Online personal training and nutrition coaching has been exploding over the last few years. It works great for both parties because of the ease and simplicity of it. But be warned, this is the fitness industry and there are a LOT of ‘tricks’ so called personal trainers or nutritional coaches pull.
My Experience
One of my buddies convinced me to try this year long online nutrition and workout program that is supposed to give you guidance every step of the way. It was a reliable company and I’ve used them for nutritional consults before, so I thought why not? I really liked their philosophy on nutrition, they seemed to have great results, and I would be working with the one of their top guys so I thought “F’ it I’m in!”
Without making this into a crazy long story, the end result:
- Not the Main Guy–The ‘coach’ was nice but wasn’t very knowledgable with program and knew the basics of nutrition. But I must say he was very motivational and they had a template ready to go so he just followed their coaching guidelines. *you had to read the fine print to see see you wouldn’t be working with the ‘head honcho’
- I Got Hurt-I wanted to fully commit despite the junk program, and that my friend, destroyed my back. The base program was 10 exercises 3-5sets of 5 reps with 15-30sec rest for 4 weeks, afterward you’re given a rep max test where you perform a front squat, deadlift, overhead press, pull up, and bench press at 80% for as many reps as you can in 30 minutes. Before you freak out I did email my ‘coach’ saying, I didn’t see how this could be safe nor was progressed to a 80% 30 min rep test– I was told to believe in the program…stupidly I followed suite and of course blew my back out. It didn’t make sense but I was stupid enough to follow it, despite my concerns..which brought me to write this post.
So What Did I Learn?
Well clearly fitness has some great sales and marketing to pull at your strings. They’ll post great pics of the before and after and promise you all these great results. While the program I bought into is a very reliable nutrition company, they definitely sucked ass at exercise programming.
My Advice:
- Don’t Trust the Pics- Pictures are a great way to track results, but as stated the fitness field has some very tactical marketing people. While some the pics can be real, some of them can also be manufactured as the video shows or the person could’ve also be using some ‘juicing’. Bottom line you just never know.
- Quality Coaching- Make sure the personal trainer that’s implementing the nutrition and workout programming is qualified. Despite the fact “Big Named Coach” wrote the program, the advising coach or personal trainer still needs to be skilled enough to make changes to the individual–my guy was not.
- Currently Training or Coaching- I’m not a big fan of guys that ONLY do “online training”. Call me old school but I believe coaching and training someone in person keeps your skills sharp.
- Make Sure They Care- *This is really for anyone you hire in anything. Online personal training creates barriers and if the person isn’t reachable you’re in trouble = that’s not cool. The few online clients that I take, I spend a LOT of time either over the email, phone, or video teleconferencing with them about their program, diet, and going over their workouts and videos. How do you expect to progress if the person you’ve hired isn’t reliable?
The best advice I can give is if your spidey sense goes off and the trainer isn’t accessible before and after, I wouldn’t waste your money.
Stay strong,