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A personal trainer is the best investment I've made

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Re: A personal trainer is the best investment I've made

#21

Post by antihero »

Cryptonic wrote: post #2

Great point! I am 40 and when I look at pictures of myself 10 years ago, I look and feel much much better now. One day in my early thirties I started running and going to the gym. But I had phases of extreme motivation following phases of zero motivation. A personal trainer might have helped, but is expensive. What really brought a turning point was when I discovered a sport I always wanted to do, but did not know it…

This sounds really good, I find the best exercise is done when you're focusing on something else (just got back from building/striking a festival in the desert and lost about 5kg, for instance). Have found a historical fencing club in London and emailed them.

Re: A personal trainer is the best investment I've made

#22

Post by 300bps »

trhoad wrote: post #10

Too much emphasis is put on organised exercise. I think it's an American thing, where nobody seems to walk anywhere. Better advice is to build more functional "exercise" into your day-to-day life. This is where real lifestyle change happens without you really knowing it. Take the stairs, walk to the shops, cycle to work (where possible), household chores that involve getting on your hands and knees and breaking a swe…

Too much emphasis is put on organised exercise.

Organized exercise allows you to set a specific goal and do targeted exercise to accomplish that goal in the minimum amount of time with minimum risk of injury.

why people pay to go to the gym and deadlift, then e.g. happily pay someone to move a load of soil around the backyard always confuses/amazes me

It's math and risk. If I make $150 per hour and have unlimited capacity to work then it makes no sense for me to do manual labor that I can pay someone $15 per hour to do. And I'll get a much better workout with an hour in the gym than 3 hours moving a load of soil around. And as I stated earlier, my risk of injury doing controlled targeted movements is much lower than randomly twisting and turning and jerking loads of soil around.

Re: A personal trainer is the best investment I've made

#23

Post by bruce343434 »

hsn915 wrote: post #15

> Humans are irrationally motivated by loss-aversion and regualrly succumb to the sunk-cost fallacy. This is not irrational and it's not a fallacy. As you have proved to yourself. It's a mental heuristic that works. You spent money to get something valuable, it would be foolish to let that go to waste. What about that exactly is irrational?

The money is already gone. Now you have some thing that you must evaluate the worth of on its own. If you muddy that evaluation with "but it cost so much" that's the sunk cost fallacy: clinging onto a thing because it was so hard to get even though it's subpar.

Re: A personal trainer is the best investment I've made

#24

Post by seper8 »

trhoad wrote: post #10

Too much emphasis is put on organised exercise. I think it's an American thing, where nobody seems to walk anywhere. Better advice is to build more functional "exercise" into your day-to-day life. This is where real lifestyle change happens without you really knowing it. Take the stairs, walk to the shops, cycle to work (where possible), household chores that involve getting on your hands and knees and breaking a swe…

All this "exercise" helps, especially if you are coming from a sedentary lifestyle but you also really need exercise where you will elevate your heartrate and be close to running out of breath. Also known as Zone 2 (or higher) cardio.

Re: A personal trainer is the best investment I've made

#25

Post by seper8 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #4

I have chronic fatigue, but what can go a long way, and what I am doing, is 1. a good diet on the low calorie side of things, 2. a little body-weight strength training each day, 3. do some walking. All of which has the advantage of not taking too much time. But it does require habit building which is tricky.

Maybe find a sport you really like? I didn't do any sports until 18 when I found bouldering. Good sport to do alone, although you still can talk with people. And a lot of eccentric, free thinking people if that's your crowd.

Oh and you'll get to go outside aswell, which is nice. Sometimes a hike to the rocks.

Re: A personal trainer is the best investment I've made

#26

Post by tomxor »

> What keeps fit people going to the gym on a regular basis isn't wearing their running shoes to bed at night. It's discipline and accountability.

There is an alternative, less resistant path which I believe is more sustainable and better for the soul... find something you love that involves exercise, not much discipline is needed once you do, because you probably wont be able to stop yourself from doing it when it's something you look forward to - which in a way is "wearing your running shoes to bed", it's passion.

Something which is not exercise for the sake of exercise, i.e not "going to the gym", it must be more mentally rewarding and stimulating somehow. That doesn't mean team sports either, there is more to life, in fact I'd recommend avoiding team sports because then you are more likely to have more control over when and where you can do your activity. Examples: rock climbing, mountain biking, sailing, surfing, skating, skiing. You can do these types of activities with friends, and make friends too, and they can take you all over the world, or at least all over your country - so they are pretty good for the soul ;)

Discipline is a useful ability, but you can only apply it effectively so many places in your life, and you wont be able to keep it up forever. Save it for when you really need it to fix something - but health is not a fix, it's a lifestyle.

Re: A personal trainer is the best investment I've made

#27

Post by zeroc8 »

Although I loved sports in my youth, I didn't exercise for more than 20 years. I felt miserable, fat, had low energy and started having various health issues. A relationship of 25 years broke apart.

48 was my turning point. I started eating differently, started doing pull ups and invested some money on a personal tennis trainer.

One of the best decisions in my life.

Now I'm 50 and relatively fit again. Life is good and I'm having fun again. I just wish I would have gotten off my lower back a lot sooner.

Re: A personal trainer is the best investment I've made

#28

Post by kasey_junk »

emptyfile wrote: post #18
valenterry wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an expert, but I don't think what you say represent the current state of knowledge. As far as I know... > make sure you are doing training units of at least 30 mins regularily. Going shorter than that is not really useful to get you actually trained. That's not true. Less time can be effective as well, given that the intensity is high enough. > If you try to get better endurance most of your training should be ae…

>> If you try to get better endurance most of your training should be aerobic (instead of anaerobic) >It's actually the opposite and interval training (mixed aerobic and anaerobic) seems to be more effective. Wrong and easy to prove that its wrong, just look at a training regiment of any elite runner in any distance. Most coaches agree that 80% percent of your volume should be easy aerobic for any goal. Doing high in…

Caveat that I’m not a runner, but in every other athletic activity I’ve done, you’d never compare elite athlete regimens to normal peoples.

They have resources, time, (usually) age and genetics working for them. Trying to train like them is usually a recipe for injury and burnout.

So I think when we talk about “effective” we should probably contextualize it.

Re: A personal trainer is the best investment I've made

#29

Post by valenterry »

emptyfile wrote: post #18
valenterry wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an expert, but I don't think what you say represent the current state of knowledge. As far as I know... > make sure you are doing training units of at least 30 mins regularily. Going shorter than that is not really useful to get you actually trained. That's not true. Less time can be effective as well, given that the intensity is high enough. > If you try to get better endurance most of your training should be ae…

>> If you try to get better endurance most of your training should be aerobic (instead of anaerobic) >It's actually the opposite and interval training (mixed aerobic and anaerobic) seems to be more effective. Wrong and easy to prove that its wrong, just look at a training regiment of any elite runner in any distance. Most coaches agree that 80% percent of your volume should be easy aerobic for any goal. Doing high in…

> Wrong and easy to prove that its wrong, just look at a training regiment of any elite runner in any distance.

That's a bad comparison. Elite runners' first priority is to win and get out maximum performance. But for regular people, the goal is to overall improve their body and condition using a small time span. Since the goals are different, the methods are as well.

That aside, I believe athletes _do_ use interval training (HIIT). But if you have a source, I'd be interested.

> The Born to Run fad has been over for years now. Consensus is incorporating barefoot running into your training makes little difference to performance

Again, I think you are focussing on pure/max performance. But I don't think that's the goal for the majority of people who start out with their training. You get higher speed / better performance when running with shoes for sure. But I think for the people we talk in the context here, the goal is to improve body condition and lose weight.

Re: A personal trainer is the best investment I've made

#30

Post by orzig »

zeroc8 wrote: post #27

Although I loved sports in my youth, I didn't exercise for more than 20 years. I felt miserable, fat, had low energy and started having various health issues. A relationship of 25 years broke apart. 48 was my turning point. I started eating differently, started doing pull ups and invested some money on a personal tennis trainer. One of the best decisions in my life. Now I'm 50 and relatively fit again. Life is good a…

Congratulations! Having tried a personal trainer who I ended up disliking, I’m curious: what do you look for when trying to find a good match?
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