In praise of personal training

These days I have a Personal Trainer. Not because I'm 41, or not directly, but because I was injured in a horseriding accident, and needed help to rehabilitate myself. (One of my first physiotherapists at the hospital told me that as I was "relatively young" I was likely to make a good recovery. I replied that you should never call any woman of 40 'relatively young' even if that's the medically correct category.)

I had a lot of preconceived notions about what personal training would be, based mostly on television: buff, buzz cut, brash young men yelling at a group of 'fatties' and making them cry and run obstacle courses.  So I approached my personal training in a penitential spirit of "grin and bear it".  But it's not like television at all.

You begin with a discussion of your personal goals.

Personal trainers can provide external motivation when yours is lacking, that is one of their functions, but not the most important and certainly not the only one. My personal trainer spends more time stopping me before I hurt myself, than he does egging me on to do "just 10 more".  I've also heard, through the gym grapevine, that paying a trainer to provide all the motivation doesn't work - if you're really unmotivated, you'll just skip sessions and then decide that a personal trainer is "just a waste of money, it did nothing". 

While "lose some weight" probably does head the list for many of us, and "get a six pack" has been heard, the reasons people choose to get personal training varies as much as they do. Sportspeople often need to rehabilitate after injury, or develop a particular muscle group in order to improve their performance. My motivation was to get my right arm as strong as my left, and to increase my general fitness (cardio-vascular, strength and flexibility).

A personal trainer is above all an expert in the function of your muscles and skeleton, and in training them to perform better.  If you had a tricky tax question, you'd go to the accountant with it, even if you are able to navigate your way around a basic tax return.  When the same thing happens with our bodies, we resist the idea.  

When it comes to exercise we think we know what to do.  Which is odd, as visual evidence on a stroll down the street tells me that most of us don't!  We attribute our lack of physical fitness solely to a lack of activity - when in fact many people who do lots of physical exercise still aren't very fit overall.

Some people who go to the gym are wasting their time.  In some cases, they're actually doing themselves harm.  Doing the wrong exercise is either pointless or counter-productive. You need to do the correct exercise, and do it correctly to get much benefit. So even if you can do a hundred ab crunches per day, there's no guarantee that that exercise will get you to your goal.

It turns out that choosing the "right" exercises for my needs is complex and changes regularly. My personal trainer adapts as my body adapts.  He keeps an eagle eye on my muscles as I work - which is quite intimidating to start with, most of us aren't used to people openly staring at our bodies - and then suggests new things.  I can give my all, knowing that he won't let me overdo it.  We experiment together, with him asking a lot of questions about what I'm experiencing.

Is it working? It's early days. So far I've gained in strength and flexibility, and my overall health has improved by doing regular exercise.  I heartily recommend personal training to anyone who has a specific fitness goal.