What You Must Do Before Joining A Gym & Hiring A Trainer

I often hear people say I don’t have the stamina to go to the gym or I’ll first start running/ do yoga for a month and then ...

I often hear people say I don’t have the stamina to go to the gym or I’ll first start running/ do yoga for a month and then hire a trainer. If you think this article is going to explain those exercises, congratulations! You fell for the click bait. The simple answer is: You don’t need to be anywhere to begin. Confused? Keep Reading:

Gym is safer than home workouts

“But how am I going to lift 5 Kg dumbbells? Shouldn’t I be lifting the 2 Kg ones? I can hardly lift the grocery bags!”

If only I ate a candy every time I heard someone say that, I’d be obese for sure. If you are a woman who can’t do a simple pushup, chances are you are not going to improve much on your own by just going up and down 3 inches. What you need to do are bench pushups so that you can work muscles in full range of motion and get stronger. If you are in a gym, we can add some similar pressing movements like the bench press in which we can choose weights according to your current strength levels. This will carry over to progress in your pushups.

Also, while home workouts can hypothetically be progressed to very difficult levels, this usually requires jumping in exercises like dynamic lunges and jump squats, explosiveness for difficult pushup variations like clap pushups and good core control for conditioning exercises like burpees. Many times, when people move on to more difficult variations, body starts to ache. Suddenly, jump squats are not so fun on the knees and lower back start to hurt when you do burpees with a sloppy back.

In the gym, it is safer for a majority of the population to push themselves on intensity of these movements with just increasing weight on the exercises you are already doing without adding a jump or an explosive component to it. You have more tools in the gym to work around with. Think of them as weapons in your arsenal. You can always do home workouts when you want to but this gives you more choices to kill your real enemy (fat).

Personal Trainer? I am not fit at all, he is going to kill me!

Take a walk across a commercial/society gym and you would find so many lost souls wandering their way around complex machines, not knowing what to do; either trying to do what they saw last night on Youtube or imitating the fittest person they saw in the gym with lesser weights.

Although it is intuitive to think a workout with a trainer is harder (and it is, in a good way) and you need to be at a certain level of fitness, you really don’t need to be fit to start with a trainer. You are hiring the trainer so that they can handhold you into your fitness journey. It is important to have a good mentor to get a kick-start. I admit many trainers are insecure that they’d lose you if your first few sessions aren’t tough enough and go overboard with the routine. This is why you should always read reviews and have a detailed conversation with them before you finalize a trainer and pay him/her.

At Psi Fitness, the first month of any newbie is always about developing technical proficiency in basic human movements. Pretty much like Mr. Miyagi of Karate Kid, we make you practice that over and over again so that good movement patterns become your second nature. Look out for this quality in a trainer and don’t rush him/her for results early on. Fitness and health should be a lifetime priority, not a 4 week goal to lose 5 kilos.