By Duncan Rinehart, Ph.D.
While personal trainers have been around for many years and personal trainers are common in many fitness centers, the field is professionalizing, requiring personal trainers to be certified by a nationally accredited organization like the American College of Sports Medicine. Health and wellness coaches are not as well-known and the field of wellness coaching is newer, though it too is professionalizing rapidly with nationally accredited programs like Wellcoaches®. Indeed, there is a national board certification for health and wellness coaches (NBHWC) assuring high-quality skill and experience and establishing the credibility of this new field. Partly because coaching is fairly new and unfamiliar, there is confusion between health and wellness coaching and certified personal training.
Exercise program vs healthy changes in lifestyle
The easiest distinction between what a personal trainer does and what a coach does is this. A personal trainer creates an exercise program for you and helps you follow it to reach your fitness goals like losing weight and/or gaining strength. In contrast, a health and wellness coach works with you so that you can make lasting changes you want in your lifestyle – not just losing weight and/or gaining strength, but also in other areas of wellness such as managing stress and coping with the challenges of aging.
Approach: directive vs facilitating lasting changes
Trainers are more directive and focused on physical goals. Coaches, on the other hand, are not so directive or narrowly focused. Coaches use evidence-based tools to help you create and sustain changes in your lifestyle as you (not the coach) want to make them, some of which may include accomplishing physical goals.
Similarity
Trainers and coaches overlap in helping you reach your physical goals though they differ in how they help you reach those goals. However, coaches go well beyond trainers in the range of skills, experience, and knowledge that coaches use to help you. Similarly, wellness is a much broader field than physical fitness although wellness includes physical fitness.
Which one is best for you?
So, which one is best for you? As both a certified personal trainer and a certified health and wellness coach, I say it depends on what you want to accomplish – how you want to be healthier. A former training client who is a retired professional wanted only to build strength so he could work on and sail his boat. He wasn’t interested in changing his diet or his lifestyle to have better relationships with his family or deal with the years of stress of his career. He gained strength but he didn’t seem happier to me. Happiness wasn’t part of his goal. On the other hand, a former coaching client, also a retired professional, wanted to stay fit, reduce alcohol, reduce stress, and make other changes so that he could be there for his family as he ages. He accomplished these goals and seemed happier as a result. He felt better and was confident that he would be there for his family.
Bottom lines
In comparison, both certified personal trainers and certified health and wellness coaches provide valuable services to those who seek greater health, especially as they age. And the costs of trainers and coaches are about the same. It is, however, helpful to know the differences between trainers and coaches so that you can decide which is best for you or when you might work with one or the other…or both.