What a Good Personal Trainer Does Between Your Sessions

A personal trainer designs your programme, coaches you through it, and decides what changes next. The part you see is the session: technique, loads, encouragement. The part you do not see is where most of the value is made. Between sessions, a good trainer reviews what you did, plans the next session around how the last one went and how your week looks, adjusts for sleep, stress, travel and niggles, and keeps the long-term plan pointing at your goal. If your trainer only thinks about you while you are in the room, you are buying supervision rather than coaching.

Before the next session: the review

After every session I write notes. Not elaborate ones, but specific enough to be useful a week later. A typical entry covers:

• Every exercise, the load, sets and reps, and how many reps were left in reserve.
• Technique notes: “hips rose early on the last set of Romanian deadlifts”, “much better bracing on squats today”.
• Anything you mentioned in passing: a stiff knee, a bad week at work, two nights of broken sleep, a holiday coming up.
• One thing to change next time.

That last line matters most. It is the difference between a session that follows on from the last one and a session made up on the spot. Ask your trainer whether they keep notes and what they did with last week’s. A good answer is specific.

Programme design: the work you never see

A programme is not a list of exercises. It is a set of decisions about how much work you can recover from, in what order, over how many weeks, to arrive at a particular result. Writing one properly involves:

1. Choosing the main movements based on your goal, your assessment and your history. Someone with a cranky lower back may build the hinge from a trap bar or a Romanian deadlift long before a conventional barbell deadlift.
2. Setting weekly volume, meaning how many hard sets each muscle group gets. Too little and nothing changes; too much and you stay sore and stall.
3. Planning progression. Will loads go up each week, reps first then load, or in waves? This is the core of progressive overload, and it has to be planned, not improvised.
4. Building in easier weeks at sensible intervals so fatigue does not accumulate unnoticed.
5. Writing the solo sessions. If you train once a week with me and once alone, the solo session needs to be clear enough to follow without me there.

This usually happens in blocks of four to six weeks, with small changes every session and bigger ones at the end of each block.

Adjusting to your actual life

The plan written in week one assumes an average week. Very few weeks are average. Much of what a trainer does is quietly adapting the plan to what is really happening.

Bad sleep or a heavy work week

If you arrive after three short nights, the planned top set probably should not happen. I keep the movements but reduce load or volume, so you still train and still practise, without digging a hole. Pushing hard on a depleted week rarely produces the result people hope for.

Travel

Before a trip, I will usually send a short hotel or bodyweight session and adjust the first session back so you are not jumping straight to the loads you left at.

Niggles and minor aches

Something sore is not always a reason to stop training, but it is always a reason to change something. That might mean swapping a barbell exercise for a dumbbell version, changing range of movement, or working around the area for a week. Anything sharp, worsening or not settling within a few days should be checked by your GP or a physiotherapist, and a good trainer will tell you that rather than guess.

Communication between sessions

This varies a lot between trainers, so it is worth asking before you start. A reasonable standard is:

• A clear answer to sensible questions within a working day.
• Your solo sessions written out, with loads or a target effort.
• A quick check if you have flagged something: a sore shoulder, a hard week, an event coming up.
• No pressure to message daily or log every meal unless that genuinely helps you.

The aim is enough contact to keep things on track, not a stream of motivational messages. Most of the people I coach are busy professionals; they want useful information and then to get on with their day.

Keeping the long view

A good trainer is also the person holding the bigger picture when you are focused on this week. Every four to eight weeks I look back at the numbers: how lifts have moved, how often you have trained, how your InBody results have changed if we are tracking them. Then we decide whether the plan is still the right one.

Sometimes the honest answer is that something needs to change: the goal, the frequency, the nutrition approach, or simply the expectation. Sometimes it is that progress is fine and you just cannot see it from the inside. Either conversation is part of the job.

A checklist: is your trainer doing the unseen part?

• Do they refer to what you did last session without checking their phone first?
• Do loads and exercises change in a planned way, rather than at random?
• When you mention bad sleep or a sore knee, does the session actually change?
• Do you have something written to follow when you train alone?
• Have you had a proper review of progress in the last two months?
• Would they tell you to see your GP or a physio if something needed it?

If most answers are yes, you have a coach. If most are no, you have someone counting reps.

How this works at The Highgate House

In the private 1-1 studio on Archway Road, every session is planned in advance from notes on the previous one, and adjusted in the room when the day calls for it. Solo sessions are written out for you, the InBody scanner is used periodically to check direction, and progress is reviewed in blocks rather than left to drift. I have coached for more than ten years and work mainly with people over 30 who have full diaries, so the planning is built around the week you actually have. If you would like to understand the session itself, our guide to what 1-1 personal training in Highgate includes covers that side.

For background on how much activity adults should aim for, the UK Chief Medical Officers’ guidance is summarised on gov.uk.

Questions we get asked

Does a personal trainer write my programme for days I train alone?

A good one should, if you are training alone between sessions. Ask before you start whether solo sessions are included.

Should a personal trainer give nutrition advice?

Within limits. General, mainstream guidance on protein, portions and habits is reasonable. Detailed medical or clinical nutrition advice belongs with a GP or registered dietitian.

How much contact should I expect between sessions?

Enough to answer questions, adjust for problems and keep solo sessions clear. Daily messaging is not necessary for most people.

What if my trainer never changes the programme?

Ask what the plan is for the next four weeks. If there is no clear answer, that is useful information.

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