Working with a Personal Trainer - What to expect

During our first meeting, we would do a walk through of the gym, before filling out and reviewing questionnaires such as medical/injury history to develop your short/long term goals, and discuss the number of sessions you would like to integrate in your weekly routine. I would then give you a brief and general idea of what to expect before creating a concrete plan and scheduling your workout sessions.

Once we start getting sessions under our belt, our first 8-12 weeks will focus on getting consistent, and building a foundation, and adjusting along the way to achieve your goals. We’ll also monitor your goals, or whatever else changes down the road, as your plan can be altered to help you stay the course.

What to expect from our sessions together. The initial 8-12 weeks will be more focused on hypertrophy (building bigger muscles) to get a lot of repetitions in place. Doing this will allow you to get practice doing a wide variety of movements, with the added benefit of finding out what lifts you prefer, and if any aggravate you in whatever way. Once this period is over, we could go in a few directions - we could stick with hypertrophy, move to a strength focused program and so on.

This fitness journey will help you to get healthier and provide an improved quality of life.

Programing - What’s it going to look like?

The initial wave of programing will be 2-3 days a week with 2-3, 4 week blocks which will focus on hypertrophy, with approximately 5-6 exercises in a work out, with 3 sets of 8-12 repetitions to help build muscle, proper movement patterns, help figure out what you like, don’t like and help to figure out how strong you are. Rest between sets would vary from 1.5-2 minutes.

Programming after this will vary depending on what your short and long terms goals are.  You may stick to hypertrophy, or you might want to focus more on getting stronger on certain lifts. Which would entail 1-5 sets of 1-5 repetitions for your first exercise, 3 sets of 6-8 repetitions on your 2nd exercise and 3 sets of 8-10 repetitions on your last 3-4 exercises of the workout. Time between sets would vary from 1-5 minutes.

I can also design sport specific workout plans and incorporate sport specific weight training into your weekly routines if this something that is of interest to you. For example, if you play volleyball, I would incorporate some plyometrics (exercise involving repeated rapid stretching and contracting of muscles such as jumping and rebounding to increase muscle power) exercises that include jumping into your workout program. Some specific weight training could include lat pulldown and shoulder press exercises since volleyball involves raising your arms above your head.

References:

1)      https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27102172/ - Hypertrophy

2)      https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22777332/ - importance of resistance training