Shreveport-Bossier Personal Training

Patrick Welch at the Seattle post has written an article about choosing a personal trainer.  Patrick is an ACSM certified personal trainer.  He makes some pretty good points and I though I would post part of it here.  Even though this post is from a guy in Seattle you can apply his advice to choosing a personal trainer to improve your personal fitness in the Shreveport or Bossier area.  You can read the whole post here.

#1 Certifications: not all are equal. Some emphasize performance training, strength training, endurance, injury prevention and rehab or are a combination of elements. A good rule of thumb; how long did it take to complete and how much did it cost? There seems to be a direct relationship between the amount of time and money a trainer has invested in themselves and how much they care about the level of service they offer their clients.

#2 Experience: look for a balance between how much the trainer knows and how much they can teach of what they know. My brother can tell you the history of the electric guitar in irritatingly minute detail, but I’ve never heard him play anything more than the opening riff to “Smoke on the Water”… which he learned in 1972. By itself, how long someone has been doing a job is a very unreliable indicator of value.

#3 Assessment: how can I give you directions to you where you want to go if I don’t know where you are? The trainer should give you a thorough evaluation that accumulates data congruent with the goals you want to achieve. Mine can take up to 4 hours at the premium level and is adjustable so that I can make it relevant for each client. If I’m working with a basketball player, I don’t measure how much he can bench because you can’t push another player forward in basketball. I measure how much he can pull, because pushing your arms back to contain another player is pulling.

#4 Programming: observe your prospective trainer from afar or ask if you can tag along to observe while they train someone else. I offer this, but require a deposit against future sessions. Not all trainers do the former and if they don’t do the latter, be skeptical. I value what I do and at $150 an hour, you should know that.

You want to know the extent of their knowledge, but also how they interact with the client; do they adjust their teaching style to match the clients learning style, are they addressing the achievement of definable goals at every session, is the program written out and programmed weeks into the future, do they give the last person the same program as the next person, is there a feedback loop for daily progress; emails, text, login web access?

#5 Progress Reports: Are the goals of the client constantly revised as they are achieved and do you receive a report card that verifies progress? Plus it’s re-assuring to know you’re going in the right direction every once in a while. Think of your training plan as a road map leading you to where you want to be. (Man, I must be getting old; I probably should have used a GPS or MapQuest reference!)