3 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Hiring a Personal Trainer

As a personal trainer, I would love to tell you that personal training is for everyone. Everyone should sign up. Everyone is ready, right now.

As a health coach and decent human being (that’s an assumption derived from the fact that I’m 31 and still have friends), I can’t tell you that.

Personal training is not for everyone. Here are three questions you should ask yourself before signing up with a personal trainer or fitness coach.

Why do I want to lose weight/gain muscle/get fit?

Identifying your “why” helps you take action and helps you continue to take action when the going gets tough.

When you sit down for your first training consultation, you should be able to tell your potential trainer why you are there. Dig deeper than “I want to get fit”.

I ask my clients “why”, until they can get deep down to the internal motivators pushing them to ask for help. My clients come to me to lose weight, but losing weight isn’t the ultimate goal – the goal that will keep them coming back when they are sore/tired/stressed. It’s why they want to lose weight that keeps them coming back.

Is keeping up with your children or grandchildren for as long as you can important to you?

Do you play a sport that makes you endlessly happy and you want to be able to do that for as long as possible?

Do you want to feel confident in your own skin and you’re uncomfortable not being strong or fitting into your favorite clothes?

These are all great answers to the question, “why?”.

Am I ready to be held accountable?

Your trainer should help you in every way possible. He/she should develop a program and exercise plan that, when executed properly, will get you results. They will teach you how to do an exercise, and why. They will schedule your workouts for you.

But there is one thing they can’t do for you: they can’t stick to the plan and do the workouts for you. You have to be ready to be held, and hold yourself, accountable.

Having a meaningful goal that you truly want to achieve is a great starting point. But long term consistency and accountability is the key to achieving that goal.

How do you hold yourself accountable?

Believe that you can do it. First and foremost, truly believe that you can achieve your goal. This is non-negotiable. You have to believe that if you put in the effort, stay consistent and never give up, you can get where you want to be.

Make you a priority. Your schedule has likely been the way it is for a long time. And if your schedule didn’t include exercise and self-care before, it’s going to take some rearranging to fit it in. Planning ahead is one of the most effective ways of staying accountable. Find the time.

Am I willing to make changes that might feel uncomfortable?

If you always do what you’ve always done, you will always get what you’ve always gotten.

This is one of my favorite quotes, but it’s also science.

When you hire a personal trainer or fitness coach, you are hiring someone whose job it is to get you results. Which means they are going to ask you to do things you haven’t done before.

Push-ups are hard. Substituting fresh fruit for ice cream is not the easiest decision that you will make all day. Burpees suck. These things might make you feel uncomfortable. You might have 101 excuses to avoid discomfort. It’s your willingness to push past those excuses and do it anyways that tells you you’re ready for a personal trainer.

p.s. Here are 7 Reasons to Learn to Do a Real Push-Up <<