By Leo Shveyd, Co-Owner at Advanced Wellness

“Personal training” traditionally refers to one-on-one training, one coach to one trainee.  However, personalized training can have many of the same benefits as personal training as well as actually adding a few more!

Personalized training is accomplished in a semi-private setting (1 coach to 4 or fewer clients) and this is our model at Advanced Wellness. While for the first ten years of our history, we used a one-on-one personal training approach at our gym, we ultimately shifted to semi-private training sessions when we envisioned being able to reach more clients, while also helping our clients achieve even greater success using this approach.

We know that when delivering a personalized training experience to our clients, that not only do they get the benefit of one-to-one coaching (at a much-reduced cost by the way), but they also benefit from hearing us coach other clients and share and communicate with their fellow workout partners. They tell us that they actually prefer this approach to training because it combines all the benefits of being personally coached while adding the power of community into the equation.

What Defines the Best “Personalized” Training Experience?

In order for a workout to be personalized, it should include the following components:

• Be tailored to a client’s specific goals
• Incorporate information about a client’s lifestyle and current movement capacity
• Be scaled and scalable as a client makes progress
• Ultimately make clients BETTER.

Goal-oriented at the Individual Level

Typically, a personalized fitness program is designed based on the client’s initial and very specific goals.  These goals can include objectives such as building strength, flexibility, endurance, mobility, injury recovery, as well as … once an individual’s motives for their training program are determined, the appropriate strategies in terms of workout progressions can be planned and executed to accomplish these personal athletic and fitness goals.

Incorporates Client Lifestyle Considerations

All personalized training programs must consider client lifestyle factors which impact readiness and receptivity when it comes to fitness. These include factors such as sleep, nutrition and overall stress management.  How these factors impact each person help determine whether or not a given client is able to progress optimally toward their goals.  Moreover, training load will need to be adjusted over time in order to finetune any successful personalized program.

Personalized Workout Planning: Scalable and Scaled

An experienced fitness program designer will put together a sample fitness program that can be initially applied to a wide variety of clients, but a great fitness coach will implement this by adapting it specifically to the individual in front of them.

Great coaches understand that in order to push clients toward their goals, the components of a program must be appropriately challenging. Too easy and too challenging will both miss the mark.  When considering movement specifically, coaches will consider the appropriate breathing strategy, alignment, degree of complexity (i.e. one step or more to make it appropriately challenging) and the amount of resistance.  With these factors appropriately adjusted for the client, the likelihood of progressive achievement and fitness performance increases.  At Advanced Wellness, we believe this is our greatest asset:  we hire great coaches that know how to deliver and scale the right training program for each individual client.

Makes Us All – BETTER

Finally, a scalable and scaled program needs to fundamentally make the trainee BETTER. They must see results, feel results and see progress along their personal continuum of performance.

In our experience, we have seen more people get better results in a semi-private setting.  And our clients tell us that working along-side others with the benefit of great coaching, delivers far better results for them than one-on-one training with a single coach.

We are so thankful for this feedback from our community of fitness fans and athletes at Advanced Wellness. It has inspired us to shift primarily to a personalized training approach with the results being that our clients are…BETTER!