“How to Not Get Fleeced By a Personal Trainer”
Special Report
If you’ve ever tried to lose fat on your own you know how challenging it can be.
Have you ever quit your exercise routine because you became bored with it? And going to the gym seemed like a chore?
Have you ever struggled to lose just a few pounds, even though you were going to the gym and eating a bunch of boring healthy foods?
The sad fact is that most people who try to do it on their own fail. Very rarely does their body seem to change much, even when they try their hardest.
By far, the absolute best solution to this problem is to get a personal trainer. They can guide, direct and motivate you to a better body. Personal trainers can help to change someone’s physique like nothing else on the planet
But, many times this isn’t the case and the trainer ends up being more problems than they’re worth...
You see, often times when someone hires a personal trainer the only place they end up trimming any extra fat away is in their bank account.
Have you ever known anyone who hired a trainer and got NO results at all?
Have you ever been working out in a gym and actually observed the trainers?
If you have, I bet you probably could tell right away that the trainer is just doing a job, and has no emotional investment in seeing the client get results.
If you’ve ever hired a personal trainer yourself you know what a crap shoot it can be to try and find the right one.
If you’ve had friends who’ve hired personal trainers it’s no doubt you’ve heard the horror stories... The flakey trainers who are always late and missing their appointments, the trainers who promise everything yet produce nothing in the way of tangible results and the trainers who go on and on about their personal lives the entire workout all on the clients dime!
If you’ve ever done a trial workout with a trainer you know that many of them can give great sales pitches, but how do you know if they’re really the best trainer for you?
Keep reading and you’ll find out...
The Problems with Many Personal Trainers...
One of the problems with many of the personal training programs in Orange County is that the trainer and client spend a lot of time talking about their personal lives, and frankly, the trainer wastes a lot of time just standing around counting reps.
Why pay good money for someone just to count your reps? You could easily hire someone for minimum wage to count your reps if that’s what you’re looking for.
And if you're looking for someone to talk about your personal life with for an hour then a therapist might be more what you’re looking for, not a trainer.
Here are a few of the types of problem personal trainers that are giving the rest of us a bad name:
The Selfish Trainer... who’s motto is if it works for me it will work for you - This is the trainer who doesn’t take their clients goals into consideration when designing a routine.
This is why it’s common for a female to hire a personal trainer and then 3 months later she looks all buffed out like she’s been taking steroids.
Or why you’ll see people in the gym working out with a trainer doing some really ineffective and funky exercises.
You see, while the clients goal might be to lose fat and tone up, the trainer will put the client on one of “his” favorite exercises, which won’t do anything but add a couple of yards to your golf swing... but if you want to lose fat, who cares about improving your golf swing! Just cause the trainer’s a golfer and finds that doing a lot of functional sport training routines helps him improve his swing and impress his buddies on Saturday morning doesn’t mean that’s the same workout his clients need to reach their own fitness goals.
But the Selfish trainer doesn’t see this. Because he’s completely self-absorbed and self-obsessed and what his clients want really doesn’t matter to him.
So it’s very important when hiring a trainer that you let them know EXACTLY what your goals are.
Make sure the trainer knows that you have no interest in improving your golf swing, unless that’s your goal.
If you’re a female and don’t want to get big and bulky, make sure you tell this to the trainer before you sign ANYTHING, and ask the trainer to see before and after pictures of his clients, so you can make sure he’s not turning women into bodybuilders.
Watch out for the Selfish Trainer who just puts his clients on “his’ favorite exercises, with no consideration for the client’s goals.
The Amateur Psychologist Trainer - One of the biggest problems in the industry is personal trainers trying to be amateur psychologists.
They’ll happily give out financial advice even though they’re broke.
They’ll happily dish out marital advice, many times as a way to get into their clients pants! (I’ve seen this one more times then I can count).
They’ll talk to you about your inner child; right after they just snorted a few lines of coke in the gym bathroom (cocaine and steroid addiction is a giant problem in the personal training industry).
The truth is many of these pop-psychologist personal trainers live lives that are an absolute mess. And it’s easier for them to dish out information about how their clients should live their lives than it is to fix their own.
Watch out for the personal trainer who wants to play “psychologist.”
The Know-It-All Trainer - It’s impossible to know EVERYTHING about exercise. There’s just so much to learn. Science is rapidly finding the best ways to go about losing fat and toning muscles that to know it all would require a hundred lifetimes and a university-sized library of knowledge.
Any personal trainer who claims to know it all is dangerous! If a client comes to this kind of personal trainer with an important question regarding their body or health, if the trainer doesn’t know the answer many times the “know-it-all trainer” will just dish out any old line instead of admitting they don’t know the answer and going and finding the best answer or solution for that individual client with the clients best interest in mind.
A true fitness professional will keep their clients best interest at the absolute forefront of their mind at all times, and won’t be scared to say “I don’t know”
An amateur will THINK that by admitting that they don’t have the answers to everything that it’s a weakness, so they’ll tell a boldfaced lie to the client and dish out possibly harmful information just to protect their own ego.
Beware of the know-it-all personal trainer
The Rep-Counter - The Rep-Counter is the most harmless of trainers yet also has the worst track record for getting results.
You see, a lot of personal trainers just train for the money and look at it as job.
In fact gyms are filled with unqualified personal trainers who could give a damn about their client’s goals and only care about bringing in a paycheck.
Here’s a typical situation of how this kind of personal trainer gets hired:
In this case we’ll call our trainer Jonny.
A local gym puts and ad in the newspaper or online saying they are hiring for Personal Trainers, Sales People, Front Desk Staff and Custodians.
Jonny is fresh out of high school and needs a job so he can afford his weekly sack of weed, gas money and the $25 a week he pays his parents for rent to live in their house.
While looking through the classifieds, at the strong urging of his mother, he sees a job listing for “Personal Trainers”.
This catches Jonny’s eye because he’s heard trainers get a lot of “chicks” and Jonny kind of looks like a trainer. Not because he works out, but because he’s young, has good genetics and took P.E. in high school for the past four years... he looks like he’s in good shape.
So Jonny applies. And since many gyms will hire just about ANYBODY to be trainer, he gets the job. They make him go to a two-day certification program that the gym offers which amounts to one day on how to train people, and then another day split in half between how to sell personal training to people who don’t want to buy it and how to up-sell their clients on the line of crappy supplements that the gym offers, allowing the trainer to make a 5% commission.
Jonny loves his job because he quickly realizes that all he has to do is sell packages of personal training and count reps and his boss is happy.
And the fringe benefits are, while Johnny’s on the job, he can check out “chicks”, go on and on about his personal life, and even possibly sleep with a few of his unhappily married Newport Beach housewife clients.
A common disguise for this kind of trainer is the stop watch and clipboard, which will many times only serve as “costume” for making them look like they know what they’re doing
Shocking yes, but common...
When searching for a trainer, be sure and avoid “Jonny the Rep-Counter”
Two-Routine Trainer - Another common situation that gives personal trainers a bad name are the trainers who put clients on one of two workout routines.
Routine #1 is where the trainer will stick the client on a treadmill for half the workout while the trainer either blabs about his personal life to the captive-audience client on the treadmill or while the trainer hangs out and chats with his trainer buddies at the “trainer desk”. All while the client is forking over good money for the hour.
Routine #2 is where the trainer knows how to do one workout (usually the one he learned in that two-day certification program) and he puts his clients on this routine, EVERY TIME THEY COME IN THE GYM.
What the trainer didn’t learn in his two-day certification program is that this not only will get clients very little in the way of results due to the “Law of Physical Adaptation,” but this will cause pattern overload syndrome, which will ruin the clients joints and cause them to have that horrible-rounded-shoulder- head-poking-forward-posture that will make them look like a caveman.
Do NOT hire the “Two-Routine Trainer” unless you want to end up paying high dollar to walk on a treadmill while you turn into a hunchback.
The Genetically-Gifted, Steroid-Freak Trainer - The last kind of trainers I’m going to warn you about is the “genetically gifted” and the “steroid freak.”
Often times this trainer comes in a combination of both and is actually a hybrid, which I call “The Genetically-Gifted, Steroid-Freak Trainer”
Due to either steroid usage or genetics or a combination of both, these trainers can do just about anything and be in perfect shape. Any kind of exercise they do will make them look like Greek Gods, even if they live on cheeseburgers and onion rings.
Now that’s great for them, but the problem is these trainers think that since whatever they do in a gym works for them, then it must work for everyone else.
And their clients believe it too because any trainer in that kind of shape MUST know what he’s doing.
Unfortunately, most of us weren’t blessed with perfect genetics, nor are we willing to order black market pharmaceuticals from third-world countries online and then inject them into our tush just to get six-pack abs.
There is so much science behind what it truly takes for the average person to get into incredible shape, and what works for “Genetically-Gifted, Steroid-Freak Trainer” will not work for the vast majority of the population.
But “Genetically-Gifted, Steroid-Freak Trainer” doesn’t need to keep up on this science because hell, anything works for him!
The truth is that this is an extremely dangerous breed of trainer because often times they are so amped up on the roids that they can perform near superhuman feats in the gym. And the harder the feat, the better the results.
Yet the real problems start when they give these kinds of routines to their client’s.
Not only will these routines put the client into an over-trained state which will actually cause their bodies to lose muscle and hold onto fat, but they risk seriously injuring the client as well
Avoid “Genetically-Gifted, Steroid-Freak Trainer” like the plague, they are the most dangerous of all trainers!
And to make matters worse...
Did you know that many trainers make the majority if there income by keeping their clients out of shape and dependant on them?
They know that once they get you into great shape you probably won’t need them anymore.
They also know that if they give you just enough results to where you see a small change in your physique, you’ll probably keep coming back in hopes of really getting into shape.
And they know if they keep you uneducated that you will most likely completely rely on them to get into and stay in shape. This means big bucks for the trainer yet a feeling of dependency for you.
Bottom Line...
It’s extremely important when looking for a personal trainer that you are (or stay) on the lookout for these kinds of trainers and avoid them at all costs.
There are a lot of great trainers out there but there are also a lot of scam artists who will take your hard earned money and then throw you on a treadmill for the entire workout.
Or they’ll make you do the same unproductive routine every time you come in for a workout.
Their sales pitch might be great, but the only place you’ll lose any fat is in your wallet.
Make sure you state your goals and what you’d like to achieve before you make a commitment to any trainer.
There’s nothing worse than seeing a female get all buffed out because of her personal trainer, or watching a guy get a nicely developed upper body from workouts but get stick-figure-twig legs that all his friends tease him about.
The sad fact is that 93% of personal trainers just look at training as a job.
So make sure you find one of the 7% who love to help people get into shape, find a trainer who trains people because that’s his or her passion in life.
When you first meet the trainer, ask him or her why they decided to become a trainer in the first place.
Asking this question could save you thousands of dollars and countless hours working out with the wrong trainer.
Make sure you can try at least one workout before making any financial commitment to a trainer. Many will just want to do a quick consultation and then sign you up. So remember to make sure and really taste the goods before you buy... Insist on a trial workout.
During this trial workout your job is to see how well the trainer motivates you.
Do they push you to do your best while still showing you respect?
If not, I would run away, not walk, RUN from that trainer as fast as you can.
Immediately after choosing your trainer, make sure and go home and clear out your fridge and cupboards of any junk (it’s been my experience if there’s junk in the house, it will eventually get eaten).
Then go buy the foods your trainer tells you to buy. This will ensure you will lose fat as quickly and safely as possible. Eating the right foods is extremely important.
And another tip is to find a trainer who works with multiple people at one time. You’ll be amazed at how much more enjoyable the workouts are when there’s someone else beside you giving the workout their all as well.
The energy of a semi-private workout is much higher than with traditional one-on-one training and the results the clients get are much greater and come much faster.
So What Do You Do Now That You Have This Information?
Armed with this information you’re now one of the most savvy and educated consumers in the entire world. You now know instantly how to differentiate a good trainer from a bad one.
Keep an eye out in your email as I’ll be sending you my Positively Fit No-Bull Fat Loss e-Letter. It will keep you on the forefront of the fat loss frontier with cutting edge information on how to lose fat FAST, and keep it off for good.
Also, I want to let you know that I’ve hand-picked a team of what I believe to be the best 1% of personal trainers in Orange County.
Not only do these trainers bring a tremendous amount of passion and experience to their training, but they are all down to earth, good human beings with a proven track record for getting people into incredible shape.
I urge you to learn more about this unparalleled team of personal trainers here
Click here to learn about the Positively Fit Personal Training Team
Yours in Never Ending Health and Fitness,
Chris McCombs
Orange County Personal Trainer
http://www.socalworkout.com/
P.S. By the way, I’m not sure how well you know me yet, but as a new subscriber to my Positively Fit No-Bull Fat Loss e-Letter you can learn a little bit about me here:
Click here to learn about who I am and why you should listen to me
And in case you haven’t checked out my Positively Fit Personal Training Program, be sure and check it out:
Click here to learn about the Positively Fit Personal Training Program |
