In most articles, I write about what mistakes the average person makes when trying to get fit. In this one, we’ll take it a step up, and look at the five biggest mistakes that even the professionals make with their clients. That is, personal trainers who are directly hired for their exercise knowledge.
At the risk of sounding arrogant, what qualifies me to comment on the mistakes of my colleagues and prospective students? A couple of things:
- I’ve been hired to speak, multiple times at personal training conferences, where my audience consists of other personal trainers. One of which is one of the world’s largest personal training conferences, the Can-Fit-Pro conference.
- I hire other personal trainers to work for my company, so over the last 4-5 years, I’ve probably done a good 200 interviews. And they’re not easy interviews (for the candidates). I’ve written about my hiring process in very large detail, in this article: A Behind-The-Scenes, All-Access Look At My Hiring Process.
So I’d like to think I have a fairly solid grasp of how other personal trainers are training their clients.
Without further ado, here are the 5 biggest mistakes that I see:
Mistake #1: Not Assessing and Taking Regular Measurements
I’ve harped on the importance of taking measurements on a regular basis. In fact, I had an entire article on the topic, called “The Importance of Measurements.”
But anyways, measurements are very standard in serious medical professions. If you go to a doctor, he’ll take your blood chemistry, give you whatever medication he thinks is most appropriate, and measure your blood chemistry again in 3-6 months. He doesn’t make the assumption that the medication will work, and have no side effects. He measures to be sure. Why don’t 95% of personal trainers measure??? I don’t know.
Mistake #2: Not Having a Program
There’s an old saying that’s almost a cliché by now: “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” The same is true with fitness. You need to carefully think about what your goals are, what your exercise history is, what limitations/injuries do you bring to the table, and craft a well-thought-out program to get you there.
If you should do that for yourself, certainly a professional should do that, but take even more factors into account. And yet, very few gyms that I go to do I see a personal trainer with a written-out program for his/her client.
Why not? Because thinking hurts. To put together a personalized routine for a client takes some serious mental effort for a trainer. And mental effort is uncomfortable for most people (not just trainers).
Mistake #3: Changing the Client’s Program Too Frequently
One problem that comes from not having a program is forgetting what you did with your client on their previous session. After all, a trainer may have 10 or 15 clients, and if there’s no written program, it’s hard to remember the sessions of 15 different people. So why bother remembering anything? Just do something different every single workout.
Justify it with excuses like “this is good for muscle confusion.” And “it prevents the client from getting bored.”
Both of those excuses are complete gobbledygook (how do you like that 1940s slang?).
To do a bit of myth busting, “muscle confusion” is nonsense, because it states that you need to change your program every single workout, to keep the muscles confused, and therefore, adapting. Why is this nonsense? Because the body makes only a small adaptation in a single workout. You need a series of workouts (usually over a period of months) to completely get all the gains from a program.
And what about the boredom excuse that trainers use to change up the client’s program every single time? Well, it might help the trainer with their boredom, but it doesn’t help the client. I’ve been doing personal training for over 10 years, and worked with hundreds of clients. I’ve never had a client get bored after doing the same program just once. I’ve never changed a client’s program any more frequently than once per month. Clients want to see progress, they want to see results, and if the means to that end is doing the same program for a period of 1-6 months, they don’t get bored in my experience.
Mistake #4: Referring to Their Clients as Athletes, When the Clients Don’t See Themselves as Athletes
It might be an endearing term to call your client an athlete. And if the client sees himself/herself as an athlete, that’s fine. But what if the client doesn’t see themselves as an athlete, but the trainer refers to his/her clients as athletes? You start to rub them the wrong way. The client might just see themselves as a middle-aged non-athlete wanting to get in shape. Yet, if the trainer will treat their client as an athlete, the training may be too intense, and produce injuries.
The trainer may justify it with “oh, but all athletes have minor injuries here and there.”
Yes, that’s true. But the athletes aren’t throwing around their injuries like a badge of honor. They try to rehabilitate the injuries as fast as possible, because if they’re injured, they can’t participate in their sport. If they can’t participate, they don’t get paid.
Mistake #5: Pushing Clients Too Hard
Boneheaded trainers will take a first time exerciser (or even a long-time exerciser, but after a long layoff), and give them a workout so hard that it either makes the person throw up, or get so sore that it’s debilitating. A bit of soreness is normal, and to be expected. But extreme levels of soreness should not be happening.
They equate a difficult workout, with an effective workout. That’s why I call these folks “boneheaded.” It doesn’t take any skill to make something difficult. But it does take skill to make a workout effective.
After all, if someone is either a new exerciser, or coming back after a long layoff, it doesn’t take that much exercise to make progress. Just doing 1 set of 8-10 exercises will be better than sitting on the couch, doing nothing. To treat your new client like a long-time exerciser is both asking for injury, and killing your client’s enjoyment of exercise. And you make your client think twice before continuing to work with you.
If you found this article educational, and/or entertaining, here’s part 2, and part 3.
Original source: here.
