First of all, let me disclose that I am a personal trainer. But this is not blatant self promotion. It's an assessment of my industry based on my experience with clients. And I can tell you conclusively that there are many people for whom personal training is a very good idea. There are also a great number of people for whom it is not.
This line should not be drawn according to weight, but according to knowledge and motivation. Those who are looking to lose weight or build muscle may not need to spend the money on a personal trainer, as there are countless free resources online for the self motivated. What these resources can't give you however is motivation to push through grueling sessions, and more importantly, tried and tested fitness techniques and principles.
From my experience the average person is full of useless and confusing information about fitness and diet. Some of these misconceptions include: one shouldn't lift heavy weights because heavy weights build muscle and light weights burn fat, one should work out on an empty stomach because you'll burn more fat, that long steady cardio sessions are better than more intense and shorter interval sessions for fat loss, and that reducing calories without discussing the quality of your diet is going to result in fat loss. All of these statements are false, and they are all commonly held.
The single greatest advantage of hiring personal trainer is not simply motivation and structure, its education. The client, if they are attentive and thoughtful, will learn the skills and techniques which lead to weight loss and muscle gain on their own journey to fitness. This can often take the form of a condensed fitness education in the course of only a few months. And this is personal knowledge that doesn't leave you when you're finished with your trainer. Now granted, the client will pay more than a simple gym membership, but so what? What good is a gym if you bust your butt there several days a week and don't see any results?
A good personal trainer should keep a tight log of sessions, monitoring strength and endurance gains, and methodically increasing the intensity of those sessions in accordance with strength gains. This is the true art of personal training. Most people either cannot tell or do not remember their previous sessions well enough to see their true progress. Even if they do, they may not see a clear path toward future progress and avoiding fitness plateaus.
The trainer will have a larger basket of resources and exercises to keep the body stimulated and challenged, which is the essence of progressive overload. To cause our bodies to gain muscle or burn fat we need to force it past comfort levels and into higher intensity range, which is measured by how much energy we can exert in a unit of time. The body will adapt to exercises, times, and weights, and shaking these up once and a while is ideal to keep our bodies from plateauing.
So when dealing with the question of whether hiring a personal trainer makes sense, one needs to make an assessment of their condition, and decide if they have the personal knowledge and drive to make it happen in a few months. This is where the true value comes in.
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