Singapore Personal Trainer | FAQ’s On Hiring A Personal Trainer In Singapore

A new client told me that prior to signing for my company’s services, she had met a few personal trainers in Singapore (both from fitness clubs and also freelancers) for consultation.

Like the majority of people who hire personal trainers, she wanted to lose weight and so she decided to do personal training. She said she had one before back in the UK but only got minimal results.

When I asked her what her trainer gave her, she said “Well, we do a lot of running over there. It was quite OK. Even though I hate running he was always there to motivate me.”

I asked further, “So after meeting a couple of trainers here in Singapore for consultation, what was their strategy?”

“All of them said that if I wanted to lose weight I’d need to do more cardio. And I guess this is true. Right?”

More cardio = Results?

————————

These are the common questions I get when I meet prospective clients. I just have to shake my head in disbelief thinking about how backdated and uninformed most personal trainers are.

If you’re thinking of hiring one, do yourself a favour and download this checklist.

If you have any questions, leave me a comment at the box below!

Ask any personal trainer in Singapore on whether you should or should not consume food after 6pm and I’d bet my last dollar that there’s still quite a number of them who’d still believe in this nutrition myth.

Granted, the body doesn’t really need that much calories prior to bed time because we are in “hibernation” mode when we sleep. But… (there’s always a but huh?) to always keep our body’s metabolism stoked, we’d need to feed our bodies every 3 to 4 hours.

A simple strategy we could use is to have the biggest meal at breakfast and as the day closes in, we end with our last meal as the smallest one. And YES, you CAN consume food right before you go to sleep.

Question is what kinds of foods?

The best would have to be a combination of a protein source and a fat source.  Eg. some cottage cheese with natural peanut butter or mixed nuts.

You see, our bodies were built to handle carbs earlier in the day (or post workout when our insulin sensitivity is high and all glucose coming from the sugars will be transported to where you want them to be, muscles and not fat cells).  The rest of the day should be fats and protein. In fact if you are sedentary, (i.e. seating on your lazy rears all the time) youdo not deserve any carbs!

And at every meal, you should be getting some protein source. Protein scores high on satiety level so you could be having 200 calories worth of protei and that could fill you up pretty good.

“Oh no! But won’t I get fat eating fat?”

Well, if it’s not hydrogenated fats (fried stuffs and processed foods that comes in colorful boxes), most natural fat sources are OK. though you should try having a good 1/3 split of saturated fat, mono-unsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats respectively.

Now, I know on one hand we have the carb fearing crowd and on the other the fat fearing crowd. And I can hear you guys whispering…

“Why don’t we just eat only protein? Voila!”

Not so fast boys and gals. If you consume just protein, the amino acids from the protein will be converted into glucose (or sugar or carbs) via a process called gluconeogenesis. So, inadvertently, you are running on glucose for energy.

So why don’t we just keep it simple?

• Have your largest meal as the 1st one
• Smallest meal as the last one
• Protein at every meal
• Carbs only at breakfast and post workout
• Fats at every meal that has no carbs

Easy?  OK, now go have your dinner!

Here are some of the frequently asked questions on hiring/finding a personal trainer in Singapore. Click on the links to find out more.

• How do I choose one?
  • Hire a trainer that is equipped with the latest knowledge
  • He has to always upgrade himself and be researching

• How much does it cost?
  • Price does not necessarily mean that a trainer is good or not
  • To play it safe, hire one with a money back guarantee.

• Which one to hire and why?
  • Don’t get one based just on certifications or years of experience
  • Instead, request for testimonials from past/current clients

• Where to do personal training?
  • Fitness centres/clubs
  • At home
  • Outdoors (parks, gardens, etc.)

PS: Get this checklist for a good head start: How To Choose A Personal Trainer 

As with in home training, outdoor training can be done with minimal equipment provided your personal trainer is experienced and versatile enough. Using the different terrains and fixtures like benches, tables and playground (if any), your trainer should not have any problems designing workouts that is not monotonous and keeps things fresh.

First thing that comes to mind with the mention of personal training would bring images of a gym setting with exercise machines and the trainer guiding you through each and every unit of it. This is, if you’ve read my other post(s), unnecessary. Though not optimal, it is not a must.

Consider weighing out the options of having an equipped gym but crowded during peak hours as opposed to having a big open space outdoors with just a simple resistance tubing/band. I’d choose the latter for fresh air, greenery and most importantly… personal space! (again, it depends on how well your personal trainer mix things up every now and then)

With resistance tubing/band coupled with your own bodyweight and outdoor fixtures/terrains, you are set to go. All the basic 7 movements can still be performed with ease and you don’t need no fancy equipment (or sharing sweaty benches)

7 Basic movements :

• Quad dominant exercises - you don’t need machines

• Hip dominant exercises - you don’t need machines, resistance bands would be useful

• Horizontal Pulling exercises - you don’t need machines, resistance bands would be useful

• Horizontal Pushing exercises - you don’t need machines

• Vertical Pulling exercises - you don’t need machines, resistance bands would be useful

• Vertical Pushing exercises - you don’t need machines, resistance bands would be useful

• Core Exercises - you don’t need machines

With resistance bands, any fixture can be looped around at different heights. And you can do both upper body pulling and pushing movements. Not to mention lower body quad and hip dominant exercises. The options are endless.

And the advantage of having a big outdoor space is you can do sprint intervals without banging into others. Try this the next time you enter a gym. Sprint across the gym 50 metres and then walk back to starting point. Repeat 5 to 6 times. All this without being obstructed by other members (or vice versa) Well, you get what I mean.

Yes, yes. We can do sprints on the treadmill but the impact it has on your joints, if not on your shins, is not worth the pain. Not to mention the member jogging on the treadmill next to you looking at you funny as you keep stomping on it.

So the verdict is out. You don’t need a gym to get a total body, fat blasting workout!

PS: If you intend to hire a trainer, get this checklist for a good head start: How To Choose A Personal Trainer

Singapore is booming with fitness centres opening up even in the heartland areas. What used to be a trend only for the fitness fanatics more than a decade ago, has now become a necessity and lifestyle for most common people.  More and more people understand the health benefits exercise does for them.

The first questions that comes to mind when joining a gym membership would be pricing, location and gym density during peak hours. Some gyms limit their membership when it’s too crowded and some don’t. It differs from fitness centres to fitness centres. Even the membership packages differs. So do your due diligence in finding the best gym membership that suits your needs.

In Singapore, the 3 largest chain of fitness centres would be California Fitness, Planet Fitness and Fitness First. There’s also a ‘ladies only’ gym by the name of Amore Fitness.

Here’s the club locations for each of the fitness centres.

Fitness First:

• AMK Hub
• Paragon
• The Cathay
• Capital Tower
• Millenia Walk
• One George Street
• OUB Centre
• One Raffles Quay

Planet Fitness:

• Great World City
• Far East Square
• Suntec City
• Chevron House
• Parkway Parade
• Vivocity

California Fitness:

• Orchard
• Raffles
• Bugis
• Novena Square

Amore Fitness:

• Bugis Junction
• Eastpoint
• Heartland mall
• Jurong Point
• Park Mall
• Woodlands
• Thomson Plaza

All these fitness centres would normally have personal training services and if you are interested in engaging one, don’t forget to download my checklist at the link below!
PS: Checklist on: How To Choose A Personal Trainer

You should prepare a set of questions and strategize a way of filtering through the good personal trainers from the ‘fly by night’ trainers.

Anyway, you are paying with your hard earned money right? It’s normal to want to have the best personal trainer you can afford who DELIVERS RESULTS.

At the end of this post, I’ll tell you how you can download my FREE checklist on How To Choose A Personal Trainer (And Not Get Ripped Off!).

Inside this comprehensive checklist, there are questions that you can use to interview your potential trainer. All the bases are covered here and it doesn’t matter where the personal trainer works at. Be it a fitness centre, a country club or if he/she is a freelancer.

The interview questions cover topics ranging from assessments and training to nutrition and accountability to even advanced qualifying questions to see if the trainer keeps up with the latest fitness studies/trends!

(image of checklist)

OK here’s how you can grab this powerful checklist.

1. Click here and you’ll be sent to another page.
2. On that page, fill in the form and at the “Please Enter Your Message” field, just type
3. “Send me the Checklist!“
4. Once we’ve received your message, we’ll send the checklist to your email where you’ll be given download instructions.

That’s it!

Good luck with your scouting.

Again, here’s the download link.

If you go to a restaurant and ordered steak and a side salad, what would you expect to get?

A steak and a side salad… right?

If you go to Amazon.com and ordered a hair dryer what would you expect to receive?

A hair dryer… right?

Ok, to clear the confusion (well I’m not trying to confuse you here) let me explain; I am just trying to give you an analogy.

When you hire a personal trainer, what do you expect to get? You don’t expect to get a personal trainer..right? It’s not the same as ordering steak and side salad or buying a hair dryer over the internet. What you expect is to reach your goals. Or in better words, RESULTS.

The reason you hire a trainer is to get results!

So listen up. Which personal trainer you hire is going to affect what kind of results you are going to get. Why? Because you hire a personal trainer and expect results, which are intangible. And trust me, results WILL vary. A LOT… Steak and dryer are tangible products so you know what you will get ultimately. Well, not with personal training results.

A few tips on which personal trainer you should (or should not) hire and why:

• Years of experience is not a good indicator of whether the personal is competent or not. I’ve seen rookies performing better than veteran trainers.

• Total number of clients trained would be a better gauge than years. More clients means more demand (though doesn’t apply in EVERY case). Use your own discretion. Try to get a personal trainer who have trained at least 30 clients.

• Of course, if you want more accuracy you should compare total hours of training experience. But one in a million personal trainers would actually keep track of those details.

• Check if he’s got testimonials to prove that he has delivered results to his past clients. Before/after pictures, video/audio testimonials or written testimonials would be good to have a look at.

• Or if he’s confident of his services, there shouldn’t be a problem to speak to one of his clients directly. With permission of course.

• Certifications, I would say are the worst indicator for hiring a personal trainer. Nowadays, anyone can get a personal training certification pretty easily. Even you, yes YOU! So don’t bother too much with a trainer’s certificate. he can have 20 certificates and don’t know jack but another trainer with one certificate can be 10 times better.

• With that, there are only 2 that I recommend that makes the cut. NSCA-CSCS or OPTS-CPT

• Pricing may or may not be a good indicator either but it does give a rough idea on how much demand the personal trainer has. Anything thats more than $120 would be considered high demand.

• And the biggie…… Does the personal trainer have a 100% money back guarantee? This would easily separate the elite from the average personal trainers. It’s how much confidence he has on his service to back it up with a money back guarantee.

OK, hope these tips will be useful for your personal trainer scouting. So which one should you hire? You already know the ‘whys’ …. Now it’s up to you to decide on the ‘which’.

All the best!

PS: Get this checklist for a good head start: How To Choose A Personal Trainer

Have you ever thought of hiring a personal trainer here in Singapore? I’m sure you must have asked yourself “how do I choose one”? “How do I qualify one to be the trainer that can help me towards your goals?”

Qualify before you hire.

You need to choose a personal trainer that is equipped with the latest knowledge of fitness and health and is always upgrading and researching to better himself. In order to sift through the competent ones over the average personal trainers out there in Singapore, there are a couple of pointers that I can present to you in this post.

• A good personal trainer will perform a form of movement screening to assess your posture and muscular imbalances. This is to prevent any potential injuries due to the imbalance that you may have.

• The personal trainer will take your blood pressure and heart rate to assess if you’re fit enough to start a workout regime.

• The personal trainer will take your bodyfat and girth measurements to keep track of your progress.

• The basic exercises that he’ll prescribe would be variations of squats, deadlifts, pushing and pulling movements in the horizontal and vertical planes and good core movements.

• He won’t focus on using machines as the basis of his program but instead free movements like resistance training like bodyweight, free weights, band training and corrective exercises.

• Your personal trainer will focus on compound movements working your total bodyfat each session or alternating an upper and lower body split.

Well, that’s more on the training portion of it. You may have heard before that nutrition will give 80% of your results and that is very true. Here are more pointers on nutrition:

• Your personal trainer should not give guidelines that follow fad diets like eat low fat/eat low carb/ eat less food/ eat ’soupy’ stuff/don’t eat after 6pm/eat less red meat

• He should give you a basic diet plan to follow and also guide you on nutrition and label reading, etc

• Your personal trainer should also recommend a few ‘quick start’ recipes for you to take immediate action on

• He should give you pointers on how to do healthy grocery shopping and explain to you the myths and misconceptions of nutrition

While all this looks good on paper, it doesn’t mean that you will be able to follow. We are creatures of habit and it does take effort to incorporate lifestyle changes. With that, your personal trainer need to keep you accountable for your own results. Eg:

• He needs to assess your nutrition and your training periodically

• He will make changes accordingly and make sure to keep track of your progress by always taking measurements

• If you’re away, he should create a special online training page for you equipped with individualized workouts with animated exercise pictures

• This is especially so when you always have to travel a lot

I hope the notes above would have given you a good summary of how to choose a personal trainer here in Singapore. It’s imperative that you take the effort to search for the right one for you. You want to get value for your money and expect to get results delivered as promised.

PS: Get this checklist for a good head start: How To Choose A Personal Trainer 

“Personal Training at home? How is that possible? You mean I got to get those machines and keep it in my house? ”

These are common skepticisms people have at the notion of working with a personal trainer at home. How can you actually get results when you don’t have your home equipped with all the machines and facilities the mega gym has?

The secret is…………

………….Well, there is no secret.

If a personal trainer tells you so, it’s like pissing on your feet and telling you that it’s raining. Or it may also mean he has no clue about designing a proper, minimalistic workout at all. Truth be told, you don’t actually need much equipment to get the desired results when hiring a personal trainer. It all depends on how experienced and versatile the trainer is.

Now, let’s look at the basic fundamentals of a properly balanced workout. It’s got to cover these basic movements (hang on with all these technical jargons yeah, it’s imperative that you know these so you could weed out the less competent trainers for the better ones when you intend to hire one in the future)

7 Basic movements :

• Quad dominant exercises - you don’t need machines

• Hip dominant exercises - you don’t need machines, free weights would be useful

• Horizontal Pulling exercises - you don’t need machines, free weights would be useful

• Horizontal Pushing exercises - you don’t need machines

• Vertical Pulling exercises - you don’t need machines, resistance bands would be useful

• Vertical Pushing exercises - you don’t need machines, free weights would be useful

• Core Exercises - you don’t need machines

It’s not difficult to find a personal trainer in Singapore to hire but don’t be surprised that when you’re seeking for one the jargons used above may sound alien to them. Nothing shocking because most trainers out there stop learning once they’ve gotten their basic certifications.

All right, consumer warnings aside let’s get to the whole point of this post.

In home or at the gym?
This post is to give a clearer picture of how personal training at home can be done and may prove to be better than joining a gym membership. The money that you will save from the membership fees and petrol back and forth locations (gym to house and vice versa) will be used to purchase some simple equipment (yeah, not the bulky ones!). Equipment needed for purchase (from top to least priority)

• Barbell with plates

• A pair of dumbbell with plates

• Resistance bands/tubings

• Swiss ball

• Medicine ball

• Exercise mat

• Foam rollers (to be used for deep massage)

• Step up boards

Equipment you can use from home

• Platforms of various heights (be it low height table, chairs, staircase)

• Sturdy objects to loop bands (pillar or heavy furniture)

• Extra Space (well not really an equipment but if you have a big space it’ll be of an advantage!)

• Tennis balls (this can replace foam rollers)

These are but a few of the plethora of equipment you can use to get great workouts at home. Very basic but is more than enough to get the results you want. Your home need not look like a gym equipment shop as the items above could be stored safely in an obscure location without needing to be an eyesore.

OK, so there you go. Workouts at home with a personal trainer without the hassle of monthly memberships and traffic jams.

Cheers and good luck to your fitness journey!

PS: Get this checklist for a good head start: How To Choose A Personal Trainer 

When it comes to personal training locations in Singapore, we have so many options to begin with. I’ll touch upon the common ones in this post. You can click on the hyperlinks to get more details on each particular type of location.

Usually, when someone wants to start personal training they would go to one of the big mega gyms, sign up as a member and then hire the trainer that is attached to that gym. (Note: the personal trainer the client is attached to may be a part-time freelancer as commercial gyms do hire freelancers)

Full timer or Part-timer?

The trainer would then train the client and make use of the machines that are readily available in the gym. Most personal trainers attached to gyms would base their workouts on exercising with big, bulky machines even though more and more scientific studies have shown that ‘free’, unrestricted movements like bodyweight exercise, free weights and exercise bands yields superior results.

But we can’t blame these trainers because if more and more people realize that machines are inferior, lesser people will sign up as members of gyms. From a marketing standpoint, this is a “NO-NO” for the company (fewer sales). Therefore, these trainers have no choice but to base workout programs using machines predominantly.

Hold on!

I’m not saying don’t go to gyms; it is still the BEST place to exercise. But if the personal trainer you hired keep giving you machine exercises, you’d better off training on your own as machines are ‘no-brainers’. There’s normally instructions label attached to the machines unit.

(More about why machines are useless and free movements are the way to go, click here)

OK?

Another location would be right at the comfort of your home. Well if you stay in a condominium you can train at the clubhouse’s gym. Depending on how well equipped it is, you may need to invest in extra equipment to embark upon a balanced workout routine.

Condo gyms can be less crowded and fully booked too depending on peak or non-peak hours. So it all depends on luck. If your personal trainer is competent enough, he should be able to come up with a decent program without even the need for much equipment.

If you’re staying in a landed property, you can train anywhere there’s space. The bigger the space the better, but it’s not a must. Heck, you can even train in a small room that’s barely a 100 square feet in size! Again, it all depends on the experience of your personal trainer. If he has to scratch his head to think of new exercises, you might have found the wrong one! So choose wisely.

Lastly, a personal trainer can bring you out and train in the outdoors. This would be the most fun of all locations. There are many parks in Singapore equipped with fitness stations. With simple equipment like bands and using the readily available, various height platforms you can find all over the park your personal trainer should have no problems designing a fun, weight loss, fat blasting workout for you. Of course, it depends on the creativity of your trainer.

The cons of training outdoors would be the unpredictable Singapore weather. It may rain or shine anytime so do be prepared to find the nearest sheltered location should it rain or be too unbearingly hot to exercise. Your personal trainer should advice you accordingly on what to wear, and make sure you hydrate yourself before, during and after the workouts.

PS: Get this checklist for a good head start: How To Choose A Personal Trainer