How To Be Your Own Personal Trainer

• Gina McKnight
• >Categories: Fitness
• Feb 22, 2017

We at Fitness Republic are big proponents of hiring a personal trainer. A certified trainer can motivate you, create the perfect routine based on your specific goals, and ensure you see results faster.

Of course, hiring a personal trainer isn’t for everyone. If money is tight or your schedule is constantly in flux, you may want to consider being your own personal trainer.

Signup & Get Early Bird Access To Our Personal Training App

The best trainers teach you more than just how to exercise. They monitor your goals, fitness level, and keep you motivated. Just like a professional personal trainer, you must identify your goals and what you want to achieve, and keep evaluating your progress in order to success.

While nothing beats the expertise that a personal trainer can provide, becoming your own personal trainer may be the next best thing. Here are a few tips for coming up with your own workout programme and being your own personal trainer.

1. Get Specific About Your Goals

Do you want to lose weight? Add muscle? Train for a marathon? No matter what your fitness priorities are, be specific in your goals and what you want to achieve. Once you have a goal or goals in mind, you can begin to decide how to achieve it. For instance, maybe you would like to begin running in the morning before you go to work. Where are you going to run? How much time can you allot? How far would you like to go? Do you have the appropriate running shoes and gear? Will you need a stopwatch or other device to help you track progress? Be sure your goals are specific, realistic, and give yourself a time frame for success. First, identify a clear and reasonable goal — i.e., “I want to be able to do 20 push-ups in six weeks,” or “I want to run 5 K in two months” — so you can identify the steps you need to take to get you there.

2. Assess Your Fitness Level

Before Don’t overexert your body to reach unrealistic goals. Begin where you are. Take a fitness assessment to find your fitness level. If you are overweight and need to lose a few pounds, don’t place unnecessary force on your joints. It is important that you stay within your fitness level to avoid injury. Re-assess your fitness level every few weeks.

Depending on what your goals are, you may also want to take body measurements to track your progress. Most trainers will begin with measurements and re-measure weekly once a month to track your progress. The most obvious measurement is your starting weight, but there are other, more important measurements to consider, including your BMI, your body-fat index, your blood pressure, and body measurements, including your waist, hips, shoulders, chest, thighs and arms. If you’re training for a marathon or aiming to increase your cardio, measure how fast you can run one mile.

3. Make Your Plan

The toughest part about being a personal trainer is crafting a personalized workout schedule and plan, and it may take you a few tries before you get it right. A trainer creates a map that shows where you are now, and where you want to be, and — most importantly — the work you have to do in the middle to get there. Create a clear plan that details how often you are going to work out, and lists clear details of the exercises or routines that you will be following. You may need more than one workout routine, especially if you’re focusing on strength training or building muscle, since your muscles will need both regular change and rest days. Write down or use an app to outline goals and benchmarks. Include all info — repetitions, minutes, days per week that you intend to workout and for how long.

This may seem overwhelming, but don’t worry: Fitness Republic has hundreds of different long and short workouts, all catered to a variety of goals and workout schedules — whether you’re looking for a HIIT-style treadmill workout to increase your cardiovascular endurance, a one-stop-shop, total-body routine that combines cardio and strength training, or any number of targeted workouts that focus on carving your glutes, abs or arms. 

4. Get Informed

Now that you have your goals, measurements, and a plan in place, you need to be informed about the execute your fitness routine correctly. There are wrong ways and right ways to do specific exercises. Learning the correct techniques will improve your results and prevent injury. Make sure you search Fitness Republic for instructions on how to perform each move in your workout with perfect form. Consider hiring a trainer for one session, so you can make absolutely sure that your technique is flawless before heading out on your own.

5. Keep A Log

There are a lot of exercise apps available to log your progress, including a workout calendar, tracking other numbers (heart rate, calories burned, etc.) and personal bests. Most fitness sites/apps offer a nutritional component and a social media component where you can interact with people who share your same goals. Find a tracker that works for you to track your workouts and keep you motivated.

6. Perform Regular Assessments

Measuring progress is important for staying on track and keeping motivated. How do you know if you’re heading in the right direction if you’re not measuring your body’s abilities? Again, apps can come in handy for this, but you might also want to schedule monthly or bi-monthly check-ins to see how you’re progressing. Use the exact same benchmarks you used in step two, and compare your improvements week over week, month over month.

7. Stick To It

Often we enlist the help of a personal trainer so they can keep us accountable and push us to keep going. On our own, we often begin a fitness program only to lose interest and go off track. We all know that staying motivated is the key to success, so solicit a mentor, or workout buddy who will keep you psyched. Try some of these motivational techniques, and you’ll be more likely to stick to your programme.

8. Keep Setting New Goals

Being your own personal trainer requires dedication, focus, and switching things up. Most personal trainers will not have you do the exact same routine every day, let alone for weeks on end. If you’ve been following your plan for several months and you’ve hit an exercise plateau, it may be time to change your routine and dial up the intensity. Our bodies get used to doing the same things over and over again, so keep switching up your routine and re-evaluating your goals. Incorporate different body-sculpting exercises, equipment, machines or other fresh ideas, just as a personal trainer would.

In the end, what matters most in being your own personal trainer is achieving your particular fitness goals, whatever they may be. Stay on track, keep it real and enlist an expert if you need to. You don’t have to spend a ton of money on a personal trainer if you follow these steps and stick with it.