If the goal is to reach the 3 E’s (Excellent Exercise Experience), then the 10 P’s (of Excellent Teaching) might help you get there – and if you are an exerciser and not a fitness professional, this list might help you in choosing your own personal trainer:
One – Punctuality
Arrive on time, start on time, finish on time.
Two – Planning
Preparing a session means that we consider the client, consider the goals, consider the environment, consider the time, and we have a blueprint to follow – and options to allow for flexibility. Planning also means we consider our own needs, such as clothing, access to water, lunch breaks, admin tasks, and global scheduling.
Three – Personalise
Using questions (this is a collaboration) to offer individualised adjustments and modifications that reflect skill, comfort, and preference.
Four – Purpose
Explain, reason, justify and link activities and choices to goals and objectives.
Five – Positions
Changing and considering positions of self, client, and equipment in order to better observe, teach, make safe, and give feedback.
Six – Posture
Teach, encourage, and demonstrate general and exercise specific posture to reinforce skeletal alignment and integrity.
Seven – Performance
Enhance, correct, make safe, and establish strong independent and effective patterns and techniques.
Eight – Praise
Motivate, but encourage, inform, education, empower, enable.
Nine – Progression
Intensity, load, skill, approach, modality, comfort, and confidence.
Ten – Professionality
Commit to the first 9 and you pretty much get this one for free, because if the focus is on the 10 P’s and the 10 P’s only, then the chances of crossing professional boundaries, getting sloppy, becoming a rep counter, touching a phone, eating/drinking in front of the client, inappropriate conversation, running out of time, and getting distracted become about as close to zero as they could possibly be.