What You Don't Know About Your Personal Trainer Can Hurt You

Some certifications are more legitimate than others.
By Bethany Lye for MSN Health & Fitness

Search the words “personal training certification” on the Web and you’ll generate a long list of acronym-heavy diploma-granting fitness organizations—there’s ISSA, IFPA, NESTA and NCSF, for starters. Some of these organizations have higher standards than others, and most of their links even lead to respectable-looking Web sites. But buyer beware. Unless you know what to look for, hiring a personal trainer could do your body more harm than good.

Fed up with the growing number of “bad trainers” in his profession, last year personal trainer Harry Hansen sat down in front of a computer “to try a little experiment.”

“I downloaded a personal training exam. It cost $39.99, the cheapest, quickest program I could find,” says Hansen. “I took the test that day and put it in my son’s name: Dylan Hansen. A few weeks later, his diploma came in the mail.”

Problem No. 1: Dylan did not take the test.

Problem No. 2: Dylan is 7 years old.

“It just goes to prove that anybody can get certified,” says Hansen, a trainer of more than 20 years.

Harley Pasternak, arguably the hottest personal trainer in the country, would agree. His current list of celebrity clientele includes Jessica Simpson, Katherine Heigl and Eva Mendes. But even more impressive—and rare in the fitness field—is the fact that Pasternak holds advanced degrees in nutritional sciences and kinesiology.

“There are really no barriers of entry whatsoever in the field of fitness training today,” says Pasternak, who estimates that, over the course of his career, he’s interviewed more than 100 personal trainers and—despite greatly needing the extra help—hired just three. “It’s just so hard to find someone who’s qualified,” he says.

Enter Romeo Strann, a 35-year-old certified personal trainer from Brooklyn, NY. Last fall, Strann (whom it’s fair to call “buff”) visited a local gym, hired a personal trainer to update his workout routine and ended up walking away with a job offer from the facility’s manager. “She said, ‘No problem, I can take you on as a trainer, but we’re going to give you some in-house foundation training first.’” Strann recalls. This foundational training lasted six full days at eight hours a pop. “And then they put me on the gym floor and called me a trainer.”

But did he actually know how to train clients? “Definitely not,” says Strann, who has since earned a second, and more esteemed, personal training certification. “I didn’t know much about the body. There were certain muscles I was still unsure of—you can’t learn the entire human anatomy in six days.”

Dr. Bruce Thomas, a sports medicine physician affiliated with the U.S. Olympic Committee, says scenarios like this are “a recipe for disaster.” While most personal trainers are “well-intentioned” he says, “unqualified trainers can cause harm.”

Yet, thanks to aging baby boomers, rising incomes and an increased public awareness in maintaining health, gyms are progressively pushing trainers onto the fitness floor before they’re ready. Fitness professionals are in short supply but high demand, and this momentum is unlikely to stall anytime soon, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, which predicts that the “employment of fitness workers is expected to increase much faster than the average for all occupations through 2014.”

Struggling to find quality trainers to staff his gyms, Hansen recently set out on his own “to fix a very broken system.” In December 2006, he co-founded a school licensed by the New York State Department of Education that focuses solely on educating aspiring personal trainers. Called the American Academy of Personal Training, “the school is our way of raising the bar on this issue,” says Hansen.

Thomas and Pasternak, who also agree that the certification current system needs a makeover, support streamlining the certification process. “There really needs to be state licensing of personal trainers,” Thomas says. Pasternak advocates an even narrower scope: “Just like with doctors, nurses, chiropractors and dentists, there should be one organization handing out certifications—and just one. Fitness training is a health profession and it should be treated as such.”

Cedric Bryant, a chief science officer at the American Council on Exercise—one of the more esteemed organizations to certify personal trainers—says he believes the current certification scheme is sufficient, but that consumers need to be better informed.

“Don’t be afraid to shop around,” says Bryant. “The thing that surprises me most is that people will do more critical shopping and be more selective with regard to who will repair their automobile than who repair their bodies.”

Hansen suggests these three must-ask questions when selecting a trainer: “Where is your certification from? Did your certification require you to have hands on training?” and “Do you have any references I can call?”

According to Pasternak and Thomas, the most qualified trainers have an academic degree in the field of kinesiology, exercise physiology or physical education. After that, Pasternak recommends seeking out trainers with certifications from the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) or the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA). Thomas’s top two certifying agencies are the ACSM and the ACE. “Every little gym has a bulletin board full of personal trainers,” the physician says. “But if I don’t see one of these acronyms on someone’s business card, I steer people away.”

So, in a nutshell: Ask questions, shop around and don’t settle for just anyone who could look good in Spandex. Take care of your body—because there’s no guarantee that the fitness industry will.

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