There are some great personal trainers and there are some questionable trainers. Most clients trust their trainers 100% when it comes to advice on how to get in shape. But the information is only as good as the source.
- 85 of Your Results Come From What You Eat - This bit of information is HUGE! If you're losing weight or gaining muscle, what you eat plays the biggest role in how you look. No matter how advanced and fancy your workouts are, if you eat garbage, you will look like garbage. Straight up. Working out plays its part in stimulating muscle growth and speeding up the metabolism, but when combined with proper nutrition...you can get great results. You can't just workout. You have to do the hard part...eating right the rest of the time.
- Your Core/Stomach is Not the Big Problem - It never fails. You walk into the gym and see trainers having their clients doing all these balancing exercises on bosu balls, wobble boards, and other pieces of random equipment. While it's okay to use them as secondary exercises, they shouldn't be the main focus of your workout. Using resistance with weights, bands, and cables or doing full compound bodyweight movements is where most people need to focus. Don't get suckered into all the promotions by the equipment industry. They just want to sell more silly balance equipment. If you want a strong core, lift something over your damn head and hold it there. Then repeat. Looking around the gym, most people have too big a core anyway and simply need to focus on full body movements and diet.
- Abs are Made in the Kitchen - One of the things that bothers me is seeing trainers have their clients do abdominal workouts for 30 minutes straight. Really? Unless your six pack already shows or you want to improve the definition on your abs, there's no need to have this be the focus of your workout. Doing ab exercises at the end of your workout will be more than enough stimulation. Without proper diet/nutrition, your abs will never come shining through. Remember this: We ALL have a six pack. We just have to remove the fat that's covering it.
- Don't Use Most of the Equipment in the Gym - If you're going from machine to machine to machine and spending zero time on free weights, you need another trainer. The machines are for people who don't properly know how to exercise without a trainer/spotter. Machines offer a fixed path working one muscle at a time (isolation)...not exactly the most time efficient workout. Not to mention, your body doesn't work in isolation in real life. So if you're going to pay someone to teach you the proper way to workout...it should be with something other than machines.