Time to teach the teacher

The traditional personal trainer

Traditionally, a personal trainer supports you in achieving your health and fitness goals by providing practical advice and support. A good personal training session can be a great experience, leaving you energised, motivated and full of enthusiasm.  A personal trainer is really just a teacher.  They teach you what to do by demonstrating and correcting exercise techniques and prescribing exercise programmes.  They can push you beyond your comfort zone with their encouragement and enthusiasm.

But how do you feel during your next exercise session when you no longer have the support of the trainer?  And how easy do you find it to put into practice that well-intentioned piece of nutritional advice that you enthusiastically agreed to the last time you met?

Achieving results is essentially about the client making changes to the way they live their life, whether through a change in exercise, nutrition, or in their approach to their health.  But as each person is so different, does a personal trainer really have the answers to how best to do this?  What if the answers were to come from the client themselves?

Coaching: a new approach to personal training?

Coaching is a non-prescriptive way of working with a client to achieve a goal.  In their capacity as a coach, a personal trainer works with a client to get them to articulate their own solutions, in their own way.  The big difference here is that the answers are coming from the client, not the trainer, although the trainer has the skills to bring those answers out.

By coaching their client, a personal trainer can look beyond the obvious and work with the client to find solutions that will realistically work for them over the long term. When it comes to making changes, only one person really knows what’s going to work, and that is of course the client themselves.

By adding coaching skills to their toolbox, a personal trainer has a great opportunity to make a genuine difference.  They can move between the roles of teacher and coach as appropriate, combining technical expertise with the softer coaching skills required to truly personalise a training session.  In this way, the gains made during the exercise itself are more likely to be sustained as part of day-to-day life, providing great value to the client.