Do You Know Your Audience?

This post is for the group fitness instructor and personal trainer who needs to focus on getting the most from their clients and to be aware how they are instructing them. Because our name is all we have; and if we give our best to our students they will share it with their friends and our business will be more lucrative.

I figured that I was a professional person before I became a professional fitness instructor. I used to watch America’s fitness guru, Jack La Lane as he gave daily fitness exercise sessions. He was the one who inspired me to want to become a professional fitness instructor. He would demonstrate the correct and incorrect way to do an exercise as well as explain why it’s important to do each exercise correctly. And I would do the exercises with him as I would see results in my body when I participated in his sessions. I was around thirteen years old when I decided that the fete I most wanted to achieve was being in good health. As I grew older realized that there are many people who are not healthy; whether or not it is because of their inability to do any better. Some have a chronic hereditary health issue and are not able to make that change in their life. And there are those who place a heavy burden on their physician to keep them healthy as they would routinely follow an unhealthy lifestyle.

There are those group instructors who have an audience of participants who come to a class to see what their favorite instructor will do in the class, and they primarily just show up in the class and merely go through-the-motion of the workout and they don’t get any good results from them showing up for the class. So the instructor puts his or her all into the class and the participants brag about taking an “advance” class. As I’m sure their peers are thinking that they can’t see any results of them going to this advance class. Hence the instructor is the only person being benefitted by the workouts. This says that the instructor is not concerned about teaching a good sound class that the participants can actually execute and make improvements with the exercise program the instructor has designed for them. For the past fifteen years I have worked with the senior community, and there is no one who has the stamina, endurance and coordination for an advanced class. This also says that this kind of instructor is not in tune with the participants in the class. Then there are those “show off” personal trainers. These are the ones who like to show their skills when demonstrating an exercise to a potential client. I have seen a personal trainer demonstrate an abdominal exercise to a potential client by starting this beginner client with a plank exercise. The client obviously does not understand the mechanics of the exercise, so when it’s time for the client to do the exercise he had no clue of what he needed to do to make the rectus abdominis actually do the work. So this personal trainer didn’t begin with the basics of the exercise. This exercise was far too advanced for this client. I hope he repaired the damage he had done with this client, because he just probably got overly excited about teaching this exercise to this client. So as you can plainly see, we as instructors have a big responsibility to the people we touch each workout and we owe them our best so that they will feel a sense of accomplishment and feel empowered to continue their journey to be as fit and healthy with or without us.