A few days back I did a post asking whether we need a trainer for our physical training. I got a few responses on mail, some on the comments page and some on the phone. Many people did not know what a trainer is supposed to do. Well, a good proper trainer is supposed to do the following for you:

1. Keep you on track: he/she should know your goals – run a marathon, lose 5kg in 3 months, increase the strength of your upper body to improve your swimming, reduce the size of your abdomen, – whatever it is.

2. He should help you set realistic goals: ‘I want to lose 20 kgs in 4 months’ may not be realistic for many people. Your trainer should tell you what is possible and what is not. People who do not have a trainer have unrealistic goals and get disappointed in a week or a month.

3. Make sure you do not over-exert: Some people start very aggressively ignoring small niggles, then suddenly find themselves laid low by injury or over-training. This is worse than having an unrealistic goal – because it can put you off from the exercise circuit for a long time and may be keep you off it permanently!

4. Teach you the exact way of doing things: Whether it is a lat pull down for your upper back or a chin up for a mid back exercise, only a trainer can tell you the EXACT way to do it. A good trainer should be able to make a plan and help you do that in a nice comfortable way.

5. Push you and hold you back: Sometimes you may be over excited and some times completely lack motivation – a trainer will help you keep a good balance between the two swinging moods!

6. Check on your diet: a trainer should know about your eating – what pre exercise snack to have, what post work out carbo loading to do, perhaps monitor the daily intake of calories, keep a written record of your work outs, monitor progress, etc.

7. Bring variety to your work out – decide on how much of strength training, how much of cardio, will you do strength training and cardio on the same day? Will you do abs exercises? are your stomach muscles strong enough to do 100 crunches a day? Well it takes a trained trainer to answer all these queries.

8. Answering your queries: A well trained and experienced trainer should be able to answer all your exercise related queries – far, far better than Google can!

9. Call you at 6am even on days you are trying to play hookey!

well there are other reasons too…as soon as I can think of them will post it…if you search on Google I am sure you will find many more reason too 🙂