Coaching Is Catching on With Health Club Users

What kind of weight training do you need to run the Boston Marathon?

Weekend athletes increasingly are paying experts to give them answers to questions like that. Personal trainers, once hired only by sports professionals and the rich, are becoming more common at health clubs.

“I work more with your average middle-aged client--more specifically, people who would like to do a first-time event, particularly the Boston Marathon,” said Alexis Tyson, a personal trainer at the Boston Athletic Club. “They want to know everything.”

This kind of coaching is an ever bigger business, said researcher Patty S. Freedson of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Survey data from IDEA, a fitness professionals’ association, find 53% of respondents offer sport-specific training to individuals, and 41% do so in clinics, she said.

Twenty-five percent of health club members belong to a club to train for other sports, according to the International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Assn., a Boston-based trade group. Only 19% of home exercisers train with such a goal in mind, spokesman William C. Howland Jr. said.

“It’s become popular, out of the professional athlete model,” Freedson said. Pro athletes rely on experts to tell them their sport’s requirements for success, and the past five years have seen this system catching on with ordinary amateurs, she said.

Trainers apply the physiological principle of specificity--that different sports tax muscles and draw on the body’s energy supplies in different ways. This principle explains why, for instance, a well-conditioned tennis player can wind up surprisingly sore after an afternoon of rowing.

In the marathon, for instance, the need to run long distances is pretty obvious. What may not be so obvious is the need to lift weights, Tyson said. “Many runners have always believed they never had to strength train,” she said. Weight training strengthens the lower back, trunk and shoulder girdle to stand up to the constant jarring that travels up the body as feet slam against the road, she said.

Similarly, a trainer will know how to train for the energy demands of an activity, Freedson said. An example: Distance running is primarily aerobic, while tennis requires sprints, so a tennis player needs to do shuttle runs to build up the short-term energy system, she said.

This doesn’t mean that ordinary aerobic and strength work--the same cardiovascular and muscle-toning stuff everybody should do--isn’t a good idea. Sport-specific training is an addition to healthful exercise, not a replacement for it, Freedson said.

Nor is sport-specific training only for the competitor. A trainer may come up with new exercises to get a non-goal-driven regular exerciser out of a rut, Freedson said. And a trainer can help a person prepare for non-sports activities such as a summer hiking trip, Tyson said.

However, although it seems logical that a personal trainer’s regimen would give added benefit to the trainee, “we just don’t have any data on that from a research perspective to say it reduces injury or improves performance more than just traditional aerobic or weight training,” Freedson said. Those studies have yet to be done, she said.

And there is a lot of variability among trainers. Potential trainees should seek someone with a college degree in exercise, as well as certification by a respected group such as the American Council on Exercise or the American College of Sports Medicine, Tyson said.

Clients also can follow the crowd in their sport, Howland said. Health clubs with tennis programs are more likely to have experts in tennis, and running clubs often know who the better running trainers are, he said.