Hold Your Trainer Accountable

Hold Your Trainer Accountable

By Dave Turpin of Desk Jockey Fitness

If you are working with a professional personal trainer you know first hand that it is a significant investment in time, effort and money. In most cases the trainer is the expert, authority, role model, teacher, mentor and coach; the client is the student taking direction from the trainer and relying on the trainer’s experience, expertise and knowledge.

On the surface it may appear as if most information transfer goes from the trainer to the client. In reality, the most important function of a good trainer is the ability to listen to what the client is saying or is not saying; to observe the client’s posture, gait, body language, emotional states and energy levels. Great trainers constantly have the antennas on high alert looking for verbal, visual, and subliminal feedback from the client. Tactically, this information is used as a guidepost to adjust the level of intensity for the current session. Strategically, the information needs to be considered when determining the client’s long-term plan. In trainer-speak, this long-term plan is called exercise program periodization.

In most if not all of the big membership based gyms, where personal training revenue is secondary to monthly, electronically drafted membership fees, the concept of the new member “free assessment” is not much more than an ice-breaker. This ice-breaker serves two fundamental purposes:

1. It helps the client become acclimated to the daunting sea of strength machines, free weights, and cardiovascular machines. This is the selling point of the free assessment and benefit to the new member.
2. It allows the club’s trainer to establish a rapport with the new member. This opens the pathways to up-sell personal training services to the new member which is a benefit to the club.

There’s nothing wrong with the free assessment as long as the new member understands what is going on. For example, would the trainer still be offering assistance to the new member if option B didn’t exist? In some cases yes, when the trainer is one who truly cares for other people. Would the club management be driving or endorsing free assessments without the possibility of a follow-up sale of personal training services? Probably not.

In the private personal training studio trainers should be held to a higher standard. In most cases the service fees are higher, the overhead of the business to provide personal training services is higher because personal training is not being subsidized by membership fees, and the experience, training and expertise of the trainers are higher. In the private studio environment, the client has every right to demand a higher standard.

In the personal training studio environment, the client assessment should not be a lead generation system. Assessments should be used to serve several purposes including:

1. The initial assessment should establish a baseline of flexibility, strength, coordination, agility and stability. This information then needs to be correlated with the client’s stated goals, experience, exercise and medical history, and level of commitment to determine the client’s initial program design. This is putting the “personal” in personal training. The client’s program design should reflect the client’s physical and mental realities and not be cloned from a previous program that seemed to work for someone else. Or worse, the program should not be a derivative of the trainer’s exercise program.

2. Periodic reassessments needs to occur for one simple reason: To see if the client is moving towards her stated goals. How would you feel if you went to your physician who determined that you had high cholesterol; followed his instructions and “exercised and ate well” for six months exactly as prescribed, but never had your cholesterol retested? Would you feel as if your personal sacrifices were worth it if you didn’t know your cholesterol went down? Probably not! So why do clients let their trainers off the hook by not getting reassessed and comparing the results against their previous benchmarks.

In today’s personal training marketplace, the initial client assessment is ubiquitous. Everyone does it. Clients expect it. The scope and depth of the initial assessment varies widely but its prevalence is indisputable.

In my opinion, re-assessments are rarely performed even in high-end studios. The client’s “cholesterol” is seldom rechecked. Why is this? There are several contributing factors.

First and foremost, what is the reliability of the tests performed during the initial assessment? Are the tests repeatable? If the client had the same tests performed by the same trainer who was unable to “remember” the results of the previous test, would the same results be determined? For simple performance based tests, such as the push-up test or bench press test, sure. But for tests that require skill and observation of the trainer such as postural analysis, movement screens, and functional skills are administered, the consistency of the test results will be driven by the skill and experience of the test administrator.

Second, how would the client feel if the reassessment determined that the last four weeks of exercise have actually heightened postural dysfunction, tightened long weak muscle groups, and loss range of motion in poorly functioning joints? How would the trainer respond to the client’s concerns? If I were the client I would want to find out in four-to-six weeks that my program design was not working. It beats getting injured in four-to-six months because the flaws in my program design were not identified early on and exasperated my pre-existing conditions.

Thirdly, there is the nagging fear on the trainer’s part that the client will feel reassessments are a waste of time. That the time used for the reassessments would be better used on the floor exercising. This fear on the trainer’s part CANNOT be overcome until he is confident in the reliability and repeatability of the assessment process. Nor can the trainer’s fear be overcome if he does not have alternative approaches to meeting the client’s stated fitness goals in the event that his first or second approach did not yield favorable results.

Lastly, and this is where the personal training consumers can make a difference, is that clients do not expect or DEMAND verification of their progress based on S.M.A.R.T (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-based) principles.

For many clients, having a trainer holding them accountable is a great advantage over trying to get in shape on their own. Just knowing that they have an appointment with the trainer at a minimum ensures that they show up and once there, do something. The question each personal training client needs to ask themselves is “Am I getting the most value out of my personal training investments?”

If clients are not being re-assessed; if their exercise programs are not being validated against their stated goals; if clients are not being refocused on new and progressed goals… They just might have one heck of an expensive rent-a-friend program.

Savvy clients will ensure the highest value and ROI for their fitness expenditures by demanding their trainers raise the bar by learning the skills and providing the services that benchmark, retest and refocus goals and activities. Borrowing from our current presidential candidates, the time for change is now… It’s time to hold your trainer accountable.