On Target Fitness isn’t the Alec show, but here is a little story for you.  I got my start in Personal Training when I was on a NROTC Scholarship in college.  I had seen how powerful fitness could be for myself and then for others.  Fitness had opened the door for me to have the Marine Corps pay for my education and to commission as an officer upon graduation.  Not a bad reward for getting in shape.  When I started seeing my personal training clients transformations, that’s when I truly appreciated the impact of personal training.

I had two clients who were parents.  They were very heavy and they knew it was time to do something about it.  After a couple short months they had lost weight, were eating healthier, and had more energy.  What really got me hooked was when they told me that their 8 year old daughter had seen their example and started asking for vegetables and doing some of the exercises she saw her parents doing.  Personal Training transformed the habits of the whole family!  I was hooked.  After I finished my time on active duty, there was only one profession I could go to.

Here is a simple assumption: if you have a program that is customized to you, and you are being Coached as an individual, you will get better results.  Plain and simple.  Workouts that are written with your needs in mind, that grow with you so they don’t get stale, and individual attention are what makes personal training so powerful.

But here is the problem: traditional one on one personal training is broken.  After getting my start in this setting, I have seen both the power of Personal Training as well as the downfalls of doing it the old way.

Here are 6 problems with traditional one on one personal training:

1. Cost.  One customer at a time is a really inefficient way to help you.  The cost of that inefficiency get’s passed on to you, the customer.  Workouts cost between $50-$100 a session.  Yes, you need to be willing to invest in your health, but that price makes it hard for most people to do often enough, for long enough to make a real change.

2. Scheduling.  Good trainers are too busy to book.  Bad trainers, you don’t want to book.

3. Struggling Trainers.  Despite how expensive traditional one on one training sessions are, that trainer doesn’t end up taking home the vast majority of that money.  Typically, they work insane hours and take home barely enough to live.  I know because I’ve been there.  It’s typical to start your work day at 4:30am, end it at 7:30pm, and still struggle financially.  You won’t get the best out of someone living like that.

4. Bad trainers.  Maybe they are inexperienced, maybe no one taught them the trade, maybe they’re disorganized, or maybe their attitude is terrible because they’re burned out.  Whatever the reason, there are a lot of crummy trainers out there.  You think you’re paying for one on one attention and what you’re getting is someone who isn’t present with you at all, only talks about themselves, and isn’t actually Coaching you.

5. No systems.  Without organized systems in place, it’s actually hard to make adjustments for things like injury history.  Because it’s only one on one, a lot of mediocre trainers just improvise that stuff rather than make changes for you based on proven systems and experience.  I’ve signed up plenty of great clients who were with a one on one trainer who was incapable of making adjustments to accommodate their injuries.  What?

6. No community.  It’s just you and the trainer during the session.  There is no one working out alongside you motivating you to keep going when you’re tired.

Coach Ryan and I built On Target Fitness from the ground up to be the solution to these exact issues.  We assumed 2 things: Personal Training is the GOLD standard for the very best results, but we HAD to come up with a better way of providing it.

Enter, Small Group Personal Training!  What is it?  It is custom written workouts done in groups of 6 or fewer clients with one Personal Trainer guiding you every step of the way.

(Writers note: Since we started doing this years ago, “Small Group Personal Training” has become a more popular term to describe a variety of settings.  Some facilities have groups of 12-18 people doing the same workouts that are random each day.  In my eyes, that group isn’t small and that training isn’t personal but that’s just me ; )

With Small Group Personal Training at On Target Fitness, we’ve taken everything that we thought was broken and flipped it on it’s head.  Here, you get experience and highly trained Personal Trainers guiding you expertly through a progressive strength and conditioning program.  They are neither burned out nor underpaid.  They are 100% there for you, every workout and so are your friends that workout with you.  Scheduling is a breeze.  We have over 30 Personal Training session times available per week with extra sessions added during peak hours.  While I have been encouraging my clients to book recurring appointments, they still have the flexibility to reschedule those times up until 24 hours beforehand.

Finally, price.  No matter what, you are going to spend money on your health.  You can either spend money making it worse (junk food, booze, your comfy sectional couch, your TV) and later spend money treating all of the ailments of poor health, OR you can spend a little bit now taking care of yourself.  Type II Diabetes costs more than my most expensive membership option, and is way less fun.  You also don’t want to go cheap on your fitness or it will end up like the tattoos in the photo.  That said, by sharing the time with that expert Personal Trainer with the other clients in the small group session, you get all the benefits of personal training for around $30 per session instead of $75.  We bill monthly rather than in large packages making it really easy to dedicate a portion of your budget to your health.

We help people over 40 finally get fit, feel confident, and have all-day energy even if getting everything done is a constant struggle.  If you’re ready to find out more, fill out the info on the top and bottom of this page.