Shane Lee Personal Trainer

  Each year I go for a New Year’s Eve walk with one of my clients. It’s become a tradition of ours. Last year she asked me, ‘What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned in 2021?’. I told her, ‘I’ve learned not to worry about what other people think about me’. It’s human nature to want others to like and respect us but it becomes a problem when we think about this too much. I’ve mentioned before how much I admire Denzel Washington and I heard him talking about this. He was saying that if he started thinking about others think of him, it would become a barrier to living his life. He wouldn’t have achieved such success if he let others affect him. I could relate to this. I often found myself dwelling on what others might think of me. I would literally create problems in my head, wondering what others thought, doing their thinking for them. Lao Tzu, an ancient Chinese philosopher wrote ‘Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner’. This quote rings true as it...

One of my clients changed her entire lifestyle, from nutrition to exercise, career to relationships. These changes happened over a few years. Gradual changes = lasting changes I want to talk about long term goals and long-term success. Most men who hire personal trainers stay with them for short periods of time. They learn what they need to and go it alone. Women, on the other hand, tend to remain clients for longer periods of time. I’ve seen this in my own business. Some of my clients are women who have trained with me for years, some of them up to 9 years! Clients have come to me at all sorts of different starting points. Some are healthy, some were heavier than they wanted to be, some wanted to move better. When clients come to me, they often have a short-term goal in mind. They want to lose weight for an occasion or train for an event. As many personal trainers will know, some come at peak times in the year following a new year’s resolution or for a summer shred. Others come becaus...

  Calisthenics I became interested in calisthenics in 2015 when I saw a local coach on Instagram performing all sorts of crazy bodyweight movements like ring muscle ups. I got in touch with him and asked him to coach me and they rest, as they say, is history. I’ve trained with a couple of coaches over the years. They had different styles and I learned a lot from both of them. I’m glad I took the time to invest in myself to learn this type of exercise so I could establish it in my business to teach others. What is calisthenics? Calisthenics comes from the Greek kallos meaning beauty and sthenos meaning strength. Similar to gymnastics, it is a form of exercise which uses predominantly body weight. It includes movements such as handstands, planche, muscle ups and the human flag. Movements which often defy gravity. What equipment do you need? One of the things I like about calisthenics is that minimal equipment is needed which is why it is known as a street workout and something that c...

This month marks a decade in my personal training career. I started working in a commercial gym in April 2012 and spent the following ten years developing my skills, making mistakes, and learning from others. I often talk about how I help my clients develop in life both in and outside the gym and I have done the same in my life too. At the start of my career, I was a single lad working part time in a pub and now have a family, have bought a house built my business and have been on adventures all around the world. I mentioned a few weeks ago on the blog is that long term careers in this industry are difficult to achieve. Many drop out in the first couple of years, particularly when they don’t generate enough income straight away. Most personal trainers are self-employed and what many of the short personal training course don’t teach is how to run a business. The qualifications undertaken to become a personal trainer often teach anatomy, the principles of exercise and how to run studio c...

  Organising walks with clients sounds simple – tell them where and when to meet and go for an adventure – but there are a whole host of things that could go wrong. With 8 years of experience of organising walks with clients, I’ve learned a few things along the way. PLAN:  Find a route and directions to a parking spot. Let people know how long the walk is expected to take, how long it will take them to get to the starting point and how challenging it will be. It’s likely that you’ll have people attend with different levels of fitness so pick your route accordingly. I try to choose walks with clearly signposted or well-trodden paths so that even if people get separated from me, they can still follow the path and wait at the next stopping point. PREPARATION:  Explain to people what kind of preparation will be required. I’ve been on many walks where we’ve seen people having to be rescued from mountains so it’s important to treat them with respect. We need to make sure people...

March was a month of celebrating women with events such as International Women’s Day, Women’s History Month and Mother’s Day. In my career as a personal trainer as well as in my family, I see strong women every day and it is important to me to be the best I can be for them. Part of this means being supporting and trying to learn about and understand their needs. I have been working as a personal trainer in Stockport for a decade and throughout this time most of my clients have been women. This is the case throughout the market. Personal training has traditionally been a male dominated career (although this has started to change in recent years), and people who hire personal trainers are predominantly women. This is true for me and I’ve found over the years that women tend to stay for the long term which means I have learned a lot about women. When I qualified to be a personal trainer, the course centred around anatomy and how to write a training program. The teachers of these courses w...

March is a month for women. It’s Women’s History Month, International Women’s Day and today in the UK we celebrate Mother’s Day. A majority of my clients are women, and many are mothers, so this week’s blog is a celebration of their achievements. Many people struggle to fit exercise into their lives and one of the things I admire about some of my clients is that they live by one of my favourite mottos: NO EXCUSES. I’ve had clients bring their baby to session, clients who do family training sessions with their children, they train while pregnant and they train as soon as they physically (and safely) can after giving birth. They prioritise their fitness for a number of reasons. One of my clients explained it using the flight safety announcement analogy. When the cabin crew tell you what to do with oxygen masks in an emergency, they always say that if you have a child with you, give yourself the mask first. The reason for this is because if you can’t breathe, you can’t help the child sitt...

  I was always told that from a business perspective, I would need a unique selling point (USP) or a niche. I would need this to stand out from the many other personal trainers out there. I was told that many PTs don’t last in the industry because they don’t have a USP, they don’t stand out from the crowd. This is one of the things that I’ve struggled to get my head around – after all, I’m a personal trainer, not a marketing executive. I’ve been in the fitness industry for a decade and it’s the one thing I found difficult to nail down for years, in part because I didn’t want to be known for one thing or to focus on a particular group of people – I wanted to be inclusive for all, and to tailor my services to the person. As time went on, I realised that my niche is me – it reflects my values, beliefs and who I am as a person. I don’t want to be inauthentic, or pretend to be who I am not to please a specific audience – that’s not me. My niche was always there – I just didn’t know ...

  I grew up with exercise being a big part of my life so it’s no surprise that I ended up having a career as a personal trainer and I have no doubt I will exercise for as long as I am physically capable. As I wrote in a social media post recently, I am a strong proponent of exercising for health and wellbeing as opposed to weight loss, although weight loss can be a benefit of exercising. We often don’t realise when we’re young how much our lifestyles impact on our future and I’ve witnessed those who don’t exercise and have deteriorated in later life, as well as those who made exercise a part of their lives and have continued to thrive into their later years. As we get older, we tend to move less. If you think about it, how many steps do you get in when you’re dropping the kids off at school or walking from the car to the office, and even from one meeting to the next? Many people have active jobs too so when they retire, it’s even more noticeable. For those who do move less, t...