Both group trainers and personal trainers have completed their fitness study requirements and often met all of the requirements to be a personal trainer. The big difference is how they train and their specialty. Group trainers specialize and creating a class routine for many individuals to perform at the same time. It is a set plan to follow. If you are in a group fitness class and cannot keep up, you can choose to modify the moves to meet your athletic abilities or march in place to keep your heart rate up until you feel comfortable jumping back into the routine. A personal trainer provides a personalized training plan meeting individual needs that are unique and different compared to another. They create a specialized plan just for you based on your needs and personal goals and individual ability.
A certified group fitness trainer can provide classes to create challenging workplace wellness. Group classes can make the challenge fun and employees can help hold each other accountable for getting their workouts in. It also helps to bring community together with a common goal of getting fit. Many group fitness trainers will have other certifications to help them gain extra knowledge in an area of interest that they enjoy teaching.
A certified personal trainer will focus on meeting individual goals and watching form to make sure you are doing the moves correctly and efficiently to help reach your goals quickly. For example, joint motions in bench press workouts have to be monitored to make sure form is good. If your form is off, you could either not benefit from doing the move incorrectly or risk injury. It would be very difficult for a group trainer to watch an entire classroom’s form at the same time and to be able to give each client the same individual help at the same time. A personal trainer can spend 100% of their attention on your form to keep you injury free.
Both types of trainers are great at helping you make positive lifestyle changes in your life and gaining fitness. One manages a classroom at a time and the other manages one at a time. Determining what level of help you need and what activity you want to be doing can help you determine what time of trainer to have.
