You would think that Cape Town in South Africa is a beautiful city with great outdoors, where people can swim, surf, hike, bike, climb, walk, run or get physically active in other ways all year round. Thus, everybody should be at least in decent shape and there is no real need for a personal trainer.
Yet, at a closer look, a lot of people in Cape Town complain about lower back pain, a bit (or a bit more) of extra padding around the midsection and being out of breath just from walking up the stairs. Here are 5 reasons why it may make sense to hire a personal trainer in Cape Town:
- Motivation: A lot of the time, just having a beautiful mountainside such as Table Mountain or even Lion’s Head is not enough, but you need someone to chase you up there. Hiring a personal trainer can be motivational by itself. By hiring someone to help you with your training, you make a statement that making a change or an improvement is important to you. A good personal trainer should be able to help with realistic and measurable goal setting and be able to make sure that the way to getting to these goals is as fun and motivational as possible.
- Results: How can you improve your time running up Lion’s head? How do you lose that last little bit of stubborn body fat before hitting the beaches of Clifton or Camps Bay? You need to find a way of getting results. After setting the goals, a proficient personal trainer is able to guide their trainee towards this goal as efficiently and effectively as possible. In other words: His personal training program should give you results that you never thought possible.
- Expertise: The best personal trainers know everything they need, in order to help you with your goals: They know the most effective exercises, are able to teach you all the movements in the most efficient and and effective way and will be able to dial in your nutrition in order to support the exercise program. Granted, veteran coaches are tough to find in the mother city, but he will help you get the most out of what Cape Town has to offer.
- Proficiency: Having a personal trainer as a fitness expert will help you become more proficient in terms of movement and nutrition yourself. The goal should be continuous learning until the use of a trainer is no longer necessary. Leaving you with independence in a city of limitless possibilities, being able to surf in both Oceans, climb the top of Devil’s peak or run along the scenic Ocean Drives.
- Convenience: All the other advantages may be worth little, if it is very hard to find time for the proper instruction. Or if it is compromising all the time you could spend enjoying Cape Town’s features that make it such a beautiful city and take advantage of its high life quality factor. When hiring a personal trainer, it comes handy that you can often times appoint a time with him/her that is convenient for you, as opposed to taking a course or class where you are constrained by the scheduled times.
As you can see, there are quite a few benefits from a personal training program in Cape Town, even though the city caters to a lot by itself. Now you just need to find a way how to pick a personal trainer that is capable of fulfilling all these criteria. Finding a great personal trainer in Cape Town can prove to be quite a mission, and will be the topic of another article.
Jobst Olschewski owns and operates Cape CrossFit, one of the first facilities to offer CrossFit in South Africa and personal training in Cape Town.
