Who Should You Believe?

When looking for good training advice knowing who to ignore is as important as whom to listen to. Just because a Glasgow personal trainer charges 50 pounds an hour there is no guarantee that they give high quality advice. Corporate gyms are based around finding and retaining members and not providing results. Their in house training courses used to "educate" their staff tend to be fad based so their instructors will be well informed about current gimmicks but not about scientific underpinnings of effective training. Gym instructors are also often set in their ways so the advice they give can be out of date.

The "big guy" that trains at your gym is probably big in spite of what he knows and not because of it so beware if he suddenly starts giving you advice. If he was serious about his training, and you should only seek advice from people that are, he wouldn't disrupt his session to talk to you. He will also happily tell you how he trains which is probably of no use to you and 20 years out of date.

Most mainstream fitness magazines are owned by supplement companies who only publish the magazine to advertise their products. Supplements are at best unnecessary and at worst a complete fraud. If a magazine only exists to sell you supplements how objective is the information contained in it? Another issue with fitness magazines is that they are constantly looking for ways to fill their pages which leads to regular repackaging of old articles.

It is best to look for training advice from sports performance coaches and not the fitness industry. The fitness industry is about profit but competitive sports are about results. The fitness industry does not trade on results because that would alienate most people as they are not willing to put in the effort to get results which is why it focuses more on lifestyle. The best sports conditioning coaches will be renowned in their particular area and will have a have a track record of delivering results to a lot of people. Olympic sports and big money professional sports generally provide the best advice because they are the most competitive and their coaches will only use the best methods. Use Google to find out who coaches lots of successful sports people, find out who they listen to and learn from these people. Most people would love to look like an elite sports person, so train the way they do.

Iain Smith (MPhil/CSCS) owns Standout Gym, an independent warehouse gym in Glasgow, focusing on weight loss. He offers small group training as an affordable alternative to Glasgow personal training. Iain is a former international decathlete with 17 years coaching experience. www.standoutgym.com.