Selecting a Personal Trainer - Part 2
Yesterday I wrote about how to assess yourself in order to prepare yourself for choosing a personal trainer to help you get in shape. Today, I’ll talk about how to go about finding personal trainers to select from.
There are many ways to find personal trainers in your area. Here are a few:
- Friends, family members, and co-workers who have worked with or know a personal trainer. Don’t totally rely on their advice, though, because a trainer that works well with them and their personality may not work well with you.
- Your health club or Rec Center. If you belong to a club, no doubt at one time you’ve been hit up to use one of their trainers. At a minimum you can get some names and maybe even talk to them in person before agreeing to use their services.
- Certification organizations. I’ll talk about the importance of certification in a coming post, but you can always find nearby trainers that have been certified through the company that certified them. An example is the National Strength and Conditioning association’s trainer locator.
- The Yellow Pages. Whether you use the paper version or an online one, you can get a list of trainers and begin calling them.
Regardless of how you find your initial list of possible trainers, you’ll need to know what to look for so you can weed out the bad ones before investing too much time interviewing them. Yep, you should interview them just as if you were hiring someone for a job. After all, you are hiring them for a job, and a very important one at that. We’ll discuss what to look for in my next post.
