who make blanket statements
There are thousands of so called ‘experts and gurus’ in the fitness industry who claim that there way is the ‘holy path’ and the only way to train. Firstly be wary of their exercise preferences as they are likely to be biased towards a style of training that has best suited them.
Everyone is different and so will respond different to training stimuli. A very wise quote from Bruce Lee is to:
"Absorb what is useful, Discard what is not, Add what is uniquely your own”
Smart Guy!
Through years of consistent, hard work you can discover what works best for you.
A good trainer should always be a student to his profession, constantly striving to learn more and be open to new ideas and techniques.
You also have to question why an ‘expert’ is making a blanket statement, do they have a hidden agenda? Are they trying to sell you their own style of training or supplement line?
4, Nutrition, nutrition, nutrition
The difference between a guy and girl who spends years in the gym training but never changes their body can most often be attributed to lack of effort in the kitchen. There are three main types of people I encounter-
Perma-bulkers
There are thousands of guys who are ‘perma-bulkers’ walking around the gym for years with too much body fat to ever be close to seeing their abdominal muscles. They train hard and often can be quite strong but never get smart with their nutrition which would allow them to diet down and reveal the hard, chiselled muscle underneath their soft exterior.
Cardio queens/Ms. pink dumbbells
There are also many women who slog away at the gym, quite often performing too much cardio and not enough resistance training but also who fail to make adjustments to their diets and consequently never achieve the lean, toned look they so desire.
Skinny dweebs
These guys try and do all the hardcore training, often trying to follow the routines of their favourite pro-bodybuilders they read in magazines. They however never get it right with their nutrition, never eating enough nutrients to enable their body to grow into something worth looking at. They are often too scared to eat too much in fear that they might temporarily loose sight of their abdominals. You can train your ass off but unless you eat the required nutrients you will not grow.
The difference between someone who looks average which these days is often overweight and a bodybuilder who gets into contest shape (5% or below) is nutrition.
A bodybuilder or even a Men’s Health cover model (a more desirable look for most people) makes the most adjustments to his/her routine through diet. If your goal is to build your body you need to provide your body with the building blocks in which it can grow. If you want to loose fat then you have to create a deficit which will encourage your body use fat as a fuel while preserving the muscle you have.
5, Create a definitive goal and then shoot for it
I am surprised by the number of people I encounter who have absolutely no idea what they are trying to achieve by attending the gym other than the vague idea of ‘trying to get in shape’.
If you don’t have a definitive goal then you will never be able to achieve success. If you goal is to look “bloody fantastic at your sisters wedding, making all the males at the wedding heads turn” or “I want to bench press 100 kilo’s” then write this down!
Once you have a definitive goal you can better plan how best to achieve this. Some of the most successful people in the world such as Bill gates, Richard Branson, and Arnold Schwarzenegger are all keen goal setters and clearly defined what they wanted to achieve in every area in which they ultimately succeeded.
Give yourself a deadline; we all generally work better under pressure. Take responsibility for you goal and make yourself accountable. Create checkpoints towards your goal and then make sure you consistently hit them along the way.
Wrap up
This is just a small sample of things I have learned, stay posted for future insights!
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