When is a personal trainer worth it?

Thirteen personal trainers work with us. The most common question is not what it costs but whether you need one at all. That is a fair question, and the answer is not always yes.

What it actually gives you

Not motivation, you cannot buy that. What it does give:

• Form. Somebody watching which way your knees point in a squat. That is the thing you cannot see on yourself and will not learn from a video.
• A plan. You do not have to decide what to do every time you come in. That decision fatigue stops more people than the training itself.
• Load management. When to add weight and when not to. As a beginner this is almost impossible to judge: you either do too little or progress too fast.

Four situations where it pays off

When you are starting out. Habits form in the first two or three months. What you learn badly then is harder to fix later than it would have been to learn properly. A handful of sessions at the start are worth more than twenty in your second year.

When you have stalled. You have been doing the same thing with the same weights for six months and nothing is happening. That is not laziness, it is a planning problem, and from the outside it takes about ten minutes to spot.

After an injury. Coming back with “I’ll just take it easy” is the most common route to the next injury. Here you genuinely need someone who knows what is safe.

When you have a date. A wedding, a competition, a medical result, a mountain you want to climb. Once there is a deadline, planning suddenly matters.

When it is not worth it

If the problem is that you do not turn up, a personal trainer will not fix it, that is a group class question, because a class has a time and has to be cancelled. Build the rhythm first, fine-tune later.

And if you simply like training alone, you have a plan and you are progressing: everything is fine. It is not compulsory.

One thing that is free

Even if you are not training with them personally, you can ask any of our coaches on the floor how a machine is meant to be used. They will happily show you. No pass needed, no courage needed, you just have to walk over.

Finding the right one

All twenty-one are on the Coaches page, the fifteen personal trainers alongside our class instructors. Each has their own page showing what they work on, which classes they teach, and how to reach them.

You arrange the session directly with them. It does not have to go through us, and you do not need to buy a pass first. Each trainer sets their own price, so there is no single price list: ask the one you would like to work with.

If you do not know who to start with, look at who teaches the group class you enjoy. If you get on with an instructor in a class, personal training with them will probably work too.

Before your first session

Bring what you know: previous injuries, medical advice, how much you have been moving, how much time you have each week. The more precisely you can say it, the fewer sessions go on assessment.

And do not expect a miracle after the first hour. It says so on our home page too, and not by accident: we do not believe in miracles, we believe in you coming in three times a week.