Online Personal Training

Over the first couple years of AskTheTrainer.com I have got numerous requests for various combinations  of workout programs and online personal training.  Unfortunately I’m so busy with developing the site, answering questions and my tourism and photography sites there is just no way I could devote the necessary time for online clients.

Best Online Personal Trainer System

Lucky for me and anyone looking for an online personal trainer I have developed a great way to refer people looking for online trainers to a personal trainer that specializes in their goals.

I have created an Online Personal Training sub-site to accompany the AskTheTrainer.com information site.  OnlineTraining.AskTheTrainer.com allows users to click an, activity, sport or group specific fitness goal which brings them to a list of trainers who specialize in helping people achieve those specific goals.

The online personal trainers must have certifications, education and/or experience in the specialty they are listed for.  I verify every trainer’s certification and degrees and display them on the page to show that AskTheTrainer.com is dedicated to providing only the best gimmick free information, products and services.

First 4 Trainers On board

The first 4 trainers who have signed up are all certified by the major certification organizations and all 4 also have a 4 year college degree to accompany their certifications. The first trainer Dan Tatro, NSCA-CPT is a personal trainer training clients out of Orange County California.  He is also a US Army veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq who wrote the very popular Army Fitness Workouts article

The second trainer Jason Spencer, ACSM-CPT, CSCS is an ex college football player who trains clients in Manhattan New York and carries two of the very best certifications out there.  Jason has already contributed to the site by writing a few articles and answering dozens of visitor’s questions which are all viewable from his page JasonSpencer.AskTheTrainer.com.

The 3rd trainer Matt Hines has an exercise science degree from ECU as well as the ACSM-HFS certification (Health & Fitness Specialist) which enables him to train in clinical settings.  He currently trains clients in the wellness center of a North Carolina Hospital.   MattHines.AskTheTrainer.com is currently being finished up.

The 4th Trainer signed up is Julian Brown, ACE-CPT who trains out of the Phoenix area.  Julian is a former collegiate baseball player.  Even though Julian received his 4-year Bachelor of Science degree in business Julian is a career personal trainer with an burning passion for health and fitness.  JulianBrown.AskTheTrainer.com is currently being finished up.

Free Pages for the First 10 Online Personal Trainers

I will only create 6 more pages on a first come, first serve basis for free.  I have enjoyed creating sites for the first few trainers but I know once the online personal training service takes off there is going to be way too many trainers to keep up with so I’m going to have to eventually charge for the service.

I will eventually charge a set fee to set up the subsite which does a great job of getting any trainer exposure on major search engines I might add.  In addition to the set up fee I will charge per placement on various specialties putting a system in place which determines which trainers can be listed in which categories.

It’s not final yet but it will be something like each degree equals 4 specialties and each certification equals another specialty including specific certifications such as Olympic weight lifting or kettlebells.  Proof of specific experience will also count for an icon on the trainer’s listings.

Independent Online Personal Trainers

I’ve created the AskTheTrainer.com online personal training system with a model similar to that of independent personal trainers.  Like independent personal trainers all the trainers who take part in online training can train people how they like, offering whatever programs they like and charging whatever rates they want.  This allows personal trainers to use methods of training (teaching) which they deem most effective based on their style and availability.

Most online personal training sites I know would be analogous to gym personal trainers.  Most gym personal trainers are slaves to a system which they always don’t agree with.  Like gym trainers, most online personal training sites determine rates for the trainers and create generic cookie cutter webpages.  I do everything by hand to put the “personal” back into online personal training.

For Anyone Interested in Online Personal Training

OnlineTraining.AskTheTrainer.com

For Personal Trainers

JoeTrainer.AskTheTrainer.com

Approaching 1000 Pages!

My fingers feel like a sweat shop worker in a 3rd world country.  I’ve been literally working my fingers down to the bone for the past year and half.  I have accomplished almost everything I have set out to do but there a few more things I need to do before the website is in cruise control and I can focus on new projects.

Synonymous with Mis-Information

Looking for Personal Trainer Article Writers

I am making an effort for AskTheTrainer.com to become more interactive for not only the website guests but also for the writers.  I feel I have covered enough and created enough to keep most people interested beginner to late intermediate general fitness for a long time so I’m going to begin to create sub sites for special interests.

Bodybuilding.AskTheTrainer.com

You can visit the design scheme but there is no articles at this point.  Many online bodybuilding websites are based loosely on facts of science and more on anecdotal evidence or ‘bro science’ and it will be interesting to see how bodybuilding takes on a different light in the eyes of certified personal trainers.

I require a copy of the personal trainer’s personal training or strength & conditioning certification before I accept any articles.  The best part for trainers who write for AskTheTrainer.com  is they can become part of the featured Best Online Personal Trainer program which is currently in development and get paid well to write personal workout programs for clients.

Applied AppalledNutrition.com

The site is currently under development.  I contacted my friend Rich Lee who is an amazing graphic designer and I highly recommend for any graphic design or illustration work to hopefully create a header worthy of the scope of the site.

I communicate with many personal trainers online at internet forums and there is no surprise to me that they have little tolerance for the poor aspects of the fitness, nutrition and dietary supplement industries.  Applied Appalled Nutrition is going to be a community blog which is going to break down everything from incorrect information posted on internet forums, to misleading advertisements, to magazine articles to what personal trainers hear on a daily basis from clients.

Once I get to know a poster I will give them a username and password to the blog’s posting control panel.  Posters will also be able to post via email which is the same concept as Answers.AskTheTrainer.com although I will moderate the posts to make sure no spam or BS goes live.

Putting the Fun in Fitness

After an entire year of publishing a weekly top 5 list I lost a little momentum as I moved to Bangkok and started a Travel/Living in Thailand blog.

Both writing and fitness have always been enjoyable for me but as I got used to freestyle writing about my experience of living in Bangkok I lost touch a little bit with creating top 5 lists related to health, nutrition, fitness and personal training.  When you just start writing from what’s in your head you don’t have research anything and you can think of creative metaphors and funny lines which you really can’t do when writing serious stuff.

Who Says a Top 5 List has to Be Dead Serious?

I kept a serious, informational tone for most of the first year of doing my Top 5 List (AskTheTrainer RSS Feed) and covered a lot of health and fitness information that people are looking for.   My desire for publishing more top 5 lists was dieing fast and I had to do something about it.

After hearing about the shocking death of Steve McNair, who wasn’t a scumbag by any means I got thinking I though instead of being dead serious,  I could blog about all the deadbeat athletes who we all have heard about over the years.  For my first entry, with fear of payback by the murderous athletes I though I’d get someone who’s untouchable to write the article for me.

I knew anyone’s list of the Top 5 Scumbag Professional Athletes of all time would include OJ, so I asked Mr. Simpson to write the article for me as he wouldn’t include hisself

Little did I know a former professional athlete by the name of Robert Rozier actually murdered at least 7 people as part of a crazy cult in the mid 1980s.  The guy who is now in a California state prison for life,  seriously makes OJ look like a saint.  I know the article is off the primary scope of AskTheTrainer.com but it got me back to having fun while writing.

Back to the Bodybuilding Roots

When most late teens/early 20’s people first get into weight lifting they train like bodybuilders.   I was the same as I used to take every supplement out there, eat like a thoroughbred and of course go to the gym on a daily basis for hours to pump iron.  While some people (bodybuilders) get obsessed with this lifestyle and often keep it up for a life time I have lost most of my desire to be in bodybuilder shape but old habits die hard as I still like to train hard albeit it not as long and with the goals of just staying fit.

I got a gym membership at a gym in Bangkok called California WOW Fitness and it has begun to change my personal style of working out back to its original bodybuilding roots.   The reason is simply I cannot get excited to train in a gym like California WOW.  You can read why in my blog entry about Working out at California WOW in Bangkok.

Working out there basically motivated me to think about my ideal gym with a touch of humor here and there and along with the folks at the bodybuilding.com forum I created the following list.

Top 10 Signs your Gym is Hardcore

How do you Lose Weight ?

I try to answer every question I receive individually but it has gotten out of hand lately.  I receive a great number of extremely open-ended (example above) questions which are covered extensively throughout the website as well as in the Personal Trainer Questions and Personal Trainer Answers Blog I’ve started an autoresponder which is basically encouraging people to post their questions as threads in the forum which allow a back & forth discussion rather than a long email response which is better for both parties.

Not so Stupid Questions

Another problem is a question which is impossible to answer in one email.  If there are open-ended aspects of the question or some important information is left out,  it takes exchanging a few emails which often become lost in our crowded email boxes.  As an educated personal trainer, I refuse to give poor answers which aren’t thorough.

If you have submitted a question on the AskTheTrainer contact form in the past and haven’t received a response it is very likely that your email response was sent to your bulk mail folder or your question did not have enough details to provide a good answer.  Solution:

Join the Ask Personal Trainers Forums

SPAM Problem

Even though I have never sent out SPAM email or even multiple emails at a single time, certain emails put my emails in their spam folder.  Unfortunately GMAIL and Yahoo are 2 of the most common emails which put my  emails in spam.  As a matter fact I think out of the first 300 emails I responded to, less than 50% actually made it to the recipients who asked a question on my website.

Please Join and Participate in the Forum

I would love to make my discussion forums more active.  I have a few other expert, certified trainers who I have already made moderators so your questions will be disucssed back and forth and you can assure there is not some 12 year old kid in India answering the health and fitness questions which are very important to you.

Join the Ask Personal Trainers Forums

Can’t Believe it has been a Whole Year!

When I first started planning AskTheTrainer.com in January 2008 I didn’t really know what to expect.  I was personal training many clients in the gym at the time and didn’t have much time to work on it.  It took until early May to create enough content to publish the site.

After I published the site I put countless hours pouring all the knowledge I accumulated through BS and MS degrees in college, personal training certification courses and over 8 years of personal training clients.

I started publishing a weekly Fitness Top 5 List on May 19, 2008 and published it religiously every Monday for 49 straight weeks!  I only took a couple weeks off when I moved to Thailand where I am able to work on the website full time.

Bro Science vs. Reality

When I explored the possibilities of creating a fitness website one of the primary motivating factors was the high levels of complete garbage on the internet.  What I saw was either utter trash, selling bogus products and generic, cookie-cutter websites reiterating rehashed bro science.

If you don’t know what bro science is here is a simple example.  The youtube video of the ripped bodybuilder bench pressing 500 pounds and telling you how you have to eat 600 grams of protein and 6,000 calories a day to gain muscle is bro science as oposed to looking at the 1st law of thermodynamics.

I aggressively pursued creating AskTheTrainer.com because I knew that the content on my site is lacking on the internet today.  Why 95% of exercise videos online are videos of fitness models, bodybuilders and athletes lifting weights is beyond me.

I don’t watch Michael Phelps videos to learn how to swim better, I find someone who can show me the techniques.   I created simple exercise videos training my actual clients to show that you don’t have to be a pro athlete to perform challenging exercises.

I have what I would guess over 75% of websites don’t have, which is credibility.  I partly started the website because I felt like I was wasting my exercise science degrees personal training when kids straight out of high school could do the same thing.  I took out thousands of dollars in student loans which I felt like was a waste if I didn’t put my education to use on paper.

I had a choice to make at the beginning of the creation of my site.  Use bro science to make money and lose credibility, or to maintain my credibility and try to help every single person I can and I’m glad I chose the latter.

Questions and Answers

Since the site called Ask the trainer questions and answers are a large part of the site.   This week’s year aniversery top 5 list was about the Top 5 Health & Fitness Questions for the First year of AskTheTrainer.com At first I had no problems personally answering every question which was sent to me promptly.

Unfortunately I’m getting flooded with questions at a pace which I cannot keep up with.  I am now looking for qualified personal trainers to help me answer questions on the personal trainer question page.  For personal trainers who want to answer some questions and voice their professional opinions I will give you credit for your answers with a link back to your website.

I am looking for trainers who will answer a question and tell it like it is.   I hate telling people what they want to hear just to sell something.  Since I’m not selling anything I can voice my 100% honest professional opinion and I think it has given my site’s visitors confidence that they will get a quality answer to their questions.

AskTheTrainer Stats Since May 1 2008

AskTheTrainer.com

731 Web Pages

530,967 visitors

688 Health/Fitness Question Emails

AskTheTrainer YouTube Channel

363 Videos

1536 Subscribers

2,158,313 Video Views

If you are not very internet savvy these numbers may seem like a lot, but when you consider there are an estimated 600,000,000 internet users world-wide the numbers have much, much room to improve.

If you aren’t familiar with everything it takes to create a successful website there is a lot more than just creating a website.  Whether you are looking to create a website business for yourself in the future or you know friends who want to the best way to educate yourself on how to create a successful website is Site Build It

To view all my content as it gets published you can view and subscribe to the AskTheTrainer.com FriendFeed

Onward 2009 and Beyond

In the upcoming year my goal is to constantly improve AskTheTrainer.com  I am branching out to other personal trainers to help me help the online fitness world  “keep it real” by using actual proven science to help people by providing answers to their questions, information and services.

Everyone Knows Why Physical Fitness is Important but Why is Defining Physical Fitness Important ?

I was going along creating new content pages for AskTheTrainer.com when I came upon a roadblock.  The page was titled the definition of physical fitness.  At first glance it would seem the the definition of physical fitness is obvious but it was very difficult to define properly.

I asked fellow personal trainers on internet forums and even a professional group on yahoo which is filled with college students and PhDs.  I received some interesting responses from different angles but none satisfied me.

Many people tried to break down the definition of physical fitness using aspects of human performance.  One PhD and motivational speaker simply said, “The Power to Do” which I thought was very uninspiring.

The reason I found this so difficult is simply because its important!

Every day people search for definition of phsyical fitness almost 400 times online.  With the obesity epidemic and many people who live sedentary lifestyles search for a definition of physical fitness, a good definition may help them understand what they have to do to turn their sedentary life around.

The way I tried to define it was looking at the human being as just another organism.  Like Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, the bottom of the pyramid is the most basic physical fitness needs which are the needs to be well and be able to perform the ordinary daily tasks and occaisonally a new task.

The second level of the hierarchy I made for specific adptations to occur for the 5 components of fitness, flexibility, muscular strength & endurance, cardiovascular endurance and body composition.  I also made sure to mention maintaining the state of well being while adapting to the environment.

The final level like Maslow’s Self Actualization is reached by very few.  Reaching the peak of an individual’s athletic potential is accomplished by few and few even strive to reach such an accomplishment.

If I had to define Physical Fitness in One Sentence it would be as Follows

“The human beings physical ability to thrive in any environment.”

I may add something to make sure the reader would know that the human could place themselves into the environment or the environment could adapt itself.

I am also looking for other people to add their input with their definition of phsycial fitness so I can add it to my page and quote them.

Definition of Physical Fitness

College Degree Reviews

College Degree Reviews

I have aired my general complaints with the fitness industry and personal training in general on this blog.  I was searching online for college programs of kinesiology and I found very little outside of each individual universities description.

I was thinking that if I was finishing high school or looking to get into college, it would be very hard to find any good information about college exercise science programs.

I decided to create a whole section on AskTheTrainer.com for current personal trainers can post a review of their college degree program.

I have begun to contact personal trainers from around the nation and the response has been surprisingly fast.

Most of the trainers have found it fun to review their college degree programs and I did too.

All trainers who write a review I will list for free in my personal trainer directory as well.  I look at it as a great way to promote college educated personal trainers who spent the 4+ years putting in the hard work.  For anyone interested please use my contact form on AskTheTrainer.com

College Degree Reviews

100 Abdominal Exercises

For real? Yes, it is actually a term searched online over 350 times a day.  Why so many people search for this specific term is interesting.

No doubt it is because they think the more ab exercises they do the more fat will disappear from their mid sections but most of you reading this will know the myth of spot reduction.

I put together a page which has motivated me to improve my entire free exercise videos library.

I am slowly but surely adding a thumbnail to every exercise video so the viewers can get an idea of what they’re about to see.

It is going to take quite a while but what’s best for the viewers of my site is all I really care about.

I created an abdominal anatomy clickable anatomy chart so people can see which abdominal exercises target which core muscle.

Give it a try

100 Abdominal Exercises

Ask Personal Trainers Discussion Forums

I recently released discussion forums on AskTheTrainer.com under the subdomain http://forums.askthetrainer.com

I also have the domain www.AskPersonalTrainers.com which I may eventually use for the forums because that is which really describes the forum.  Since I get so many questions I needed something which allows for more discussion.

Most questions are not something which I can give a 1 part answer for so the forums makes perfect sense.

I have a couple CSCS moderators and I’m looking for more Personal Trainers who would like to take part in a new exciting forum.  I think starting from a fresh start allows a forum to avoid all the BS that makes up a bulk of most fitness forums.

In order for the forums to succeed I need good moderators who can provide quality answers backed by their exercise science education.

So far my Moderators are:

Okinyi Oyungo, CSCS – Rockville Maryland Personal Trainer

Jim Benson, MS, CSCS -Lexington Kentucky Personal Trainer

Both Okinyi and Jim are also in my personal trainers directory which I am currently only allowing CSCS and other high qualified personal trainers/strength coaches.

If you are Interested in Being an Expert Moderator Please Register

Join AskTheTrainer.com Discussion Forums

Moderators and Super-moderators are needed to answer questions for the thousands of daily visitors.  Once you join send me a PM.

I also have an International Personal Trainers Directory in which I am allowing any trainers with any certifications accepted in their countries to sign up and publicize themselves, services and websites.

Personal Trainers Directory

I’ve been looking for any personal trainers in the US who are looking to make more money.  Who isn’t right?  I’m not going to be stuffing cash in their pockets but exposure is what improves the chance of landing the big client and getting more local clients and my directory will help both.

One example is personal trainer Okinyi Oyungo who is a CSCS and neuroscience graduate from the University of Pennsylvania who wrote this week’s entry in my Fitness Top 5 List about the Worst Cardio Mistakes.

You can view his trainer directory entry here:  Maryland Personal Trainers
If you would like to be included in the directory please email:  mike@askthetrainer.com

Personal Trainers Directory