Who Else Wants Know How to Avoid Bad Personal Trainers?

Avoiding bad personal trainers is key to your health, and your future as a fit, healthy human being in control of your body. I count very few people I know who see a personal trainer regularly. Why? Because they aren’t educated on what makes a personal trainer great, and because there aren’t many great personal trainers out there!

The main problem though, is education. How do you suppose you’ll choose a personal trainer who is interested in not only making you fit, but ensuring that you stay healthy and stay injury free, without knowing what to avoid when you’re shopping for one?

Our health is without question our most valuable thing we own. Even if you’re a billionaire, you’re not going to be enjoying your wealth if you have agonizing neck or lower back pain… which is why I believe we all need to educate ourselves to a basic level on what to avoid, and what to know when looking for a personal trainer.

Firstly, I believe the most important trait when choosing a personal trainer is their passion for training. Not how they jump up and down and smile the most, but how passionate they are about making people fit and healthy. Ask them, “Why do you like personal training?” On some level they should give you a response which involves helping people, but you need to go a little deeper…

If they’re passionate, wouldn’t you think they also seek to educate themselves to the utmost, in order to meet their claims about helping people? After all, how committed would you say a trainer is who did an online course, and hasn’t read anything else about training methods since they completed the course last year… or at the end of the last century?

You need to, for your own sake, ask them where and how they keep their knowledge up to date. Do they subscribe to industry journals? Do they consume books written by experts every month? Do they go to seminars or consume information regarding cutting edge techniques? Even Joe Lunchbox can accumulate a better understanding of training principles than most trainers by reading a book written by an expert in exercise every month, so why isn’t your trainer updating & expanding their knowledge too?

This personal trainer you hire is putting your body at risk, for probably less than $50 an hour. Think about that. You can’t put a price on your health.

There’s a bunch of other ways you can avoid hiring a bad personal trainer, but I believe that just by interrogating your trainer (in a friendly way of course!), you’ll be able to work out if they want to train people because they’re passionate about it, or because it gives them spare change to go out and get drunk on the weekend.

Here’s a few other ways you can tell your trainer is as useless as a bicep curl in a squat rack:

• You aren’t given a detailed screening upon seeing your trainer, including but certainly not limited to- your exercise history, your injury history, your goals, and any health risks you have.
• They make you do cardio during their personal training session. Unless its a special kind of cardio, like High Intensity Interval Training… they’re wasting your money and your time.
• Your trainer doesn’t track your progress, or worse, doesn’t show YOU how to track your OWN progress.
• Your trainer doesn’t bother changing your exercise program. Bring on the end of your exercise program due to a massive boredom attack. Exercise needs to be fun.
• Your trainer doesn’t explain why you’re doing particular exercises. I’ve always believed a good personal trainer’s end goal should be to “eliminate” their clients, one by one, by educating them properly about how to train optimally, and how to nourish themselves with proper food.
• Which leads me to my next tip. Is your trainer teaching you about food? How do you expect to lose weight when the advice you get is, “eat healthy”. A good trainer should offer to come to your house & raid your fridge & cupboards, and go shopping with you. A good client (i.e. you) should be prepared to pay for this vital service.
• Your trainer watches and chats up the hot guys & girls on the treadmill while they assign you half an hour of cardio.
• Your trainer is overweight, dangerously underweight (and they aren’t marathon runners) or you catch them smoking in the car park. Do they look the part? Why not? Is it because they really aren’t that passionate about it at all?
• Your perfectly good question (I’m 99.9% sure it was a good question) is handled by your idiot personal trainer with the response, “ah, don’t worry about that”. Again, we need to find a great trainer who wants to see us go one day, because we don’t need them anymore! Don’t worry… these highly evolved individuals almost always have more clients than they can handle, because they get lots of happy customers giving referrals.
• Your trainer (again with the education I know!) doesn’t make a point of getting back to you if they don’t know the answer to your questions. Or better yet, they don’t know and make up an answer. You get suspicious- and your google search reveals they were wrong. Avoid this trainer like the plague, their ego is getting in the way of your progress, and it might end up hurting you. Permanently.
• Your trainer never goes near the free weights, and just assigns you to the machines. You know, the ones with detailed pictures & instructions written on them already… that you can read… without your useless personal trainer. Free weights have many, many, benefits over machines that you can find googling “free weights vs machines”.
• Your trainer has you work all the ’show’ muscles, and never any of the ‘go’ muscles. What are show muscles you ask? The beach muscles- arms, chest, abs. The go muscles? They’re the ones that stop you from becoming unbalanced and injured- back, legs, buttocks, postural muscles.

If your personal trainer avoids my list of shame above, they might actually be one of the good ones. But as I say, we want education for you, and education and passion from your personal trainer. Without both, you’re bound to progress slower, or worse, hurt yourself unnecessarily.