Gyms and free-lance personal trainers can both be hit-or-miss. I'd consider (if I were in your shoes), do I prefer to train in gyms, or do I prefer to train outdoors/at home? Then I'd make a consultation with one or the other.
A lot of gyms have their trainers advertised on the wall, with information such as their qualifications and specialisations. You should still ask any PT you contact about their education - where did they study? How long was the course, and what was it like (really you want to know how intensive the study was how well they rose to the challenge, but if you ask them that are they honestly going to tell you "Oh, the course was to easy, I barely even had to activate my 2 brain cells!")? How long ago did they graduate? What have they done since then in expanding their knowledge?
There's several different companies that provide fitness qualifications. Some give short courses, others give long courses, some are focused on strength and conditioning, others on weight loss, and others on various health related issues. Each has its merrits and its shortcomings. But as a general rule of thumb:
- The longer and more intensive the course, the better educated the trainer.
- The longer and more intensive the course, the greater range of situations/goals the trainer can provide training for.
- The longer and more intensive the course, the less the trainer relies on niches and the more styles of training they can deliver based on a needs assessment.
- The shorter the course, the more likely the trainer will specialise in one specific area of fitness. Short-course graduates usually haven't learnt a whole lot during their course compared to those who have done much longer courses (naturally, the longer the course, the more topics can be covered), so they are more likely to rely on focusing on one or two specific goals rather than a broad range of goals.
A final note: for the love of all things good and merciful, don't make your assessment of whether you should hire a specific trainer based on how confident they are. Confidence in the fitness industry in generally a sign of 1 of 2 extremes: 1) The person knows so little about fitness that they haven't yet realised how much they don't know; 2) The person knows a lot, enough to know that the majority of other trainers don't have anywhere near the same knowledge base that they have. Look beyond confidence and find out WHY they're confident as a trainer.
Confidence and shyness in a trainer are both double-edged swords. Confidence usually results in the trainer instructing openly and sternly, and telling you what they want you to do every step of the way, but as it can come from either end of the knowledge spectrum, there's a high chance that the trainer is telling you the wrong thing to do every step of the way. Shyness seems to be most abundant in the middle-ranking trainers, who have a decent education - enough to know that they don't know all that much. If you get a shy trainer, they may be better equipped to train you than a lot of more confident trainers, but being shy, they may not speak up when they need to to get you doing the right thing, so it might serve you well to tell them to speak up if you're doing something wrong, and to ignore you when you complain about their annoyingly repetitive instructions.
