This is a very good question.  There are many trainers out there today and to be honest, many of them are crap!  It is very hard to tell the good ones from the bad by simply looking at them.  Although, generally if a trainer is in terrible shape him or herself chances are he or she is not going to be able to mentor you like I feel they should.  With me my physique was always my best marketing tool, I don’t just preach, I practice what I preach.

A good place to start would be to look at their education, unfortunately this can sometimes be misleading.  I have come across many trainers with university degrees in kinesiology, physiotherapy and many other sport related degrees.  These people generally have a very good knowledge of the human body but can’t seem to apply it.  Without their own time in the trenches, working out hard and picking up many tips and pointers you don’t learn in school, they can’t offer you real world knowledge.

If you want to change the way that your body looks you need to have a goal.  Goals are necessary in order to come up with a plan of attack, without a clear goal you will no doubt waste time with  program or routine that will leave you spinning your wheels and getting nowhere.   You may want to get into better shape to simply feel better or you may want to take it to the next level and develop a head turning physique.  Regardless of how big or small your goal is, you must first recognize that goal to understand what you have to do to achieve it.

You must take into account many factors when looking at your fitness goal.  Factors like:

• How many days a week am I willing to workout?
• What type of lifestyle do I want to maintain?
• Are my expectations realistic?
• What is my timeline?
• Do I REALLY want it?
• How much am I willing to spend?

Almost everyone I see in a consultation wants to lose weight, very few (and I mean very few) come to me with a specific body fat percentage they would like to be at, just a specific weight. The thing is losing weight is NOT what you want to do, you want to lose FAT and fat alone. Most weight loss approaches are exactly that, weight loss, body fat, water weight and lean body mass. The problem here is that more often than not people lose more water and lean body mass than they do body fat. In the end they are left with a smaller version of their original body or an even softer or flabbier body than before they lost the weight. The only way to become toned or leaner is to lose fat alone. As well, it is your body composition (body fat level) that determines your risks for diabetes, heart disease, hypertension etc. If you lose weight for health reasons but you maintain a high body fat percentage you have accomplished nothing from a health standpoint.

This is probably the most common thing I hear from women when I talk to them about resistance training.  NEWSFLASH!  You aren’t going to get “all big and bulky”!  First off, most women aren’t able to obtain a huge muscular physique, very few have the genetics to do so.  Second off, you don’t wake up one morning after lifting weights and find 30lbs of new muscle in the mirror.  Gaining muscle takes time and you will reach your goal and maintain that look long before you would have too much muscle.  Getting huge doesn’t happen by accident, it takes a lot of work and dedication.

Resistance training is the ONLY way to achieve a “tone” body, focusing only on cardio will leave you with a loose flabby appearance despite the weight loss.  Have a look around the gym sometime and watch the women with the best figures, they have the proper balance between resistance training and cardio.

What kind of shape are you in right now?   What kind of shape do you want to be in?  No one can say what the perfect body image is.  That is a personal thing.  After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder or so they say. 

When women look at the “beautiful” people in fashion magazines, they are led to believe that the ideal body image is to be skin and bone. Women will generally look at these images and hope to achieve the same look.  The thing is that these images belong more in medical journals under eating disorders than they do in our psyche as something to aspire to.  Often these models are considered clinically obese despite being so thin.  They have so little muscle mass that their body fat percentage is actually quite high.

My philosophy when it comes to resistance training is pretty basic.  Go to the gym on a regular basis, work hard, fatigue the muscles, rest and do it all over again.  You don’t have to do all kinds of confusing programs with many different exercises in order to develop the best body you can. The best approach is a simple well balanced one that you can follow and adapt as your goals change.  This applies to the beginner as well as the experienced lifter (I will get into programs for each group later on).

We are often mislead by the muscle magazines that tell us how to train like a certain pro bodybuilder or have the newest and greatest way to get a six pack.  The bottom line is magazines have to sell in order to make money, and they want to suck you in with the latest fitness “discovery”.

Most of the information confuses the person new to fitness by contradicting other magazines and sometime themselves with their training information.   As for any workout you read from a pro bodybuilder, take it with a grain of salt.  If you follow their program, you will probably be overtrained in short order.  They are nowhere near the average person.  So what works for them will more than likely not work for you.

I touched on this topic when I wrote about your goals.  How often you are going to be resistance training over the course of the week depends on your goals and the level you are at.  The more experienced you get and the higher your expectations are, the more often you will have to go to the gym.

It isn’t just a case of how often you are going to have to go to the gym but what you are going to do there.  Are you going to train all the muscle groups each time or are you going to split your muscle groups up? Well again, this depends.  We will look at this from a beginner’s perspective to an experienced lifter’s perspective.

I believe that you should resistance train at least three days per week, saying that, I have had people make significant gains with only two days per week.  However, these people worked VERY hard over those two days and admitted there is no way that they would work that hard on their own.  Their goals were not to make major changes to their appearance but to mainly increase their level of strength.

Cardio….hmmmm…Anyone who knows me or has trained with me, knows my feelings about cardio.  Now don’t take this the wrong way, cardiovascular training does has its advantages.  Personally, I hate it with a passion!  I would rather eat 500 less calories a day then sweat my butt off on a treadmill for an hour.  Have you ever gone into your local gym and looked at the people on the cardio machines?  More often than not, they are the people with the worst physiques in the gym.  Why is this?  Let me tell you.

Like I stated earlier, your body adapts to various changes, internal or external, and it can adapt in many ways.  I have informed you that to build muscle you must challenge your muscles by lifting weights.  Your body is put under the external stress of having to move more weight and must adapt by adding muscle to make the task easier.

By now you know what you want to achieve.  You can picture your new body and you are ready to sacrifice whatever you have to in order to reach your goals.  So what does it take to reach them?  How are you going to succeed where so many have failed?  That’s why we at Emerge are here, to help you put it all together and get you to achieve or surpass these goals in record time.

You need to have the proper balance between exercise, diet, rest, and supplementation.  The first three are the most important.  The type of exercise and diet you choose will make or break your progress.  As for rest, without it your muscles will not recover and grow.