A fitness group does an early morning workout at Bryant Park on June 15, 2016 in New York.Alex Wroblewski/New York Times News Service
James Fisher, an exercise scientist at Solent University in the UK, says there is a puzzling pattern in the use of personal trainers to oversee strength training.
Beginners often hire a trainer, he says. The same goes for serious powerlifters and bodybuilders. “But most of the people in between don't seem to be using them.”
To understand why, he and his colleagues looked at why people hire personal trainers, what they get out of it, and most importantly, as a result, personal trainers get bigger… We have been researching whether or not it can become stronger. The latest results are Published in Sports Science Journal The findings by an international team of researchers, including Fischer and Brad Schoenfeld of Lehman College of the City of New York in New York, support the claim that supervised workouts are indeed effective, but they are not specific. The benefits vary from person to person.
Researchers assigned 45 young men and women, all experienced lifters, to lift weights three times a week for eight weeks, all completing the same exercises. Half of the volunteers were supervised by a trainer. The other half I trained alone using the same gym.
Sure enough, the monitored group had a significant increase in muscle size, as measured by ultrasound, and also performed better on some muscle strength tests. For example, the maximum weight they could squat increased by 7.7% in the unsupervised group, while theirs increased by 13.5%.
Notably, only two participants in the monitored group were unable to complete the study, one of them because they contracted the coronavirus. In contrast, seven of his unsupervised participants dropped out.
The results support two claimed benefits of personal training. It's about encouraging you to stay involved in your workouts, and encouraging you to work harder or smarter during them.
But they also raise mysteries.Last year, Mr. Fisher systematic review Of the 12 studies that compared supervised and unsupervised strength training. In that analysis, the presence of a personal trainer had little effect on body composition and, at most, a modest effect on muscle strength. Why the difference?
Professor Fisher said the most likely explanation was that the subjects in the systematic review were mostly novice strength trainers, as opposed to the more experienced lifters in the new study. When you're just starting out, the details your trainer adds aren't that important because pretty much anything you do will lead to early results.
This assumes you are on board from the beginning, which is more likely if you have agreed to participate in the study. Of course, in the real world, one of the biggest benefits of hiring a trainer for novice exercisers is motivation and accountability.
On the other hand, for more experienced lifters, the easy gains are long gone. Instead, the details of a well-planned strength training program become more important, perhaps along with the motivation to squeeze out an extra rep or two.
That means everyone benefits from personal training differently, says Lee Graham, a Toronto-based personal trainer who specializes in older clients.
Older adults may have health conditions, old injuries or balance issues that can make it difficult to follow a typical fitness program, she says. “These require a deeper understanding of the body and expertise in how to move it safely and effectively.”
More generally, beginners often don't understand their limits very well, which means the trainer's job is to hold the beginner back to avoid injury, and to help the experienced exerciser push harder. She says that her role is the opposite.
For those of us who are neither beginners nor experts, the middle ground can be difficult to navigate. Hiring a personal trainer requires a significant investment of both money and time. Whether it's worth it depends on your goals and what's currently holding you back. But the new results suggest that taking the plunge can yield tangible results.
Alex Hutchinson is the author of Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. Follow him on X @SweatScience.
