A Personal Trainer is for Life, not just for New Year.

The New Year is a time when many people decide to get fit and lose weight. Across the world scales are bought, trainers dusted off and chocolates binned. Gyms experience the majority of their new memberships in January, and have special offers to tempt people in.

A huge number of these memberships have lapsed by the end of February, as people get disillusioned and go back to their old ways.....

A great way to avoid being one of the casualties is to invest in the services of a personal trainer. It’s not cheap, with a properly qualified professional costing around £20 to £50 an hour depending on where you live, ($30-$50 if you're in the US!), but the benefits can be huge.

One of the biggest reasons people fail is that they set unrealistic goals, and then get mad when they fail to achieve them. A trainer will help you set realistic, achievable goals and help you to work towards them in the best way. There’s no point deciding on January 1^st that you’re going to lose 3 stone and tucking into the Thornton’s when by January 15^th you’ve only lost 2 pounds. Weight loss is a slow process, and a trainer will help you keep it in perspective. Remember, the overall benefit to your health of eating a balanced diet and taking regular exercise is a far more important consideration than whether you stick to arbitrary targets for losing a couple of pounds a week.

The other great benefit of training with a trainer is that they will help you to train correctly and avoid injury. There’s no point going at the gym hammer and tongs for a couple of sessions and then being unable to walk for a month. Training correctly also means understanding how exercise works, and the difference between training a body part and training for weight loss, many people think, for example, that a fat tum can be reduced by sit ups, but sit ups just strengthen the abdominal muscles, and for them to start burning fat you’d have to do thousands!