Hiring a personal trainer can be expensive, so how can you make sure you get your money’s worth? Hiring a personal trainer out of a big box gym may seem like a choice you can trust, but you will likely be paying the upper end of the price spectrum for a trainer who has minimal education. Goodlife will even hire people that don’t have a personal trainer certification (the bare minimum). Many gyms I have been a member of have a roster of personal trainers that don’t even walk the talk themselves, yet they still charge exorbitant amounts for their services, which gets you a 1 hour session and nothing more. They will put you through an exhausting array of random exercises, making it seem like you had a solid workout when really, all they did was get your heart rate up.

Consider for a second that there is much more to improving your health and fitness than increasing your heart rate or burning calories and if that’s all you want, you can go for a jog and save yourself a lot of money. Although you will see results (as they are almost a certainty when an untrained individual starts training), I can assure you there is a much better way to go about training that will set you up for long term success.

I start all of my clients off with an FRA to assess the capacity of each of their individual joints. This provides us with an exact blueprint of what we need to improve and what their body is capable of. I then program with both the results of the assessment and their goals in mind. No exercise is randomly given to anyone. Much of the initial program is usually expanding joint space through rotational training to bring dysfunctional joints back to ones that function properly. Once clients have some mobility back, we continue strengthening their rotational capacity of their joints as rotation is the fundamental motion of all joints except for the spine (which is flexion). Now knowing this, if you are working with a trainer and they don’t give you any rotational training for your joints (most don’t, and most will also tell you not to flex your spine), please reconsider.

As someone who used to train like a bodybuilder, take my word, it can feel like a good approach and you can definitely transform your body doing so, but you can’t indefinitely adapt the same tissues. You either accommodate, losing range of motion in your joints, or you get injured. For me, it was both. Slowly eroding my range of motion while experiencing nagging pains and injuries that kept creeping back.

I have since made drastic changes to my training and sought out education in order to provide myself and my personal training clients with the optimal approach. Improving body composition is the easy part of fitness, and you can achieve phenomenal results while ALSO training for longevity, mobility, and overall health (the real important stuff).

As a client of mine, not only do you pay less than if you were to go to a big box gym, you get better training from someone who’s reputation depends on your results, you get actionable advice on nutrition and sleep, and you get to avoid all of the bad training outcomes that I learned the hard way.

To get started on building a body capable of doing the things you love forever, reach out to me here Contact Tommy Kudoba Fitness – Personal Trainers Kitchener, ON