Is Personal Training Worth It?
In this article, we take a bit more human approach to help you determine how much personal training and your personal trainer are worth to you. Because that is so unique to each person, we want to give you a formula of sorts to determine how much you value personal training. That way, you can be confident whether personal training is worth it for you or not.
To begin to recognize how much personal training is to you, let’s first discuss value and how you can value personal training to you.
Value - You Need To Pay Less Than Personal Training Is Worth To You
We cannot sit here and have any clue of what you, yourself, would be willing to pay for a “normally good” personal trainer. If you make $1,000,000 a year, you’re likely willing to pay more than most people because you have more disposable income than they do.
What I do know is that you will keep paying the amount that you are paying when you believe that what you are paying is as or more valuable as what you are receiving. But, how do you determine value? This is a bit unique to the client who is enjoying personal training, but value is often driven by a few important things, and we bet you’ll find them familiar. Are you getting results, enjoying a great coach-client relationship, and are you having fun. The more value you get from each, the more you’ll be willing to pay. Some of the questions that arise when a personal training client is questioning the value of their personal training service are:
- I am not losing weight, why am I doing this work or paying for this service?
- I am not enjoying my time in the gym, is it really worth spending that much time?
- I don’t relate to my personal trainer at all, is it worth my time with this person?
Certainly, your emotions around those questions will be different than the next person’s, but those are very often the value questions that you’ll feel. If you enjoy your time in the gym, if you are enjoying your personal trainer and your relationship, and if you are connected to the results you’re seeing in and out of the gym, you won’t question the value. It’s no more complicated than that.
More specifically, how much are results, relationships, and fun worth to you. Again, that depends on you but let’s break it down
How much is your health, wellness, and fitness worth to you? Let’s try to define that now
Let’s take an example - How much is losing 5 (15, 50, …) pounds worth to you?
To some, it’s worth many thousands of dollars because:
- There is a lot of self-worth attached to that.
- They will be able to play with their kids more often and for longer.
- They know they will limit medical bills that would have come because of their weight (we can’t ever stop all risk of medical bills of course).
- They know that they will have more or even more success at work because they will have more energy, etc…
And, to some, it’s not worth a dime for a myriad of reasons.
How much is something like losing weight worth to you? Maybe it’s not losing weight; maybe it’s getting stronger, or maybe it’s being able to do a pull-up, or maybe it’s being able to run a mile, or maybe it’s simply better health markers or energy throughout the day.
How much is health, wellness, and fitness worth to you if you achieve it? Answer that question the best you can right now
How much does having to do the work add or subtract from the value of your excitement to reach your health, wellness, and fitness goals?
The desire for health, wellness, and fitness is only one part of the equation. You need to achieve those results which is where most people’s challenges come in. Be it lack of interest, accountability, or outright success even when you work hard, many things can get in the way of your goal outcome.
A great personal trainer helps you work through all of those challenges as they arise, and they help connect you to people you may need to talk to along the way to figure the really difficult things out. Perhaps you have a medical condition you didn’t even know about that is costing you results in the gym. A great trainer can ask you the right questions for you to uncover that something may be wrong so that you can go see the right doctor to help you understand what’s going on under the hood.
How much does you putting a personal trainer into your results equation add or subtract from your health, wellness, and fitness results portion of the equation?
Depending on your value of health and wellness, you now have to factor in how much faster, how much less challenging, and how much more “fun” you will achieve your goals if you use that personal trainer. Either you’ll see more value in that trainer or you’ll see less because you think you can achieve your desired results faster than you would with a trainer. At any rate, you should now have a formula to derive results value:
How much value would you place on achieving your health, wellness, and fitness goals + how much additional benefit would a personal trainer be to you in this pursuit?
If you have really thought on that formula, you will be more likely to be closer to a tangible number that you’d be willing to pay for that personal trainer service.
How much does having fun and a coach-client relationship add or subtract from your health, wellness, and fitness results portion of the equation?
Now, you want to put a tangible value on how much fun you’d have throughout your training process and how much you’d enjoy building a relationship to a trainer. Perhaps you’d add to your dollar amount paid, and perhaps you’d subtract from it if you don’t want to build a relationship, or if you don’t think the process would be fun to you.
At this point, you should now have a formula that asks:
- What is the value of health, wellness, and fitness results?
- What’s the value of having a personal trainer’s guidance toward those results?
- What’s the value of how much fun you’d have in this process?
- What’s the value of building a relationship with a personal trainer?
Only you can know that...so what is it :-)
How much are you willing to pay for each personal training session?
Once you have that value number you can look to see if you are in the ballpark of what personal training likely costs. Perhaps you’d be willing to pay $12,000 to truly reach your fitness, health, and wellness goals, and perhaps you believe you can achieve those results in 12 months (be realistic here). That may look like $12,000 / 12 months which = a bit over $1,000 per month that you would be willing to pay for a personal trainer. If you wanted to train 3 days per week (we’ll assume that is 12 sessions per month), you would be willing to pay approximately $85 ($83.33) per session and you’d have 144 sessions to achieve success.
But there is one more part to this equation. You will want to look at what happens after you achieve your initial goals. Health, wellness, and fitness aren’t a one-time game. They are a long-game. That means that you’ll want to continue getting/staying fit perpetually. How does that change the personal trainer value equation months and years down the road? This is what we typically see:
- If you reach your goals and are happy to be there, you will see less value in maintaining than you saw in achieving them in the first place - this is why many people continue to pursue more goals as they move forward, but if you do not have goals (which your personal trainer should help you with), you will find less value in personal training over time.
- If you’ve built a great coach-client relationship over the course of the year, you’d add to your willingness to pay because it’s not just about fitness results anymore. However, if you haven’t built a coach-client relationship that you enjoy, once you reach your goals, you will find less value here because results were likely over-weighted in this equation.
- If you really enjoy your training - which we find that many people find enjoyment in their training as they build habits around it - you will add value to the equation over time. However, if you were all about results and never found enjoyment in the process (great coaches help you find value in it), you will not place much value there.
It’s at that point that you will want to refer back to the article titled “How Much Does It Cost To Hire A Personal Trainer?” In that article, we talk about the steps you’ll want to take to find a great personal trainer once you’re clear how much you can and want to pay for your ongoing training.
Summing Up
In reality, you’re the only person who can determine what personal training is worth to you. So much of that depends squarely on you. Certainly, personal trainers can, and will, have prices that you either agree or disagree with, but for you to align effectively with your future trainer, you need to feel really good about what you’re paying. If you’ll walk through this article and ask yourself those bigger questions, you’ll much more effectively start your personal training journey which will help you get results earlier and then for longer.
If you want to take a look at how OPEX Gyms view personal training, find the closest OPEX Gym to you and jump on a call with them. They will help you decide if Personal Training is a great service for you, and they’ll also talk about how OPEX Gyms have a new service that is The Evolution of Personal Training. Either way, they want to make sure that you are enjoying the right fitness experience for you!