Why my goal is for you to stop needing me

It is an odd thing to advertise. Come and pay me, and my aim is that you will not need to for very long.

I have thought about whether to put it quite so plainly and I keep arriving at the same answer, which is that it is true and it is the whole reason I work the way I do.

The incentive nobody mentions

Personal training has a business model problem that almost nobody in the industry says out loud. The trainer is paid per session. Therefore the trainer’s income depends on you continuing to book sessions. Therefore the quiet, structural incentive is for you to remain a person who needs a trainer.

I want to be fair here. I do not think many trainers sit down and plan this. It happens on its own, through a hundred small decisions that all seem reasonable. The programme lives in the trainer’s head rather than yours. You are told what to do today rather than why. The workout requires the equipment in that particular room. Nobody ever quite gets round to explaining how to change the programme when your life changes.

None of that is sabotage. But the effect is that after two years you have got fitter and you have not got more capable of managing your own training, and the moment the sessions stop, so does everything else.

What I am actually selling

I am selling knowledge, and the fitness that comes with acquiring it.

There is a difference between being trained and being taught. Being trained is somebody counting your repetitions and telling you when to stop. Being taught is walking away able to tell, from the inside, whether a movement is doing its job. Whether your back has held its shape. Whether the effort is in the muscle you meant it to be in. Whether today is a day to add something or a day to leave it alone.

That second thing takes longer to hand over. It is also the only part that is still worth anything to you in five years.

Knowledge really is power, and once you have it, it cannot be taken away. Not by a change of job, not by moving house, not by a gym closing down, not by me being unavailable.

What it looks like in practice

The process is deliberately front loaded. It is heavier at the start than a lot of people expect and it gets lighter, which is the opposite shape to most training relationships.

We start with a conversation, and it is free. What you want to be able to do, how much time you honestly have rather than how much you wish you had, and where you would want to train: outdoors, at home with or without equipment, or in a gym you already pay for. If I do not think I am the right person to help, I would rather say so at this point than take your money and find out later.

Then I build something that fits. Ten to thirty minutes, covering strength, cardiovascular fitness, mobility and balance. Built around your life, not around an ideal week that does not exist. A programme you will not do is worth precisely nothing, however good it looks on paper.

Then I teach you the form. This is the long part and it is the part you are really paying for. Movement by movement, until you can feel the difference between right and not quite right without me telling you. We work on what to do when something aches, how to make a movement easier on a bad day and harder on a good one, and how to tell the difference between discomfort you should work through and discomfort you should not.

Then you train yourself. We carry on until you feel you do not need me standing there. Not until I decide, until you feel it. For some people that is a handful of sessions. For others it is longer, particularly if there is an injury history or a lot of ground to make up. Either way it is the destination rather than something that happens by accident.

Then I stay available. This is the bit people are most surprised by. Stopping regular sessions is not the end of it. I am there when you want me: if you want to take things further, if you hit a plateau, and everyone does, if you are struggling to come back after an illness, or simply to talk through what to progress to next. Some people book once a month. Some I do not hear from for a year and then we spend an hour rebuilding something. Both are the system working as intended.

What this means for what you spend

Practically, it means most people spend less with me over time rather than more.

There is a cluster of sessions at the beginning while the programme is built and the form is learned. Then it thins out. Then, for a lot of people, it becomes occasional: a session when something changes, a half hour online when a question comes up, a review after a period of not much happening.

I am aware this is a strange thing to design on purpose. I have made my peace with it. I would rather work with people who come back because they choose to than people who come back because they were never given enough to manage on their own.

The part that makes it work

None of this succeeds if you are not curious. The people who get the most out of working with me are the ones who ask why. Why this movement and not that one. Why it is three sets today. Why we are not doing the thing their neighbour swears by.

I like those questions. Every answered why is a piece of the programme that has moved from my head into yours, and that transfer is the entire job.

The alternative is a person who has been getting fitter for two years and still cannot run their own training. I do not think that is a good outcome, however good the fitness is.

So: my goal is to teach you to not need a personal trainer, because you have the tools. That is not a slogan I have put on the website to sound different. It is the shape of the work.

If that sounds like the way you would want to be taught, the first consultation is free.