How to Find a Good Personal Trainer: What to Look For Before You Commit

I've worked as a personal trainer since 2012, and I think people often focus on the wrong things when choosing one.

The best-qualified trainer is not necessarily the best trainer for you. The cheapest trainer is rarely the best value. And the trainer with the most impressive physique or biggest social media following may not be particularly good at coaching people like you.

What matters is whether they understand what you are trying to achieve, have successfully helped people in a similar position before, and can provide a service that fits realistically into your life.

Start with what you actually need

Before choosing a trainer, be clear about what you mean by personal training.

• There is traditional one-to-one personal training.

• There is online coaching.

• There is small-group personal training.

• There are hybrid services where you might see a trainer occasionally and then follow a programme independently between sessions.

None of these is automatically better than the others.

It depends on what you need.

In person will me

an more personalisation at a greater cost, one to one will suit someone more private, whereas small group will offer a social element.

Start with the outcome in mind.

What are you actually trying to achieve, and what kind of help do you need to achieve it?

A good trainer should be trying to establish exactly this during your first conversation.

They should not simply be waiting for you to finish speaking so that they can tell you about their packages.

They should be asking questions to work out whether you are actually a good fit for what they offer.

Most experienced personal trainers naturally end up working with a particular type of client.

That might be people who are new to training, people over 50, people interested in bodybuilding, runners, people recovering from injuries or busy professionals who need training to fit around work.

Finding somebody who routinely works with people like you is probably more important than finding the trainer who appears to know the most about exercise generally.

Locality matters more than people think

One of the first practical things I would consider is location.

Your trainer needs to be easy to get to.

That may sound obvious, but people underestimate how important this becomes over time.

If every training session involves a difficult journey across London, finding parking or adding another 45 minutes of travelling to your day, you have created another barrier between yourself and actually training.

Training already has to compete with work, family commitments, holidays, tiredness and everything else that happens in normal life.

You don't need to make it more difficult.

A very good trainer who is conveniently located may therefore be a considerably better choice than an exceptional trainer who requires a 90-minute round trip every time you want to see them.

Consistency matters, and convenience supports consistency.

How busy is the trainer?

This is not something people usually think to ask, but I think it tells you quite a lot.

There is probably a sensible range in which you want your personal trainer to sit.

If somebody has very few clients and says, "I can train you whenever you like, just tell me when you're free", I would be slightly cautious.

There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation, but it could also mean that they are relatively inexperienced, struggle to attract clients or struggle to retain them.

At the opposite end, if somebody tells you they are personally coaching 60, 70 or 100 people, you should probably ask what "coaching" actually means.

There is only so much individual attention one person can provide.

At some point, systems become automated, programmes become templated and the service inevitably becomes less personal.

For traditional personal training, I think somewhere around 20 to 30 regular clients is a fairly reassuring number.

It suggests that the trainer is busy and established, but also that there is a reasonable chance they have enough time to actually think about the people they are coaching.

You essentially want someone who is busy, but not suspiciously busy.

Don't put too much weight on PT qualifications

People understandably look at qualifications when comparing trainers.

I wouldn't put too much emphasis on standard personal training qualifications.

Everyone working legitimately as a personal trainer will have some version of them, and in my opinion they don't tell you very much about how good the person actually is.

The basic Level 3 and Level 4 qualifications are not particularly difficult qualifications to achieve.

They establish a minimum standard, which is useful, but they certainly don't demonstrate that somebody is an excellent coach.

An undergraduate degree in a relevant area can be useful, although even then I think it tells you more about somebody's ability to think critically and understand information than it tells you about whether they will be good at personal training.

For me, a far better qualification is evidence that somebody has repeatedly achieved the result you are looking for with people similar to you.

Look at their reviews.

And don't just count the stars.

Read them.

Are they detailed? Do clients describe the process? Have those people had problems and goals similar to yours? Are people still working with the trainer after several years?

That tells you considerably more.

Look for someone whose approach reflects what you value

I also think there should be some alignment between the trainer's own relationship with fitness and the relationship you want to have with it.

That doesn't mean your trainer needs to look exactly how you want to look.

But their values will inevitably influence how they coach.

Imagine you want to become stronger, lose a bit of weight and feel better, but you also want to eat out, drink occasionally and enjoy your weekends.

You probably don't need a trainer whose entire life revolves around fitness, who runs ultramarathons, never drinks alcohol and maintains an extremely low body-fat percentage all year.

There is nothing wrong with that person.

They simply may not be particularly sympathetic to the trade-offs you want to make.

Equally, if your ambition is to get into exceptional shape and you are looking for a very disciplined, performance-focused approach, somebody who has a very relaxed attitude towards their own training may not resonate with you either.

You don't need a clone of yourself.

But I would look for somebody who reflects the values you are trying to develop.

Have they worked with people like you before?

If you have a particular goal or problem, ask about it.

If you're in your 50s and have never strength trained, ask whether they regularly work with people like you.

If you have persistent back pain, ask how they normally approach clients who arrive with back pain.

If fat loss is your priority, ask what they actually do with clients who want to lose weight.

What you are looking for is experience rather than certainty.

In fact, I would be cautious about anybody who promises certainty.

If you tell someone you have had back pain for five years and they immediately respond with, "Yes, I can fix that", they are probably guessing.

A much more reassuring answer would be something like:

"This is how I normally approach that problem. These are the results I tend to see. This is what I would assess first. And if it doesn't respond in the way I expect, this is who I would refer you to."

Good coaching involves judgement.

Sometimes things don't respond exactly as expected.

I would rather work with somebody who understands the limits of what they know than somebody who confidently promises they can fix everything.

A good trainer should assess you properly

I don't believe somebody can write you a genuinely good personal training programme without seeing you move.

They can make reasonable guesses.

They can give you a generic programme that works adequately for a large percentage of the population.

But that isn't really personal training.

When somebody comes to see me for an initial assessment, part of the purpose is simply to get to know them.

What are they like to coach? What are they worried about? What have they done previously? What do they enjoy? What are they likely to actually stick to?

But I also want to see them move.

Their description of their own ability is useful, but it isn't the same as watching it.

I want to see their mobility, coordination, confidence and general movement competency.

That information then influences exercise selection, programming and what I think they should initially be doing.

If somebody is giving you very specific recommendations before they have ever met you, I would question how personalised those recommendations really are.

Pay attention to what they ask you

People often prepare a long list of questions to ask a prospective trainer.

That can be useful, but I think there is something even more revealing:

How many questions are they asking you?

Do they appear genuinely interested in understanding you?

Are they asking follow-up questions when you say something interesting?

Are they trying to understand why previous attempts at training haven't worked?

Do they know what your week looks like, what you're worried about and what you actually want from them?

Or do they ask three generic questions and then start telling you about their packages?

At the end of an initial conversation, you should feel understood.

You don't necessarily need to know exactly what your programme will look like yet, because they should probably want to assess you first.

But they should understand the problem they are being asked to solve.

If you leave the conversation feeling like they barely know anything about you, that is worth paying attention to.

Look out for obvious red flags

Some red flags are fairly straightforward.

If somebody is late to an initial meeting, slow to respond, disorganised or generally unprofessional when they are trying to win your business, don't expect those things to improve once you have paid them.

People are normally on their best behaviour at the beginning.

I'd also be wary of trainers demanding a very large commitment upfront.

There may be legitimate reasons for selling blocks of sessions, but if somebody insists that you need to purchase 20 or 30 sessions before you have even trained together, I would question why.

A trainer who is confident that they provide a good service should also be reasonably confident that you will want to continue using it.

The hard sell is another major red flag for me.

Personal training can be a significant financial and time commitment.

You should be given the information you need and allowed to go away and think about it.

You shouldn't feel like you are being "closed".

Be wary of people with rigid rules

I would also be cautious around trainers who have very strong rules about exercises or food.

If somebody tells you that you definitely must eat a particular food or that a particular food is always bad, I would want to understand their reasoning.

Nutrition is generally about options and trade-offs.

The same is true of exercise.

There are very few exercises that are universally essential and very few that are universally useless.

Exercise selection depends on the client, their goals, their ability, their injury history and sometimes simply what they enjoy.

If a client enjoys an exercise and it can be performed safely and contributes towards what we're trying to achieve, that is relevant.

Coaching should be collaborative.

The trainer's job is not simply to dictate what you are and aren't allowed to do.

They should explain the options, explain the trade-offs, make recommendations and then work with you to put together an approach you can actually sustain.

You need to like the person

Personality matters.

You are potentially going to spend an hour or more every week with this person for several years.

They don't need to become your best friend, but you need to be comfortable around them.

A good personal trainer should be able to put somebody at ease reasonably quickly.

They need social skills.

They also need to understand how you like to communicate.

Some clients want a lot of accountability. Others don't.

Some want to be pushed. Others respond badly to that style.

Some want to understand the reasoning behind everything they are doing.

Others would rather simply be told what today's session involves.

There isn't one correct personality for a personal trainer.

But there needs to be a good fit between their personality and yours.

Is an expensive personal trainer worth it?

In general, I think paying more for a better trainer is good value.

That sounds slightly self-serving coming from a personal trainer, but there is a reason for it.

A cheaper trainer often needs you to buy more of their time in order for the economics to work.

You may therefore be told that you need three personal training sessions every week when you could potentially get excellent results from one coached session and one or two sessions completed independently.

A more experienced and more expensive trainer may actually cost you less over time because they use your paid time more efficiently.

They should be teaching you how to train.

They should be encouraging you to become more competent independently.

They should be solving problems that you would struggle to solve yourself.

I would generally rather have one session per week with an excellent trainer than three sessions per week with a mediocre one.

Less time with a better trainer is often better value than more time with a worse trainer.

Obviously there is a limit to this. Expensive doesn't automatically mean good.

But if somebody has charged a relatively high price for years and still has a full diary and large numbers of long-term clients, there is usually a reason they have been able to sustain that.

So how should you actually choose?

If you have narrowed your search down to three trainers, I wouldn't obsess over comparing qualifications.

I would look at who has made the greatest effort to understand you.

• Who asked the best questions?

• Who has relevant experience?

• Who has reviews from people like you?

• Who behaved professionally?

• Who explained their approach without making unrealistic promises?

• Who seemed interested in whether you were right for their service rather than simply whether you were willing to buy it?

• And, importantly, who did you actually like?

The more transactional, forced and sales-driven the process feels, the more cautious I would be.

Finding a personal trainer is ultimately about finding somebody you trust to make good decisions on your behalf.

They need enough expertise to know what they're doing, enough experience to recognise when something isn't working, and enough interest in you as an individual to make the service genuinely personal.

That matters considerably more than how many certificates they have on the wall.