A Personal Trainer is not a Physical Therapist

Key Points: Too many personal trainers are trying to act like physical therapists. Personal Trainers need to be very careful about what about and how we give advice regarding injuries.

There’s a trend that I’ve been seeing over the past five to ten years that has started concerning me. There are certain buzz words that I have seen starting to pop up in the fitness industry that, while I don’t disagree with most of them, I think are well outside the scope of what a personal trainer should be doing. I keep seeing personal trainers talk about mobility, rehab, prehab, and corrective exercises in ways that make me wonder why their client isn’t seeing a physical therapist instead of a personal trainer. These aren’t bad things, necessarily, but when a client comes to me, they usually want to get stronger, faster, or more generally physically fit. That is my goal for them as well. I can also design a program that will help them stay healthy and lower their risk of an injury. However, when I’ve been in commercial gyms, I generally see more and more personal trainers acting like physical therapists than trainers.

I see them going through countless mobility drills, foam rolling, stretching, and corrective exercises while neglecting the very thing most of their clients want. Many personal trainers are so obsessed with rehab, prehab, and mobility that they never end up actually putting their client through any actual training. They’ll do 20 minutes of cardio, 30 minutes of “warm ups” that essentially consist of mobility work, balance work and corrective exercises for problems their clients don’t have, and then finish with 10 minutes of actual training. I’m not sure exactly where this trend started, but it seems like an absolutely horrible idea. The worst are when you see youtube videos of personal trainers with some kind of title like “This will fix 90% of your shoulder issues.” Funny how, as someone with chronic knee and shoulder problems from the Marines, I’m always in the 10% which the exercise/stretch/technique aggravates. It took me far too long to stop listening to garbage like that.

I have a friend who uses a fully remote personal trainer. One day my friend came to me and asked me what I thought about using instability instruments in training (using unstable training surfaces or equipment). The question made me uncomfortable because I knew she had an online coach before I had started this business. If you are paying someone to be your coach for a significant length of time, I should hope you trust them and are following their directions. She persisted, and I finally said, “Personally, I would never use them for strength training unless my client needed it specifically to get good at a sport or something, like maybe surfing? I don’t know. If your coach is telling you to do something, you should probably do it…. Oh! ButI do use them all the time with my physical therapist.” Turns out, that’s exactly why she was asking me. Her physical therapist was giving her exercises to do that involved instability training and her online-only personal trainer was telling her not to do them. So either her (and my) physical therapists have no idea what they’re doing or her personal trainer is wrong and way out of line by telling her to ignore her healthcare professional. Heck, it could even be both. But if she wanted a second opinion, the second opinion shouldn’t be her non-certified, non-accredited, personal trainer. And once I realized that she was asking me because she was injured, I told her she should ignore my opinion as well.

I do know a lot about corrective exercises, stretches, and the healing process. If you have been in the Marines Corps for more than two years you are, frankly, probably broken, so most of the people I’ve worked with have some chronic injury or pain. I can help them train around that pain and possibly help with balancing them out if they have an issue. However, the last thing they need is me trying to fix their problem because that’s not what I’m trained to do and not what I’m good at. I’m not a physical therapist and I would never claim to be one. If someone is injured they need to see a physical therapist and figure out how to improve their issues and I can work with both them and their physical therapist to keep them going in the right direction in the meantime.