PT Personal Trainers

Personal Training in high performance

Personal Trainers defends the same idea presented here in this article by our colleague Frederico Raposo, as such we decided to share with our followers.

What do Cristiano Ronaldo, Douglas Costa, Thiago Alcântara (soccer), Serena Williams, Roger Federer (tennis) Gabriel Medina (surf), Dwayne Wade or Jimmy Butler (basketball) have in common? All are high-performance sportsmen who use the services of a Personal Trainer (PT) in order to optimize their sporting performance.

I want to get a better performance

Traditionally, custom workouts have been directed at physical exercise practitioners, more or less on a regular basis, whether in the gymnasium and health club setting, or (and increasingly) in the open air. This is the hiring of an exercise professional who evaluates, plans and cyclically follows the training of an individual taking into account their unique pathologies and / or personalities and non-transferable.

In addition to the more obvious physical incidence, this service has both the benefit of working the emotional and psychological dimensions in a highly targeted manner. Many people turn to the PT as a motivational strategy for regular physical exercise (although this is not a very successful long-term strategy).

In recent years, we have seen that elite sportsmen and women are increasingly turning to PT services in order to complement their daily physical work with specialized support and psychologically recover from competitive pressures through context change and coaching.

In the case of the individual modalities, this is a relationship that does not seem very complex, since it is relatively simple to integrate the PT into the technical staff of the athlete. However, this is no longer the case in collective bargaining, where the individualized and uncoordinated work of several PTs can directly interfere with the planning and management of expectations, which the coach does for the team and each of its athletes. There are currently soccer players, for example, with contracts and termination clauses of millions of euros, whose technical staff and club do not have any communication with their PTs.

I want a Personal Trainer services

It is therefore necessary that clubs fail to ignore this reality, because the positive effects of the service are clear and the athletes recognize us by investing money from their own pocket when hiring. That is, the discussion at this point should not be whether or not athletes should have a PT, because they already have one, but whether or not they should belong to the clubs.

It seems clear that technical clubs and staff should call the PTs into their structure and promote close coordination between the periodization and the type of cargo administered in training, otherwise there will be counterproductive effects.

In some of the cases documented in the press, the intervention of the PT is public knowledge, being accepted and integrated by the own club in the preparation of the player. Often the work of these professionals is decisive in periods of transition between epochs, although it is also often extensible for the competitive period. Here, if there is no close communication between the club and the PT, the risk of one job overlapping the other is high. That is why, today, many of these professionals choose to carry out work essentially geared towards increasing the structural and functional efficiency of the player, specifically adapted to their needs and conditions, rather than a direct intervention in improving their conditional physical abilities ( strength, speed, endurance, flexibility).

One last scenario has to be taken into account: the player, especially at the highest level, is constantly subjected to pressure within the club, to which none of his directly connected agents is alien. The possibility of working on your preparation, with someone close to you, and with whom you may have greater intimacy, is an important necessity for your stability. This is also a determining role that the PT can play.

We are facing a reality that clubs should contemplate in the athletes' own contract. The solution may involve framing these professionals in their technical teams, while giving players autonomy to propose to those they intend to work with.

I want a Personal Trainer working in my team

Personal Trainers is completely in agreement with this idea mentioned by Frederico Raposo and is available for a joint collaboration with the clubs and their technical teams. Contact us now!

Rui Madeiratext adapted from Raposo, F.