Is Personal Training Worth It?
Updated: Oct 5
Personal training is relatively expensive. There is no getting around that.
If you can join a gym for £30 to £50 a month, paying £80 for a single personal training session can initially look difficult to justify.
But I think that is slightly the wrong way to look at it.
The question isn’t really whether personal training is expensive. The question is whether the money you spend on it produces an outcome that is worth more to you than the money you put in.
But let's say this first, not everybody needs a personal trainer.
Who actually gets the most value from personal training?
Perhaps surprisingly, I think the people who get the most out of personal training are often the people who also train by themselves.
Doing all of your training with a trainer can become quite a passive process. You turn up, lift the weights and then go home.
The people who tend to do best are the ones who take what we do together and then go away and practise it for themselves.
It is a bit like learning Spanish.
You can turn up for Spanish lessons and learn plenty. But if you also go away, do the homework, try to use the language and think about what you have learned, you are going to progress much faster.
More importantly, you start taking ownership of the process.
Fitness works in much the same way.
Training independently forces you to engage with what you are doing. You start understanding exercises rather than simply performing them. You notice what weights you are using, how different exercises feel, what is improving and what you are struggling with.
Eventually, the information stops being something your personal trainer knows and starts becoming something you know.
That makes the whole process much more sustainable
Who doesn't need a personal trainer?
Anyone who is already training regularly, making good progress and is happy with that progress.
You don't need to become an expert in exercise.
You just need to be good enough at it that the time you invest feels worthwhile.
If you are consistently training, you know roughly what you're doing, you are getting stronger or fitter, and you are happy with the direction things are moving in, everything is basically fine.
There isn't a prize for having the theoretically perfect programme.
Personal training becomes useful when there is a gap between the effort you are putting in and the result you are getting.
The biggest thing a personal trainer can save you is wasted time
A lot of people exercise without really knowing whether what they are doing is particularly productive.
They find a workout online. They follow a class. They copy something they saw someone doing on Instagram.
And quite often it is hard.
An effective session doesn't need to be exhausting.
Being exhausted at the end of a workout doesn't necessarily tell you whether that workout was a particularly good use of your time.
A good personal trainer should make the time and effort you are prepared to invest in your fitness as productive as possible.
If you have three hours a week to exercise, the job isn't necessarily to make you exercise for five.
It is to make those three hours work.
That is where good programming, exercise selection, progression and technique matter.
You can also outsource some of the thinking
There is another part of personal training that I think gets underestimated.
PT removes mental load.
A lot of people already have enough things occupying their attention. Work, children, relationships, money, travel, everything else that comes with normal life.
Fitness can become another open tab in your head.
Am I doing enough?
Should I be doing more cardio?
Should I change my programme?
Why has this stopped improving?
Should I be dieting?
Is this pain something I should worry about?
One of the things I say to clients quite often is:
Your job is to do what we've agreed to do. My job is to make sure what we've agreed to do gets you where you want to go.
That distinction matters.
You still have to do the work. A personal trainer cannot exercise for you.
But you don't necessarily have to spend your time worrying about whether the plan is right.
So what actually makes personal training worth the money?
Results.
That is ultimately it.
If you spend money on personal training and achieve an outcome that matters to you, then the money can be extremely well spent.
If you spend a lot of money and don't really get anywhere, it probably isn't.
And I think this is where people sometimes overestimate how much personal training they actually need.
Very few people need to train with a personal trainer three times a week indefinitely.
For a lot of people, one session a week (often less) combined with a sensible independent programme is enough.
The purpose of the sessions is then not simply to provide exercise.
They give you coaching, progression, feedback, accountability and a structure you can continue using when I'm not standing next to you.
That can make personal training considerably cheaper than people initially assume.
Can you get great results without a personal trainer?
Of course.
People do it all the time.
But there is probably some self-selection involved.
People who naturally have good coordination, feel confident in a gym environment, are reasonably strong or fit to begin with, and enjoy learning about training are often quite capable of figuring a lot of this out themselves.
And because they respond well to training, they receive positive feedback from the process very quickly.
They get stronger. They look better. They enjoy the gym more. That makes them want to keep going.
Someone who is less confident, finds exercise awkward, has injuries to work around, or has repeatedly struggled to maintain a routine has a much harder problem to solve.
Those are often the people who benefit most from some help.
Should I spend £80 on a personal trainer or just join a gym?
If we are talking purely about money, I think this comes down partly to disposable income.
If £80 is money that you genuinely do not have, then spending it on a personal trainer probably doesn't make sense.
There is an enormous amount you can achieve by investing time instead.
You can learn about training, experiment, read, watch good information and gradually work things out for yourself.
But there is another situation I see quite often.
Someone looks in the mirror and isn't particularly happy with what they see.
Their knees hurt walking downstairs.
They have had a constant feeling for the last two years that they should exercise more.
They aren't really sure where to start, and every time they do start, it lasts for a few weeks before disappearing again.
At the same time, they might quite regularly spend £200 on dinner, several thousand pounds on a holiday, or considerably more than the cost of personal training on cars, clothes or other things they enjoy.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with spending money on those things.
But if you have disposable income and your health and fitness are persistently bothering you, I think it is worth asking which expenditure is actually going to have the biggest effect on your life.
Improving your strength, fitness, confidence and physical capability can affect how you feel every day, and it should be a one-off expense.
For the right person, that can be worth considerably more than the session itself costs.
Personal training should eventually make you more capable without your trainer
For me, this is one of the most important measures of whether personal training is working.
You should understand more than you did before.
You should become more confident training by yourself.
You should have a better understanding of what matters and what doesn't.
And you should gradually become better at managing your own fitness.
That doesn't necessarily mean you eventually stop working with a trainer. Plenty of people prefer having someone else manage the process for them, just as people continue to use accountants even though they could theoretically learn to do their own accounts.
But it should increasingly become a choice rather than a dependency.
Personal training is worth it when it makes the time, money and effort you put into your health more productive.
If you're already doing that perfectly well by yourself, you probably don't need it.
If you're not, getting some good help can save you an enormous amount of wasted time.
If you're considering personal training in Kentish Town, you can read more about how I work or book a free consultation to talk through what you'd like to achieve and whether I can help.
