So I’ll save you the time of reading the whole post if you’re just looking for the answer, its everyone!

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 267,000 personal trainers in the US in 2012. Is there one for you?  Heck yeah there is! There are many arguments to be made as to why that is and it doesn’t matter if you are an engineer, a doctor, a housewife or a personal trainer yourself, you will absolutely benefit from the right* personal trainer

So let me start with a little interdisciplinary analogy if you’ll just bear with me for a minute.  Software engineers primarily write code; we do a lot of things too but a big part of the job involves the creation of thousands of lines of instructions for a computer system to follow to carry out some task for provide some valuable function for either another computer or maybe even a human.  We get lots and lots of education and training on computer architecture and programming languages and logic and data structures – bla, bla bla.  We generally know what we’re doing.  However, ask one of us to test our own code and you’ll find that most of us refuse to beyond a certain point.  Why?  Because its very difficult for a software engineer to find mistakes in their own creation; that’s just not how the brain works. I can write a few thousand lines of code and test it for a week and believe it to be perfect but then give it to a test engineer who can probably find a bug it within a few hours.  It’s really all about perspective, in my mind I know how the code works so I naturally test things that are likely to work.

How does this translate to training? Directly, I think!  You may know your body and you may know exercise technique and all about the energy systems and how to train for your goals, but can you really identify your own weaknesses (bugs) as well as a trainer (test engineer) can?  I don’t think so.  My story is like many others I’m sure.  Many years in the gym focusing on things that I had learned either on my own or from someone else in the gym, either the big guy lifting next to me or a partner who happened to know more than me. But then my workouts were getting a little boring. I will stop short of saying that I was at a plateau or stalled or anything like that, i was just kind turning the crank.

So a few years back, I hired a personal trainer for my daughter to help her prepare for an upcoming martial arts test.  I felt very comfortable at the gym but no way did I feel qualified to teach a teen aged girl how to work out – I doubt she wanted guns and big traps!  She enjoyed success as she learned what to do and how to do it and along the way I began to appreciate her trainer’s knowledge myself especially when i learned she had he B.S. in Kinesiology from my alma mater. I decided to try a few sessions and I have to tell you I felt a little funny using a female trainer at first. I’m not a huge guy or anything but I think most people can tell from looking at me that I know my way around the gym. Anyway, I felt so weird about it that during our first session there was no working out – I just printed out my regular workout and sat down with her to review it as of test her knowledge and to see what kind of immediate feedback she could give me.

That was over a year and a half ago and I still use her services so, yeah, I think it’s worth it. Most of the benefit for me was in the education (brain picking) but I have to tell you a story about the summer of 2015 to give you a more tangible sense of what a trainer can do for someone whether they’re starting off in good shape or not. That summer I went on a super clean diet to support my wife who was following a prescriptive program for weight loss. I challenged my trainer to design a 12 week program for me to take advantage of this clean eating; I asked her to drop my body fat by 5 points without losing any muscle!

If you’ve done any research on body composition or trying to build muscle while losing fat at the same time you know that, well, its a tall order especially for someone who has already been training for years (less of a stretch for an untrained individual). I’ll post my workout and diet plan separately but here are the results:

Summer Training Results

Metric	Before	After
Height	5'8"	5'8" (duh)
Weight	192	180
Body Fat %	20%	13%
Strength	-	No Loss!
Energy Level	Good	Great
RPE during HIT**	8	4-5

* Yeah OK, I’m not going to provide guidance on picking a personal trainer but common sense should prevail here…

** RPE stands for Rating of Perceived Exertion and HIT stands for High Intensity Training