Personal Training

Regretfully due to the covid-19 pandemic, I have taken the decision to permanently close down my gym and return to fulltime education. Due to this I am no longer taking on clients in the Southampton area.

It doesn’t matter if you’re an experienced exerciser or have never been in a gym before. From the moment you first step into my gym, my sole focus is on helping you reach your goals and maintain the results!

When it comes to exercise and nutrition, the media is awash with quick fixes and miracle cures. As a personal trainer, I have spent the last thirteen years separating fact from fiction and what works from what doesn’t.

Whatever your goal is, be it, reducing body fat, increasing muscle mass or getting rid of pain. What you do outside the gym is just as important as what you do inside it. Your nutrition, work life, hobbies, sleep patterns and postural habits are an integral part of what makes your body the way it is.

For this reason I give advice that covers all these areas. I endeavor to make our time together a learning experience which will help you work towards your goals even when you are out of the gym.

Everything listed below is included as part of the service:

Regularly updated Exercise Programs That Are Individually Tailored To You.

Initial Fitness & Postural Assessment.

One To One Personal Training In My Private Gym.

Home/Gym Exercise Plans.

Nutrition Plans – Learn How To Control Your Weight For The Rest Of Your Life.

Posture Correction & Help With Injuries.

Sports Massage.

Learn How To Prevent Injuries And Fix Your Own Aches And Pains

My Approach To Personal Training.

I have been fortunate as a personal trainer in that I tend to have a very low turnover of clients. On average, I take on 2-3 new clients per year. People only tend to leave if they move out of the area or their financial situation changes. 25% of my clients have actually been with me for well over ten years now!

I have often asked my clients why they stay so long? The most common answers are;

The exercise and challenges are always changing which keeps me interested’

‘You keep me accountable and help me stay on the straight and narrow when it comes to progress and my health’.

Having spoken to other personal trainers, it is very unusual to have such great client retention. Although having such limited availability can sometimes be frustrating for potential clients, it has given me a unique perspective on what works and what doesn’t.

As clients stay with me so long, I have been able to measure their progress over time. This has enabled me to work out what really makes the most difference when it comes to weight loss, muscle building, flexibility, preventing injuries and correcting posture issues. It’s also helped me identify lifestyle issues that affect all of the above.

I take a great deal of pride in the service I provide and pay a lot of attention to detail. I am not the kind of trainer who will stand by and watch a client perform an exercise badly, risk injury or slowly wearing their joints out. Likewise, if a client is training well but eating terribly I am not going to ignore it. Not only would it be morally wrong for me to ignore these things, it would also make more work for me in the future.

After all, I am hoping every client stays with me as long as possible. I therefore, have a vested interest in keeping my clients healthy and injury free.  I obviously want to avoid people causing themselves problems years down the line that I will then have to help them fix. An injured, unhealthy client also doesn’t make for a very good advert!

I tailor the exercise to suit the capabilities of the client and scale it accordingly. If a client is unable to perform an exercise properly we look at the reasons why. This could mean restoring range of motion in a particular joint or muscle or scaling an exercise back to make it more achievable. Likewise, if an exercise isn’t challenging enough for a client I scale it up and increase the difficulty.

This process of continual progress assessment and monitoring is constant yet organic. Exercise is adapted as required and every clients exercise program is rewritten every 8 weeks to stop things getting stale.

When it comes to personal training, you can train 10+ clients per day using a generic ‘one size fits all’ approach or you can work with a smaller number of people and provide a truly tailored service.

I choose the latter.

Chris Burrows Personal Trainer.