What Personal Trainers Wish You Knew

It’s perfectly normal to be a little self-absorbed during a personal training session. After all, it’s your time to focus on yourself, your goals, and your fitness.

It’s your personal trainer’s job to be focused on you, too. That said, putting a touch of thought into what’s happening on their side of the squat rack can make their job easier—and your session more effective.

Here’s what two personal trainers wish all their clients knew—the pet peeves, the trade secrets, and the tips that’ll help them help you level up your sessions.

1. Making the most of your session means coming prepared

If you’re scheduled for a 50-minute session, your trainer has almost certainly prepared 50 minutes of work for you. Anything you do that cuts into that time—like showing up late—is taking away precious minutes from your workout.

“One of the biggest pet peeves for a trainer is when the client arrives late,” says Daniel McKenna, CPT, a NASM-certified personal trainer and founder of the fitness app and community The Irish Yank. “Any personal trainer I know usually has two or three sessions back-to-back, so if you’re late, it’s eating into your session.” McKenna suggests arriving at your session not just on time but early, and using those extra moments to warm up or visit the restroom if needed.

Coming prepared also means showing up as rested, hydrated, and as well-fueled as possible. “I’ve had clients come in the evening and they haven’t eaten all day, and they’re wondering why their lifts are off,” McKenna says. “And then you have the other end of the spectrum where clients come in and they’ve had six coffees and they’re wired to the moon. Meet somewhere in the middle.”

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For Nikita Fear, a Tier 4 coach at Equinox, it’s about treating your workout as protected time. “It’s not necessarily that your entire day is centered around your workout,” she says. “But the things you’re doing beforehand and following will help you prepare going forward.”

2. But also know that you can come as you are

That said, a good trainer should be able to meet you where you are on any given day—whether you’re low on sleep, experiencing pain, or distracted by personal matters.

“Personal trainers should have a plan A, B, C, D, E and F,” McKenna says. “Because depending on how the client is feeling that day, you might need to change. The information the client gives helps us figure out how to pivot if we need to.”

3. Please, stay off your phone

Another of McKenna’s pet peeves: clients checking their phone during their session. “You get the most out of it when you don’t have that distraction,” he says, though he understands that there are exceptions when clients need to be reachable.

Consider, too, that “if you’re standing there on your phone, it’s not a great picture for everybody else in the gym.” In other words: Try not to make your trainer look bad.

4. Your trainer is curious for a reason

The first time you meet with a personal trainer may feel more like an interview than a workout. They may have you fill out a questionnaire or ask you lots of questions about your fitness level and lifestyle. Some of those questions may seem to have little to do with your fitness goals—maybe your trainer wants to know how many hours a day you’re sitting at a desk or how much sleep you tend to get.

And while you don’t need to share anything you’re not comfortable talking about, know that your trainer is asking these questions for a reason. “I like to think of it as, ‘what does a day in your life look like?’” Fear says. “I’m asking tons of questions, from lifestyle to orthopedic history to your goals. Sometimes people don’t expect that.”

Trainers have a lot of curiosity by nature, Fear adds. “That curiosity is key for clients’ success, and for us to be most effective. So I would encourage them to lean into that curiosity with the coach.”

5. The more specific your goal, the better your trainer can help you

The best thing a client can do is be very, very specific on their goal, according to McKenna.

“If you come in and say, ‘I want to lose 10 pounds and I want to tone up,’ that’s the most generic answer you could give me—we could do anything,” he says. “If you’re like, ‘I want to do a pull-up,’ or ‘I want to run a 5K,’ that’s very specific and it gives us so much more direction. And when you get there and you hit it, you know what has worked, whereas if you’re just doing anything and everything, you’re not really going anywhere, you’re just going around in circles.”

“The reason people come to us is to get educated, and a good trainer should educate the person so that after a certain amount of time they know what to do without you.” —Daniel McKenna, CPT

6. Know that results take time

In a perfect world, we’d see the ROI from all our hard work with a personal trainer after a couple weeks of sessions. But sadly, that’s just not really how our bodies work—especially for those who are relatively new to fitness, McKenna says.

“For any new client, it takes about three months just to educate them on the exercises we’re doing,” he says. It may be six months or even a year before you start noticing big changes in your fitness. “I think a misconception is having unrealistic expectations, and it’s on us as trainers to relay how long it’s going to take and that it’s an investment.”

7. Your trainer’s price isn’t negotiable

McKenna says that it’s annoyingly common for new clients to try and negotiate pricing with personal trainers.

“If you went to a lawyer and they gave you a price, would you say, ‘Will you do it for this?’” he says. “No other profession gets that question, but for personal trainers it happens 98 percent of the time. It’s an education thing—while they might not see the value in it right away, over time they will see that it’s the best investment. You’re paying us now so you don’t have to pay doctor’s bills down the line; we’re trying to strengthen you for real-life situations.”

8. Planning your session involves more than you realize

One reason why your personal training session costs what it does: the sheer volume of things your trainer needs to be thinking about to make your session run smoothly.

In addition to knowing your body, abilities, and goals, “we have to be fully aware of how the client is feeling, and all the surroundings and everyone else at the gym,” McKenna says. “You have to think about, if we’re doing this now and we want to use that bike but someone else is using it, how long do we have until we can use it and if it’s not available then what are we going to do instead? That’s all going on in my head while the person is just happily doing a couple of squats. There’s a lot more to it than meets the eye.”

9. Your trainer doesn’t know everything

Hopefully, you’re working with a personal trainer who is certified and who is an expert in their field. But unless they have the additional credentials, they aren’t a doctor, a dietitian, or a physical therapist. Try to refrain from asking them questions beyond the scope of their expertise—and know that if they do presume to be an all-knowing health and wellness authority, that’s probably a bad sign.

“As a trainer, you’re always learning and always progressing,” McKenna says. “You have to have that humility.”

Fear agrees: “If I come to you and say, ‘This is the way and it’s the only way,’ I do think that’s a bit of a red flag,” she says. “Don’t hesitate to ask questions, but also don’t hesitate to challenge your coaches.”

Similarly, your trainer shouldn’t be speaking to you as if you don’t know anything. “That’s the sign of a good personal trainer versus a bad one—they don’t make people feel stupid,” McKenna says. “The reason people come to us is to get educated, and a good trainer should educate the person so that after a certain amount of time they know what to do without you.”