3 Secrets your Personal Trainer Doesn’t Want You to Know

I have a secret.  I’m an old, washed up personal trainer.  Really.  As in, I quit before I got fired.  Now, before we get all judge-y here, and you start thinking, “What the heck am I doing wasting my time on anything this girl’s got to say,” allow me to explain.

I think I started falling in love with health and fitness around middle school.  I started competing as a runner.  I poured over Runner’s World magazine.  I started developing a normal workout routine.  So, after I graduated college, got married, and all my plans for a graduate degree in music fell through, I decided to pursue a career in fitness.  So, I researched the best personal training certification companies, ordered some books, took a test, and got certified as a personal trainer.  Ever so conveniently, we lived across the street from a major chain gym that was hiring trainers at the time, and I got hired!  I was so happy to be working in a field that I was so passionate about.  I couldn’t wait to help people!  I loved setting my own hours!  Heck, I REALLY loved my 2 minute commute on foot…

Until I found out how hard it was to actually make a living at this.  It opened my eyes to a few things that I wish people knew about personal trainers.  So many people think, “If I could just afford to hire a trainer, I’d have the body I’ve always wanted.”  Not necessarily true.  Here are a few things I learned during my year on the inside (of the gym, that is).

1.  Personal Trainers are a dime a dozen.

Please let me make that first point carefully because there are some fantastic personal trainers in gyms all around the country and, these days, online.  They know their stuff.  They care about their clients.  But, let me be the first to admit, that personal training certification exam was a bit of a walk in the park, especially seeing as my undergraduate degree is in music, not exercise science or any other similarly, training related degree.  I really only hunkered down and studied for a few weeks, walked in, took a multiple choice test, and, BOOM, I’m a trainer!  That’s it.  I’ll be the first to admit that I was still figuring things out in that first year, and I would probably change so much about how I trained those first few clients compared to how I train now.  But, once you’ve got that magic, golden ticket that says your “Certified” you can walk into a gym and get hired.

If you decide to hire a trainer, please choose carefully.  Look for one that doesn’t try to razzle dazzle you with his or her fancy moves or how sore they can make you feel after one session.  Ask him or her for their background, length of time as a trainer, certifications, and completed continuing education.  And please, if he tries to hit on you, please, please don’t hire him!!

2.  Personal Trainers get paid more for training you more.  Duh.  But training more isn’t always best for you.

I will go to my grave saying this.  You DO NOT need to workout for hours on end to achieve the healthiest, strongest, best you!  Study after study is proving that workouts that include burst training, tabata training, and other high intensity interval training, achieve the maximum results for you, your hormone levels, and fat burning.  Yes, if you want to get huge, you’re going to have to sit in the gym for hours, lifting super heavy things and then walking around resting for long periods of time in between sets.  Those people are body builders.  I’m not convinced most of them are actually healthy.  I’m also not convinced that many of us want to be body builders.  If you’re a normal Joe or Jane, you want a strong, lean body that’s full of energy and vitality, and those sort of results can be found in shorter, more intense workouts.  (Here’s an interesting article to support fat loss benefits of burst training: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2991639/)

A recent study by the University of New South Wales Medical Sciences tested two groups of women.  One group exercised on bikes for 40 minutes at a steady state.  The other group exercised on bikes for only 20 minutes but biked for 8 seconds as hard as possible followed by 12 seconds easy.  The result?  The 20-minute bikers had up to THREE TIMES HIGHER FAT BURNING!  Sheesh!  That’s a lot.  Which leads me to my next point…

3.  Personal Trainers tend to emphasize mindless cardio in between sessions.

Can we all just quit the cardio???  Now, I am preaching to the choir here as a recovering cardio queen, and most people are absolutely shocked when I tell them I can get fat running 50 miles a week.  It’s true.  Stop beating up your body doing mindless minutes (or maybe hours) on some boring cardio machine.  This low-level stress on your body is just hard on your joints, boosts your cortisol (as in, fat-storing hormone!), and saps your energy.  If you’ve only got time for a few workouts per week, incorporate some cardio intervals into a strength training workout.

So, one year later, when my schedule at the gym wasn’t chock full of clients (but the clients I did have stayed with me for several months and saw great, albeit slow and steady, results), I left the gym.  I felt sales-y.  I felt insincere.  For the next three years before my son was born, I worked at a wellness center.  I worked with the muscular component of a chiropractor’s patients, and I fell in love with fitness in a new way.  I loved getting people healthy from the inside out, and seeing the smiles on their faces because they now had the energy they needed to live a life they loved meant more to me than a bikini-ready gym client any day.

How about you?  What do you wish someone would have told you about training that goes against the normal training model?  What fitness “hacks” do you incorporate into your routine so that you get more results in less time?  Comment below, friends!