Are Personal Trainers a Waste of Money?

I have never really been a fan of personal trainers.

That is probably the easiest way to start this because pretending otherwise would be pointless. For years I looked at personal trainers and thought, why would I pay somebody to tell me how to train?

I have spent a huge amount of my life in gyms. I have made mistakes, learned from them, watched videos, read about training, tried different programmes and spent years figuring out what works for me. The longer I trained, the more convinced I became that I did not need someone standing next to me counting reps.

There was another part of it as well, and this is where I will admit I had probably built up a stereotype in my own head.

The stereotype I had of personal trainers

I used to see certain personal trainers walking around the gym, especially the ones who seemed to spend half their shift approaching women, and I would immediately think the whole thing looked a bit sleazy.

You know the sort of interaction I mean. Someone is training perfectly happily on their own and suddenly a PT appears asking whether they need any help, offering to fix something or trying to start a conversation.

From the outside, I had already decided what that was.

I grouped far too many personal trainers into the same category and, because I had trained for years without one, I also assumed there was very little they could offer me anyway.

Then I actually started speaking properly to one of the personal trainers at my gym.

Talking to one changed the argument

What changed my opinion was not that he suddenly convinced me everybody needs a PT. I still do not believe that.

It was simply hearing a different side of it and realising I had reduced an entire job to the worst stereotype I had seen.

A good personal trainer is not necessarily there because you are incapable of training yourself. They can be there because it is very difficult to look at your own training completely objectively.

When you have trained for years, you can actually become more stubborn, not less. You develop habits. You favour movements you like. You avoid things you are bad at. You convince yourself that a technique is fine because it has always felt fine.

Someone else watching you can see things that you stopped noticing years ago.

That was probably the first part that made me reconsider it.

Knowledge is not the same as objectivity

I still think having knowledge matters. I would never suggest handing over complete responsibility for your training and switching your own brain off.

But knowing a lot about training does not automatically mean you coach yourself perfectly.

I can know how a movement should look and still develop a bad habit. I can understand programming and training frequency and still push too hard when I should back off. I can understand recovery and still ignore it because I want to train.

In some ways, the more invested you are in your own training, the harder it can be to make detached decisions about it.

That is where I started seeing the point of having another person involved.

What a good PT can actually offer

The value is not just having somebody count to ten while you do a set.

It can be accountability. It can be another pair of eyes on technique. It can be having someone question why you are doing something a certain way instead of simply accepting that you have always done it that way.

It can also be exposure to methods you would not naturally choose yourself.

Most people gravitate towards the things they enjoy and the things they are already reasonably good at. A decent coach can force you to spend time on the areas you would normally avoid.

And for somebody who is completely new to the gym, the value is even easier to understand. Walking into a gym when you have no idea what anything does can be intimidating. Having someone show you how to train safely and give you a basic structure can save a lot of wasted time.

That does not mean every personal trainer is good

This is not me suddenly becoming a personal trainer salesman.

There are good PTs and bad PTs, just like there are good and bad people in pretty much every profession.

Having the qualification does not automatically make somebody a great coach. The way they communicate matters. Their actual experience matters. Whether they listen to the person in front of them matters.

And I still think you should be cautious of anyone who seems more interested in selling sessions than understanding what you actually need.

My opinion has changed, but it has not flipped from one extreme to the other.

The part I got wrong

The thing I got wrong was deciding that personal trainers had no value before I had really bothered to understand what a good one was trying to do.

I had taken years of my own experience and turned it into the assumption that because I could train without one, there was no reason anyone should have one.

That is not the same thing.

You can be experienced and still benefit from coaching. You can be knowledgeable and still benefit from another perspective. And you can be perfectly capable of training alone while still deciding that accountability or outside feedback is worth paying for.

I am still not convinced everybody needs a personal trainer.

But I am a lot less convinced that they are a waste of money.

Sometimes you spend years forming an opinion from the other side of the gym, and then one proper conversation makes you realise you never really understood the job in the first place. That wider human side of training is also what I explore in Beyond the Gym.

TRAIN. RECOVER. REPEAT.