Bootcamps, or personal training – what should you do? That’s what was asked of me by someone who has done both, and she wants to know both the upsides and downsides of both. So that’s what this article is about.
However, my bias should be stated up front: I run a personal training company. Not a bootcamp company. The maximum number of people that we’ll allow to train at the same time is 4, but even that’s rare. More than 95% of our clients are doing one-on-one personal training.
But despite my bias, consider this: yes, I do personal training, and I make money from that, but I could just as easily make money from bootcamps. In fact, I could make much easier money from bootcamps than I could from personal training. A personal trainer might make $70-$90/session. A bootcamp instructor might make $200-$400/session (10-20 people, paying $20/class), and can work much shorter hours. So despite the fact that I could make money from both personal training, and bootcamps, I choose the less profitable one, not the more profitable one. Money isn’t everything.
Anyways, with my bias statement out of the way, let’s examine bootcamps vs. personal training. Although I hesitate comparing bootcamps to just personal training, because service among personal trainers varies widely, from really poor service, to exceptional. I don’t want this article to sound self-serving, so I won’t compare it to the kind of service that my staff and I offer (exceptional – we have some of the most thorough approaches to professional development, and regular meetings about customer service), but a general, good, but not great (and not awful) personal trainer offers.
If you want to watch a short video I made about this check it out:
Effectiveness
The first, and most obvious question in the bootcamps vs. personal training debate is what’s more effective – bootcamps or personal training. And to answer that depends on how you define “effectiveness”. To properly define “effectiveness”, we need to know what a person’s goal is, so that we have something measurable.
If the goal is pure fun, enjoyment and camaraderie, bootcamps probably win. You’re there with other people going through bootcamps, that’s fun. It’s competitive, if that’s what you want it to be, and it’s supportive, if that’s what you want it to be. And of course, it’s more social than 1-on-1 personal training.
However, for just about any other purpose-driven goal, personal training wins. Better fat loss, better muscle gain, better injury recovery, better athletic performance.
Notice that the only thing you really see bootcamps for is fat loss. You don’t really see bootcamps for muscle gain, injury rehab or athletic performance (you do often see athletes training in groups, but they’re often doing individualized programs, just in a group).
A very large part of fat loss is nutrition – not just exercise. In a bootcamp class, with 10-20 people, an instructor can’t give individualized nutrition advice. It’s often not even touched upon, or if it is, it’s very quick, and generic. But everyone has their own stumbling blocks when it comes to nutrition. For one person, it’s emotional eating, for another person, who travels extensively, it’s figuring out how to eat healthy, when you don’t have full control over where you’re eating, etc. A personal trainer can do that. A bootcamp instructor can’t. They just don’t have the time.
With bootcamps, it’s not at all uncommon to see 20 overweight people exercising month in, and month out, and of those 20, maybe 0-4 actually lose weight. The other 16-18 are certainly doing good things for their health by exercising, since exercise has benefits independent of weight loss. But losing weight – they ain’t.
Now granted, you don’t really see 100% success rates with personal training either. Sometimes, the trainer just isn’t doing a great job. Sometimes, the trainer is doing a great job, but the client isn’t compliant (although there are 4 different strategies that I teach my staff, and to medical professionals to enhance compliance, so I still see that as part of the trainer’s job to some extent), and other times, a client might have what I call “aberrant physiology.” That is, the trainer is doing a good job, the client is compliant, but due to some kind of medical condition, s/he can’t lose weight.
So yes, you don’t see 100% success rates with personal training, but the success rates with a personal trainer (again, we’re talking a good, but not great, and not awful trainer) are certainly higher than 10-20%. And different goals have different success rates. Athletic performance enhancement usually has over 90% success rates. Injury rehab usually has 70-90% success rates. Muscle building/toning usually has 60-80% success rates, and fat loss usually has 40-60% success rates.
Injury Risk
The next issue is what’s less risky to your body and your joints – bootcamps or personal training. Again, here, personal training takes the cake. In a bootcamp, the ratio of participants to instructor is somewhere around 10:1, and as high as 20:1. If someone isn’t doing something properly, well, 95% of the time, the instructor can’t even see that this participant isn’t doing it properly, since s/he’s occupied with the 9-19 other participants.
With personal training, of course, it’s one-on-one the majority of the time, so anything done improperly can be corrected immediately, and wrong movements aren’t deeply ingrained into the nervous system, and performed repeatedly.
That’s injury risk from a technique perspective. Then, there’s injury risk from an exercise programming perspective. There are certain imbalances that clients come in with. One person who sits at a desk all day may have tight hip flexors. Another person who sits at a desk all day, for the same number of hours may not. Would both people require the same program? Of course not. Yet, in a bootcamp they are getting the same program, even though it may be appropriate for one person, and damaging to another.
That’s not the case with personal training. Personal training is, well – personal. The program is made around the individual. Not the individual around the program. Ideally, imbalances are accounted for within the program itself, and certain corrective measures are taken to address the imbalances (this is assuming that the personal trainer knows how to assess imbalances, which is not always a great assumption).
So again, the winner with injury risk is personal training.
Cost
On the surface, it looks like the clear winner is bootcamps, which range from $15-$35/session. Personal training is $70-$90/session (on average. You can find trainers on Craigslist/Kijiji for $20/session, and you can also find highly qualified, highly certified, highly specialized trainers for $150-$200/session. Those ones aren’t on Craigslist/Kijiji).
And bootcamps certainly win in this respect if the goal is fun. But if you take success rates into account (again, when it comes to bootcamps, fat loss success rates are 0-20%. With personal training, it’s more like 40-60%) and injury rates it’s not quite a clear distinction.
If, let’s say the bootcamp is $20/session, and personal training is $80/session, and the bootcamp has a 10% success rate, and personal training has a 50% success rate (when it comes to fat loss), you’re paying 4 times more, but you have a 5 times greater probability of reaching your goal. Not only that, you have a lower risk of injury. Seems like a good bargain to me, even if it does cost more (if you want to delve into the reasons behind different personal trainer costs, check out that article).
But understandably, no matter how good of a case there is for personal training, it’s really only accessible to the top 10-15% of the population in terms of income, so it’s not even an option. In which case, bootcamps are the only option available.
