Trainers Use Trainers

With so much information available at our fingertips, we are able to research or find out about any subject with a few taps on a keyboard. As scarily omnipresent as it is, Google is one of the best resources available for modern living, with so many of us utilising it daily and in some cases, multiple times. Everything from recipes to racing cars, places to pictures are searched for online.
Like so many professions, fitness has a huge presence online. Fitness videos, personal trainers, exercise demos, fitness apparel, live classes and anything else related to exercise and fitness. Heck, even I have a fitness related website, even if I do spend most of my time on writing blogs.
Put ‘fitness into a Google search and millions of web pages will come up. Every type of diet, workout, every celeb fitness plan, every type of gadget for measuring and tracking health and fitness. For anyone getting into fitness, the internet is a godsend. Whether you just want to get fit, find a gym or pursue a career in fitness, the massive digital library that is the web is where the journey will most likely begin.
Even we fitness professionals look to the web for ideas and inspiration and knowledge – if you’re a fitness professional who doesn’t check out what your peers do, you will be undoubtedly poorer, as a trainer, for it – as the trainer, as much as they may know their stuff, is always learning and hopefully improving.
Now, having laid out the virtues of the internet and appreciating how helpful it can be in one’s quest for optimal health, I would still advise novices to see an actual person – trainer, gym worker – for help when getting started. Not only will it help you to gain a solid foundation in your workout patterns on which to build, it will make you appreciate the difference between self-driven workouts and workouts given to you by a trainer. Most trainers, myself included, get trained by somebody else.
It may seem odd for a trainer to use another trainer, but when you train, the difference of saving that extra bit of energy you would use to formulate your workout compared to someone else telling you what to do is noticeable. It is too easy to cheat yourself. When you are benching ninety kilos and decide you can only do six reps, you only do six reps. A trainer, whether you are paying them or they are a knowledgeable training partner, will challenge you to do those extra reps or lift ten kilos more, to push past your comfort zone.
You can definitely fashion your own workouts and health plan by using Google. With the plethora of workouts, available for any level of fitness, one can build a sensibly scaled workout schedule, for no money, that will improve fitness. That takes discipline and true commitment, not to mention some trial and error. When it comes to fitness, it is not only trainers who try to train with other trainers, professional sportspersons use trainers.
You might read that and think, ‘well, of course, a sportsperson is going to use a trainer! It’s their job.’ True, but most professional sportspeople have been doing their chosen sport from a young age. They know – even better than their trainers – how to do their job. For most, fitness is a necessary byproduct of their sport also, so they know how to get fit and what fit feels like.
One of the reasons fitness people liked to be trained is because it is easier and – with a good trainer – more beneficial having somebody else calling the shots. They would keep fit anyway, most definitely, but, no matter how committed to training a person is, they still tend to fall into a pattern, even if it is a seemingly good pattern of changing up the workouts every month or lifting more every week, it is still within the comforts of one’s own knowledge. If you want to get fit, get a trainer.