The first is Brad Baldwin, CSCS, MS, an NYC-based personal trainer and owner of Brad Baldwin Fitness (bradbaldwinfitness.com). The second is Jeb Stuart Johnston, an NYC-based personal trainer and nutrition coach specializing in body recomposition and lifestyle transformation (jebstuartjohnston.com).
Whatever your skill level or goal, this checklist of key points will ensure your coach is on point and not wasting your time—or money.
“I would say that it’s really important for your trainer to have a certification,” says Baldwin. “Not because having a certification means you’re a great trainer—that’s not true, I know bad trainers with certs—but if they take your career seriously then they’ll have one. It’s just one aspect of it.”
That is, they don’t align with your goals. “If you’re a 50-year old mom in Dubuque, Iowa who just wants to get fit and do more squats, then going to a guy who only trains 200-plus-pound power lifters probably isn’t a good fit,” says Johnston. “You want to find someone who has results in the population that you fit into.”
“On the flip side,” Johnston says, “if you’re a bodybuilder who is trying to get ready for a show, then a general population trainer won’t know what you need.”
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THEY DON’T DIG DEEP
If your coach simply hands you an excel doc with numbers or exercises on it and leaves you to your own devices week-to-week, then they’re not doing you any favors. “The formula for losing weight is easy—move more, eat less,” Johnston says. “The real question is: how can we get people to move more and eat less?”
More psychologist than coach, Johnston says that bulk of his job revolves around helping people, “figure out what their behaviors are that are leading to weight gain and figuring out how to change them.” That means working to make his clients self-aware and putting them in a position to take ownership over their transformation.
“It all really comes down to them saying, “Ok, this didn’t work because I didn’t do what I needed to do. There’s a lot of power in that.”
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THEY’RE LACKING PROOF
“Just because a trainer looks amazing says nothing about their efficacy,” Johnston says. “I do think a trainer should work out, but more importantly, they should have a portfolio of client success in the forms of testimonials.”
Baldwin agrees, adding that when it comes to hiring an online trainer, you should look at more than just testimonials. He says there are two routes you can take when looking for a virtual coach. The first option is to hire an actual online trainer. This is generally more expensive (usually hundreds of dollars a month), but everything is customized and you normally get daily or weekly access to your coach over the phone or through email. Baldwin himself offers exercise videos, Skype calls, meal plans, and weekly check-ins to ensure his clients are staying the course.
A cheaper option is to buy, what Baldwin refers to as, low-ticket items, which are popular among Instagram influencers. These are usually pre-made programs that can cost between $30-100.
“Those can work for some people,” he says, “but you need to look at the ratio. If a trainer has 1 million followers but only 100 testimonials, then how many people bought the program and didn’t benefit—possibly thousands or tens of thousands.”
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THEY PROGRAM BEYOND YOUR EXPERIENCE
“The biggest hurdle is form. Your trainer should be providing a decent stimulus (or exercise) with a low risk of injury,” Johnston says. In other words, if you’ve never touched a barbell before and your coach has you squatting with a barbell on your back instead of doing bodyweight squats or goblet squats—both easier regressions—then they may not have your best interests in mind. “That’s why a lot of online trainers won’t work with true beginners,” Johnston adds. “They’ll work with people who have a few months of training under their belt.”
Baldwin, who works with Day One beginners, says that he’ll have clients send him videos of themselves performing an exercise. This way, he can correct their form within minutes. “It’s as simple as having them prop their phone up against a shaker bottle to get the video,” he says.
