Personal Trainers

Personal Trainers 

If you are a certified personal trainer, registered yoga teacher, group exercise instructor, or otherwise qualified exercise professional — we want to support you! If you are a CrossFit coach, AntiGravity® aerial fitness, pole fitness, or TRX® Suspension Training™ instructor, offering professional fitness services, please register your business by contacting Derek Curtice to share your business details, and location.

Once you are registered, you will be able to connect with people looking for help from a coach or trainer near them. We want everyone, everywhere, to find qualified exercise professionals to help them improve their physical fitness. Also, we want to connect performance coaches and strength coaches with athletes to help them elevate their athletic performance! You can help. Join us.

A little about personal trainers …

Did you know that it is estimated that there are 6.4 million personal trainer users in the United States alone[1]? Personal trainers are fitness professionals educated in exercise science. The primary responsibility of personal trainers is to safely demonstrate and teach exercises to clients with attention to any level of contraindication to specific exercise modalities. Your experience with one of our personal trainers should begin with a complete formal interview wherein you and your trainer openly discuss your health and fitness history, illnesses, disorder or disease (if applicable), your exercise history and health and wellness goals.

Do I need a personal trainer?

That’s a great question! Essentially, you need a personal trainer when you feel you are not exercising properly to produce desired results. Of course, if you need to learn new exercises or need to modify an exercise to meet any health concerns it’s a great idea to contact a personal trainer. People hire personal trainers because often their own exercise routine isn’t working or people become injured exercising improperly. When a doctor advises you to contact a personal trainer it is vital that you do so. A doctor prescribes exercise as a preventative measure to preempt further medical treatment and medicine or in combination with the treatment of various illnesses or disorders. If your doctor clears you for regular exercise contact a trainer. Your health is never more important to you than when you are suffering from poor health.

What does a personal trainer do?

A personal trainer will help you to complete a Physical Activity Readiness Questionnaire (PAR-Q). This document is necessary because each answer in the document allows the trainer to consider whether medical intervention is required prior to beginning an exercise program. After completing the PAR-Q a personal trainer will either schedule a comprehensive fitness assessment or begin an assessment the same day. Fitness assessments help both client and trainer alike understand current physical challenges and graded levels of fitness. Data collected from the test will enable your personal trainer to organize your needs based on priority and begin to prescribe appropriate exercises with the consent of your family doctor (if needed).

Your exercise program prescribed by your personal trainer will change as your fitness level and needs change. The basic accepted model of personal training is to help clients assess, maintain, and improve your cardiovascular health and endurance, muscular endurance and strength, flexibility, and body composition. Initially, control, stability or stabilization of your body during movement is key. Strength endurance, building denser or larger muscles, and strength development exercise begins only after stabilization or stability goals have been met. Under these aforementioned guidelines, more advanced fitness goals can be planned. By following these simple guidelines personal trainers can safely and effectively help you improve your health and fitness systematically and effectively with less risk of injury. More ambitious exercise modalities and exercise routines can be developed by your personal trainer to meet athletic and performance goals. Personal trainers choose specialized areas of expertise to continue research and practical experience. Personal trainers continue adding to their knowledge and practical skills by attending exercise workshops and enrolling in accredited education programs for specialized training in specific areas of exercise prescription for defined populations of people. In time, personal trainers craft their abilities and develop skill sets used to improve the performance and health of seniors, athletes, men, women, and children.

What is an exercise modality?

What are exercise modalities? An exercise modality is a prescribed exercise performed to accomplish a specific physical outcome over time. Exercise modalities range from focused exercises designed to challenge and improve a specific function of a muscle or to improve functionality in combination with other muscles. An exercise modality may defined by its ability to challenge and improve movement patterns that involve the entire body and all the systems of the body during movement performed within specific guidelines, defined by form, at minimal to maximal intensity levels, ranging in intensity, duration, frequency, and use of tools. Exercise modalities are classified by methods used to accomplish specific physical goals. Essentially, exercise modalities are forms or methods of exercise or physical movement.

Exercise modalities are prescribed to meet physical needs and goals. Typically exercise modalities follow a general guideline based on an individual’s assessed and tested physical competency, needs, limitations, and goals. The progression of prescribed exercise modalities are generally based on competence in the following order:

• Stability and coordination
• Strength and endurance
• Power and speed

Exercise modalities range from a style of training that utilizes your body weight as resistance to accomplish improved physical conditioning — to a nearly endless line of the use of other exercises using tools like health club exercise equipment and machines, resistance bands, free weights, suspension training straps, rope, medicine balls, stability balls, kettlebells, and many other tools of the trade. What all of these (and other) tools have in common is that they are designed to be used to accomplish and improve human movement and physical performance, muscular and cardiovascular strength, muscular and cardiovascular endurance, flexibility, and physical fitness.

What is the difference between PT, SGT, and Group Ex?

Exercise professionals teach exercise in a variety of ways. Personal trainers (PT) typically focus on personal (one-on-one), small group training (SGT 3 – 9 people), and group exercise (Group Ex more than 10 people). Group exercise instructors typically concentrate on large group exercise classes designed to accommodate 20 or more people. You might be familiar with Zumba®, BodyPump™, Pilates or yoga classes, these are examples of large group exercise. If you’ve witnessed a team training session, you’ll recall that there might have been at least ten people exercising utilizing a variety of exercise modalities (exercise methods) within the group. Also, team training tends to be focused on human movement, proprioception, power, endurance, skill enhancement, and sports performance. SGT or small group training occurs commonly in personal training studios or exercise facilities that accommodate smaller groups of people exercising together with common goals supervised by an instructor. Whereas personal training PT is most commonly performed one-on-one wherein a client works with an exercise professional in an exclusive arrangement to learn how to exercise based on the clients’ personal needs, limitations, expectations, and motivations.

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