(Transcript of video below)
“Not once out of our four and a half years of existence here at Perform 360 have we ever offered a free training session or a free week trial.
We often get the questions, “Do you do a free week? Can I do a free training session?” We have to politely say that we don’t and there’s a big couple of reasons why.
Don’t get us wrong. We completely understand why fitness businesses out there offer free classes or a free week. They want to get you in the door, to get you understanding about how they run their training sessions, then hopefully sell you a membership. If that’s what they do and how they choose to operate then we don’t hold it against them. It most likely works well for them. However, it’s not what we do.
Our duty of care is to ensure that we are training our members based on a lot of different factors;
- How they move.
- What are their injuries?
- Is there risk of injury?
- What are their goals?
Without performing a full assessment prior to training, we have no idea who we’re training in front of us.
For us to say, “Sure, come on in and do a small group training”. Then a potential member might say they squat 60kg’s. “Ok no problem, let’s put 60kg’s on the bar and let go.
Before you know it, they collapse under the load.
This would be a complete disservice and very dangerous for the individual we are training.
So for us moving forward, what we need to do is actually book in a movement assessment and where we can establish all these underlying issues that could arise from training. We never train our members blind.
We look at your ankle mobility. We’ll look at your knees. We look at your stability is in the hip. We look at your core stability. We look at hip flexors flexibility. We look at hamstrings, upper spine, shoulders, neck.
We need to know all these factors before we train you so we can actually dance around potential risk, solve injuries, and making sure that you are getting to your goal.
For us to say, “Come in and do a free class”, we feel it’s not doing a service to the person in front of us. It’s doing a disservice and quite dangerous.
That’s our advice for you. Be very cautious if you are going to opt for a free training session or a free week trial. No matter how good that coach is and how much experience they have, they’re not going to really understand how you move with a particular load in particular exercises, and particularly if you’re under fatigue. You can opt for a training facility such as ours that offer a movement assessment before engaging in training.
So your research, have a chat with the manager or the owner and gain that “gut feeling” first. See what their offering, how they onboard you, ask what their level of service and care they have for new members…because, at the end of the day, training should be a long game. It should be a sustainable thing that you can do injury free”.