Billie S. Dickenson

Is There a Real Need For a Personal Trainer?

Let's talk about different forms of motivation. As a person looking to get motivated to lose weight, you should first ask yourself, "Can I motivate myself? If I cannot afford a personal trainer can I still get the job done?" Some people - those who are motivated by something or have completely made a decision to motivate themselves -- can use this motivation to get to a point where they're making good decisions about their eating habits, losing weight, and reaching their goals. On the other hand, there are people looking to lose weight who are not in a particular state of mind to motivate themselves.

The question is, Do you need a personal trainer to motivate you? I cannot answer that question for you directly, just as I can't take your journey to health and fitness for you. But I can tell you this: in my opinion you can lose weight without a personal trainer. And you can even lose weight without dieting. I'll give you tips on how to succeed in self-motivating to weight loss, and discuss if and how a trainer can be useful in the process.

You Can 'Do It Yourself'

Self-motivating can be very difficult. We have created a society which seems to be very needy. This manifests in the realm of health and fitness as the belief that we have to hire a personal trainer and go to a gym in order to accomplish our health goals. But personal trainers are just another tool to assist you in your weight loss; hiring a personal trainer does not determine whether you're going to lose weight or reach your goals. I know a lot of personal trainers who have obese clients start a weight loss process and after they lose five or 10 pounds they set them loose.

Those clients are still obese. I know personal trainers working with clients to get them stronger but they end up gaining weight because of the muscles they build. In the grand scheme of things, this is a positive development because muscle burns more calories than fat, but the clients cannot control what they are doing outside of the gym-- self-motivating to change their diets - so they do not lose weight. The good news is that the inverse is also true: you CAN lose weight without a personal trainer. If you structure the way you make changes in your life properly, you can do the job of losing weight and getting fit yourself.

To do this, you will have to understand certain aspects of fitness and nutrition. Given the public health crisis of obesity in our society, there are enormous amounts of information on how not to be obese available to you -- on the Internet and in libraries and bookstores -- that you should take full advantage of. Gather resources and information about the human body, food plans, workouts, training regimens, and dietary supplements to help you work towards reaching your fitness goals. I also recommend looking in the self-help section of the bookstore to see what speaks to you.

This can help you change your mind about other negative habits in your life so there is a complete metamorphosis, not just of the body but of the mind as well. This is what ultimately determines your success - how far you can go to alter your mind. This is why personal trainers do not guarantee weight loss, because they cannot live in your head. What can guarantee that you reach your goal is altering your state of mind so that you think differently about health and fitness, about your weight loss. Even better, eventually you will not have to think about it at all. Health and fitness and training can and will become second nature, just like waking up and brushing your teeth.

You Can Do It at Home

As we think about health and fitness being second nature, let's also consider the necessity of a gym or fitness facility to reach our fitness goals. As with the 'need' for a personal trainer, there is no need to pay a monthly fee to enter a place where there is equipment, other people, or sometimes distractions in order to reach our fitness goals and become healthier people.

Just being active and doing more than you did in order to become obese or gain the weight will start the process of reversing your obesity or shedding pounds. So if you do not have a gym or fitness facility, what do you or where do you go for exercise? Well, places you can get a good workout may be in your own home, like a spare bedroom, basement, or garage.

Find a spot where you can lay out a couple of mats, put up a small television, get a few free weights, and some workout videos. Add some fresh plants and make sure you have nice lighting and upbeat colors to make it an inviting personal workout space. Over time, setting up your own workout space will cost you considerably less than the gym membership that you going to be paying for even when you're not going to the gym.

You can also go outside in the sunshine and nature to get some vitamin D and fresh air. In the spring, summer, and fall your training may happen at a park or lake or some other outdoor venue. In the winter this may be a little bit more difficult, but you will have your personal workout space to retreat to, where you can continue to stretch, do push-ups, sit-ups and free squats in order to keep your body in motion to burn fat and continue weight loss. None of these suggestions requires you going to a fitness facility. They don't require you to put out a great deal of money to become healthy.

What it does require is that you build a resistance to failure and the negative voices in your head and create within yourself the aptitude for self-motivation. This means you will have to take on the burden of being able to motivate yourself. In essence you will have to become your own personal trainer.