Personal Training


Fake, is the word for present day big chains of fitness centers and many personal trainers. There are posters, online pictures, flyers all over the place with big cheesy smiles, fancy fitness gear and shiny 2kg dumbbells... "Elite", "Best in London"...

How many serious faces with sweat pouring down and big, rusty, body crushing barbell have you seen advertising real, tough training?

Basically, it's like shopping at a supermarket – you go down the shop surrounded by nice, colorful packages that are harshly competing for your attention before you even have a closer look at it. The goal is one and only – attract customer in any way, anything goes. This commercial environment turns something that's suppose to be serious, tough and challenging into some ridiculous circus with personal trainers as clowns.

"Elite" London personal trainers...

Here's an example of how some people get into personal training.

One of the leading chains of fitness centers have an interesting way of employing their personal trainers – you don't have to have any experience in training, you don't have to know anything about training, you don't have to look anything like you've been training and frankly, you don't have to have anything to do with training – all the tests, tasks to choose from candidates are set up to judge communication skills, how outgoing and enthusiastic about nothing you are and... that's it.

After you get employed for your "exceptional" personality, you go through 2-3 months training course and, according to the advertisements, join the "elite" personal trainer team to deliver the "best, top quality" personal training service… Then an overweight or skinny personal trainer walks around the gym with zero experience but with "the whole lot of knowledge" gathered during the couple months training course...

London personal trainers... –
are you serious!!?

Even though different brand gym chains have a little different personal trainer selection systems, the one above illustrates quite well what it is all about – put a personal trainer t-shirt on a naturally talented salesman and you'll get a highly entertaining clown whose job is to ensure cash flow to the shiny and cheesy £3.8 billion fitness industry.

Not only market climate dictating major gym chains are responsible for the army of so called personal trainers. There is a training course here and a course over there, only have a look for it and you'll find a variety of personal training courses offering in 3 months or if you don't have couple grand then a bit longer to make you a "professional" personal trainer who will be an "expert" in all kind of training. Criteria to join a course and become a "specialist" – have £2000. It's that simple...

REP's (Register of Exercise Professional's)...

Few years ago unbelievably noble initiative has been demonstrated by the organization called Register of Exercise Professionals (skip to the next paragraph if you haven't heard about them, you won't miss much) to create a register of all fitness professionals in UK – personal trainers, gym instructors, group exercise trainers etc. for people to be able to check on trainers if they're registered and match the particular standard. Great service to the society! Who are those thoughtful enthusiasts so bothered about the quality of the service people get from trainers? Just to say thank you...

What do you know, it appears that the organization is not funded by government and basically it is a private business established like all businesses to make profit. For trainer to register it costs, to stay registered you have to keep paying yearly and buy a number of expensive, repetitive courses that normally are organized by Register of Exercise Professionals or have something to do with them. So a bunch of people who have already paid £2000 to call themselves – personal trainer, gym instructor etc. – still are not let go on their way, there is a mechanism created to rip them off on a regular basis.

At the end of the day any trainer must have an official qualification to have the legal right to train his/her clients. Every trainer is more than happy show certificates, diplomas on demand (value of some qualifications is another matter). The question – what else does the fully qualified professional has to prove?

Personal training via email…

Many people question credibility of info pouring from the internet. How trustworthy is it? A lot of people are abusing the easy access to an audience… Some personal trainers are not an exception. Probably the best safety belt is your common sense…

It's understandable when every business including personal training niche is trying to advertise online. At the end of the day this is the best advertisement board in the world of our day. Endless possibilities of the world wide web..! It's so easy to get carried away by it. Many people do (including personal trainers).

How about global personal training? Sounds inspiring! There are no more borders of states or separating distances of thousands of miles… or are there? When personal trainer offers his/her services to clients exceptionally online, there is no actual meeting, contact. Let's say personal trainer knows his/her stuff and supplies the client with proper training, diet regimes, gives some advices – all based on the necessary info gathered by the personal trainer from the client. Sounds okay so far... Let's see what happens next.

So the individual who bought the bit of the personal trainer's knowledge starts the weight loss, muscle gain or other goal program. There's a bunch of exercises that the personal trainer has given to do, but when tried in practice it actually feels quite odd and uncomfortable doing them... Maybe it's not done properly..? Maybe... There probably is a risk of injury doing it not quite right..? Probably... It says in the prescribed program that the intensity of the workout should be 80% of the maximum effort... How much is the maximum..? Could it be that the pre-workout calculation doesn't actually match the real intensity? It could... Is it going to be the most efficient personal training session? No it's not! It can hardly be called a personal training session. Then how come is it called personal training online?

Internet might seem endless and with unlimited possibilities but, hey – personal trainer has to watch every movement performed (underperformed) by the trainee, not sit on the other side of the ocean checking his/her bank account while the client trains on the edge of injury…

What training for a personal training?

Let's leave the "backstage" of fitness industry and talk about personal training us a training. What will you see if you look deeper into what there is under a personal trainer stereotype – enthusiastic, young person running up the hill together with a client?

Any kind of training is a sport. There are different sports that involve different fitness components when being performed – power, strength, muscle endurance, cardiovascular stamina, flexibility, agility, coordination, core stability etc. Training for each individual sport will require different training to develop the needed qualities. What is the most frequent need, goal for general population? – The absolute majority want to lose weight/fat, some men want to built a little bit of muscle, often "to get fitter" is mentioned but when broken down to what it means normally it's the same – lose weight/fat, tone up to look and feel better.

Now let's see what sports work on exactly those goals.

Boxing, other martial arts, running, cycling, basketball, football, volleyball – all sports have their specific tasks, objectives requiring particular fitness aspects and skills to perform well but does any of it have the prime and only goal to develop trainee's physique – NO. Training those sports and getting some body changes is more of a side effect from training designed to achieve other goals, hence it's not specific to weight loss or other physique structure changes.

The only sport that DOES have the sole purpose of improving the looks of a body (fat reduction, lean tissue development, improvement of body symmetry and proportions) is... BODYBUILDING!

Pursuing the ideal physique also inevitably improves power, strength, muscle endurance, core stability and even some cardiovascular stamina, flexibility, coordination. Ironically, bodybuilding has been mocked by many popular UK personal trainers for a good couple of decades now. Steroid abuse in professional bodybuilding doesn't help its popularity among general population and is the main (only?) reason for a negative public opinion about it. If you take that fault away from it you will get NATURAL bodybuilding.

Without steroids there are strict genetic limits ensuring the muscularity doesn't go over the top, in fact that's the last thing to worry about as it takes fanatic, hard work to reach the genetic potential (women can read more about muscle and weight training benefits to weight loss here).

So for those who have seen a one sided TV program about "the freaks sport - bodybuilding" or have read a random book about 10 best ways to fat loss, maybe done an expensive 3 months personal training course to become an "expert" of every training – NATURAL BODYBUILDING is the specific sport with its long history, extremely deep pool of knowledge about specialized training and dieting methods, leading to the most efficient ways of cutting fat down and shaping body/developing, maintaining lean muscle tissue with no negative consequences. Love it or hate it...

Contact Personal Training 4U (personal trainer Rolandas) for serious gym work.

 

 

Rolandas Malinauskas
Personal Training 4 U
Fordham Street
LondonE1 1HS
07742 193 913