Guest post by Rich Leigh, personal trainer and founder of weight loss agency www.fatfreefitness.co.uk, based in Cheltenham and Gloucester.

Let’s face it, Personal Training has moved on very little since becoming popular in the last decade or so. It could be down to the ‘one size fits all’ approach to training. Or the fact that the vast majority of trainers spread themselves too thinly and very rarely specialise in one field in a bid to maximise income. Whichever the reason, I feel Personal Training as an industry has stagnated. Not that there aren’t great trainers out there, because there are. They’re just very few and far between!

Weight loss, muscular gains, sports performance, injury rehabilitation, core stability – these are typical offerings by Personal Trainers. At the beginning of this year, I began to question the ability to wear so many hats and indeed still be a ‘specialist’. For example, if you were interested in becoming more knowledgeable about a certain academic subject, would you choose to be taught by a professor of the subject, or by a primary school teacher, who may have a broader knowledge base, but a more diluted knowledge of the subject of interest itself?

Besides what I’d call ‘sidestep developments’ in the diet and fitness industries, such as PowerPlates (which grew in popularity in probability through paid-for celebrity endorsement and the constant search for an easier way to exercise), nothing of note has improved in the sector except for it becoming a much bigger commercial commodity. After all, exercise is what it is. You learn how to do it, you do it and you reach your goal. The wheel has no real need to be re-invented whilst it still perfectly fulfils its function.

With the above in mind, I founded a Personal Training Agency, which at present works solely within Gloucestershire. But we operate with one key difference that people in the past have either been afraid to do, or never thought of doing: we incentivise training by talking the language of the times.

Simply put, with Fat Free Fitness, if you lose weight, you save money. In the current economic climate, many Personal Trainers are finding it difficult to succeed for one reason – they are afraid to guarantee their results. A client training with us benefits from our ‘Lbs for £s’ programme, which means, for every pound in weight they lose, they get £1 off their next session. Given that the maximum a client will pay in Gloucestershire with us is the already comparatively low rate of £25 for an hour’s training, they can make huge savings, whilst also inching towards their goal. (OK, pun maybe intended!)

At Fat Free Fitness, our trainers have all been handpicked because they know about weight loss and have demonstrated through their experience and education that this is where their priority lies. They don’t recommend the ‘diet pills’ method of weight loss (which I personally know one trainer in the area advocated to a client), but methods that work, that are sustainable and have been proven to result in the client’s desired goal. After all, this is why a client uses a trainer; because they buy into the fact that we are able to help them reach their goal. Lose sight of that goal and we cheapen the entire industry.

Clients come to Fat Free Fitness because they want to lose weight. By serving this admittedly wide niche, we are able to quantify the end goal and produce something tangible from which clients can see their progress. Namely a healthy weight range for them to work towards. To begin Personal Training as a client without setting a goal or having one set for you is like staying on a bus without specifying your destination: the journey may be enjoyable, but you get nowhere fast, and you’ll have paid a lot of money for the privilege!

Our clients can view their weight loss and money-saving graphically on the Fat Free Fitness website. Even users who simply choose to sign up to the site for free can benefit from this too! Whether one of our trainers updates this or the cuser does it themselves using our free online tool, this reinforces their weight loss progress. And all this information can be shared on social networking sites if they wish, as well as viewing weight loss tips, calculating their BMI and more, making it a fantastic online tool. However, our primary service remains very much an offline offering. Unlike the numerous ‘online’ personal training sites that have been cropping up of late.

We’re not going to re-invent the personal training wheel. What we will do however is refine the rough edges and ensure a smoother ride. We offer clients as clear a picture as possible of how and when they’ll reach their goal and reward them for success along the way. We of course retain clients where we can after they’ve reached this goal, but at a 20% reduced fee for as long as they stay within their initially agreed target weight zone.

It’s about time the Personal Training industry moved forward and became more affordable and less exclusive. For instance, where personal computers were once the domain of the wealthy and a sign of status, lives are now enriched by their mainstream availability. Personal training too needs to develop beyond being a social status identifier and the domain of the rich and celebrity amongst us, and serve the purpose for which is what intended: helping people reach their fitness, aesthetic and health goals.

I know that Fat Free Fitness can help it get there.

Check out David White of final fitness on the fat free fitness website  

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