I was just tested by a personal trainer

[CobaltSSGuy]

Here are the Results:

He had me do some warm up cardio which was relatively simple.

Then we did some cardio routines with the step boxes, push ups, jumping ect. All in all it seemed like plyometrics in a smaller scale. Push ups were a piece of cake. The rest of it kicked my ass.

Finally he tested my flexability, went well.

We went over my results at his desk. He said he was shocked by my strength. He said that he works to get people to my strength level and the fact that I haven't worked out regularily in the last 6 months is great for where I'm at. He also said that my flexibility is pretty good for my size.

He bad: he said my cardio sucked. Not As blunt like that but he said I really need to improve that. I could tell that he felt ackward saying that to m so I cracked a joke. I said " hey call me if you need to move a treadmill, just dot expect me to run on it."

finally we ran my bmi and all that good stuff. Here is what the results are:

I weighed in at 273 (I wAs 248 6-7 months ago)
height 5'10
age 22
body % 32.6
fat mass lbs: 89
muscle, bones, organ mass total: 184lbs

he said if I drop 20 lbs my b% will be in the 20s which is healthy.

I got work to do. Time to start a journal.

Any thoughts? Does this guy sound legit? I was thinking of scheduling him twice a month. I'm not sure if it's worth the money that they want. Especially since i've been successful losing weight on my own before.

 

[Goldfish]

I probably would have tested BMI before anything else, but what we've observed from him testing you tells us nothing about his ability to train you. Has he proposed a program to you? Are you looking at hiring him purely for fitness tests? Without knowing what you plan on doing with him every fortnight, how can I objectively say if he's worth it?

As a general rule, a personal trainer is worth it if they give you better training and better results than you would have had on your own, or if they provide you some service that you could not have covered without them.

 

[dswithers]

How did he determine your body fat percentage?

BMI is just a ratio of your body weight to your height and does not take into account your frame or how much muslce you have, and is generally a useless number.

It is not unusual that you retained or even gained strength if you gained body weight. Eating a caloric surplus is somewhat naturally anabolic. And it is not hard to predict that if you gain a lot of body fat you will necessarilly be worse at cardio type stuff like running, stepping, jumping, etc. since you are carrying a lot more dead weight (body fat) along with you. So your trainer didn't tell you anything that wasn't predictable.

Also, for a male, body fat in the 20's is pretty poor. You need to be thinking under 20 to be in the minimally healthy range and prefferably under 12 to be extremely healthy (abs tend to start to show around 10% and under).