You have fitness goals. Now, what’s the best way to achieve those goals?
Goal setting and working towards goals is an important part of the human experience. It gives us purpose and direction every day. It can be a cause for celebration or a cause for reflection. Health and fitness goals are an important set of goals. Pursuing good health and improve quality of life. But is personal training the best option to help you achieve those goals?
How will a personal trainer help you achieve your goals faster? How can a trainer help you avoid frustrating plateaus, and losing motivation-momentum? Is a trainer really the best option for your set of health goals? By the end of this article, you’ll be able to confidently answer all of these questions.
Goal Setting Recap
Before we get into how a personal trainer can help you achieve your goals, let’s first revisit how to set great goals.
An easy format to follow is the SMART goals method. SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-sensitive.
Your goals need to be specific and measurable. Let’s say you want to look and feel better. How can you rephrase that so it is more specific and measurable? How about saying you want to lose an inch off of your waist. Or maybe you want to have the energy to walk up the stairs at work without feeling breathless. Both of these can result in you looking and feeling better, but now you have something you can measure in inches and breathlessness.
Actionable goals are goals that have specific action steps that allow you to reach that goal. Going with the goals mentioned above, your action steps would be the specific daily or weekly actions you would take to get you to your goal. Action steps could include taking the stairs every day at work, or taking stairs whenever possible. You could make a plan to drink more water to help reduce bloating around your midsection. A great goal is usually comprised of smaller, daily goals that will result in the main goal being accomplished.
Lastly, your goals need to be realistic and time-sensitive. Can you improve your cardio health in a week? To some extent, but depending on where your fitness level is today, you may not be able to do the stairs at work without feeling a little breathless after the first week. For weight loss and weight gain goals, these are complex processes in the body, so be realistic about the time it takes to achieve these types of goals. For weight loss, sustainable weight loss occurs at around 0.5lbs – 1lb of weight loss per week. Weight gain is specific to each individual.
A hairstylist analogy
To help explain how a personal trainer can make reaching your goals easier, let’s look at a simpler task – getting a good haircut.
As many of us have learned from the COVID-19 lockdown, cutting your own hair is possible, but requires a lot of research, special tools, and a lot of trust in yourself or the friend/family member cutting your hair.
In the end, you may end up with a haircut that is anywhere from awful, to kind of close to what you were hoping for. This is a wide range of possibilities, and you really do not know where you’ll land on the spectrum until the haircut is done.
This is why many (if not all) of us go to a professional hairstylist/barber. We give them the styling, the length, and any other important specifics like if we need our hair to be able to fit into a ponytail, and then the hairstylist takes care of the rest. They’ll ask for your input throughout the haircut to make sure it is still what you want, and offer suggestions as they go through the cut and style.
In the end, you have exactly what you were looking for, and you have it in far less time, and under far less stress than the haircuts at home.
The trainer will give you the “haircut” without the headache
Once you have set a health and fitness goal, it is now time to get started. But where do you start? How can you be sure that the efforts you make are actually going to work towards your goal?
That’s where the personal trainer becomes the hairstylist in the previous analogy.
Personal trainers have done the research, completed the training, and are well equipped with the tools and resources. Similarly to the hairstylist, all you have to do is bring the trainer some information to your session. This includes your goals, your current lifestyle, and what you feel comfortable with in the gym.
Related Article: How To Pick A Personal Trainer
The trainer will be able to create a unique plan that is designed to fit your goals. They’ll also work within your comfort zone. Lastly, the plan will fit into your current lifestyle. This narrows down the possible outcomes from your efforts.
Trainers come with an additional benefit of being a point of accountability for you. Going through times of lower motivation is to be expected in life. Sometimes we just don’t feel like it. Your trainer has seen this and has likely experienced this themselves. This equips them with the tools and resources to get you through the loss of motivation-momentum and keep you consistent.
Ever hit a frustrating plateau in your training? Maybe you couldn’t beat a 10k time, or you lost the first 10lbs, but can’t seem to shift the scale any further. Trainers have the tools and resources for that as well.
When you have a good relationship with your trainer, they can make any health goal much easier to accomplish. You’ll still have to put in the work, but it won’t be guesswork.
Are trainers the best investment for your health and fitness goals?
You are reading this on a website of a personal training business. So you may think there will be bias in this answer. Let us tell you that the answer to this question is actually it depends.
Although personal training is certainly an effective and personalized approach to most health and fitness goals, sometimes personal training isn’t the right option. Personal training is a 1-1 service. If you just want to move, but don’t necessarily want that kind of individual attention, then other options like classes may be better options for you.
If your goals are more oriented to mindfulness and yoga practices, although many of our trainers encourage a multi-disciplinary approach to health and wellbeing, personal training may not be the best option for that type of goal.
So when is personal training the best option for your goals?
- You are someone who just wants to be told exactly how to get to their goals.
- You want 1-1 guidance that provides you with the recipe for success for your personal journey, then personal training is the best option for you.
- If you struggle with holding yourself accountable and have thought “oh they won’t even notice if I’m not in the class”, then personal training is the best option for you.
If you go back to your SMART goals, look at the ‘A’ step again. Actionable – what actions can you take to help you reach your goals. If hiring a personal trainer is the most reliable way to get you to your goals, then that’s where we fit in. Your actions on your journey to achieve your health goals will reflect your intentions of achieving those goals.
Author: Riley Pearce
Director of Social Media & Marketing
riley.pearce.fff@gmail.com
