Why Flexible Personal Training Can Make It Easier to Stay Consistent

If you’ve ever thought about personal training but immediately wondered how on earth you would commit to the same day and time every single week, you are definitely not the only one.

It is something that comes up surprisingly often when I speak to prospective clients. I will jump on a phone call or video call with someone who is interested in one-to-one personal training, we will talk about what they are looking for and what their week normally looks like, and then I will explain how I organise my diary.

Quite often, there is a moment of genuine surprise when they realise they do not have to reserve one permanent slot every week.

They might have assumed that signing up for personal training meant committing to Tuesday at 10am for the foreseeable future, whether that suited them that week or not, and potentially paying for sessions they could not attend if work, childcare, illness or life got in the way.

That has never really been the way I wanted to work.

I have spent many years in the fitness industry and, for a lot of that time, worked in gyms where the traditional model made perfect sense. Classes happened at set times and personal trainers filled their diaries with regular weekly appointments. Tuesday at 7am belonged to one client, Wednesday at 6pm belonged to another, and once the diary was full, the trainer moved on to the next available slot.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that approach, and for some people having exactly the same appointment every week is ideal. They love the routine and they know that once it is in their diary, it happens.

But I always knew that if I built my own personal training business, I wanted to have the option to do things differently.

Real life does not always fit neatly into a timetable

I am a mum myself, and I know how difficult it can be to say with complete confidence that the same time will work every Monday, Tuesday or Thursday for the next few months.

Children get ill, school events appear in the diary, childcare changes, appointments crop up and work becomes unexpectedly busy. Sometimes you simply have one of those weeks where everything seems to happen at once.

And you certainly do not need to be a parent for your routine to change.

I think this is even more relevant in a post-Covid world because the working week has changed for so many people. You might be in the office on Tuesday this week, Wednesday and Thursday next week, then working from home for most of the following week. You might have meetings that move around, occasional travel or days when you need to be in central Edinburgh rather than working from home.

Hybrid working has given us flexibility, but it has also meant that many people's weeks do not follow the same predictable pattern they once did.

Trying to build an exercise routine around one immovable appointment can therefore become another thing you have to organise your life around, rather than something that supports you within the life you already have.

That is exactly what I wanted to avoid.

My personal training diary is deliberately more organic

A more flexible diary probably is not the easiest way to run a personal training business from an administrative point of view. It would undoubtedly be simpler to give everybody their slot, fill the timetable and leave it at that.

But I have deliberately kept my one-to-one personal training diary more organic because I think the flexibility is genuinely valuable to the people I work with.

That does not mean texting me at five minutes' notice and asking if I happen to be free! There still needs to be organisation and planning, and sessions are always dependent on both my availability and yours.

What it normally means is that we look ahead and book a few sessions at a time. You know when you are training, I know when you are coming, and we still have the structure and accountability that makes personal training work, but those sessions do not necessarily have to fall on exactly the same day and at exactly the same time every week.

You might train on Monday morning this week and Thursday lunchtime the next because those are the days you are working from home. We might arrange two or three sessions ahead once you know your work diary, childcare or other commitments.

For some clients, their regular slot naturally ends up staying fairly similar most weeks. For others, it changes regularly.

Both are absolutely fine.

The important thing is that we are creating a routine you can actually keep coming back to.

Why flexibility can actually help with consistency

We talk a lot about consistency in fitness, and rightly so. You are far more likely to see improvements in your strength, fitness and confidence when exercise becomes something you do regularly rather than something you throw yourself into occasionally.

But I think we sometimes confuse consistency with rigidity.

Consistency does not have to mean doing exactly the same workout on the same day at the same time for 52 weeks of the year.

In behavioural terms, habits are generally easier to maintain when there are fewer barriers between you and the behaviour you are trying to repeat. If every workout requires everything else in your life to line up perfectly, you are building quite a lot of friction into the process before you have even started.

Imagine that your personal training session is always Tuesday at 6pm. It works perfectly most weeks, but then your office day changes. The following week your partner is away. The week after that there is a school event.

You have suddenly missed several sessions, not because you have stopped caring about your fitness, but because the structure simply did not fit what was happening in your life.

It is very easy at that point to feel as though you have fallen out of your routine completely.

A more flexible approach removes some of that friction. Instead of thinking, “I missed Tuesday, so I have failed this week,” the conversation becomes, “Tuesday does not work this week, so where else can we fit your session?”

That might sound like a small change, but psychologically I think it is an important one. You are looking for a solution rather than viewing a change of plan as a failure.

Over time, that can make it much easier to keep exercise as a normal part of your life.

This can be particularly important for women

A large part of my work as a personal trainer is supporting women, and I think flexibility matters enormously for the audience I work with.

Many of my clients are balancing careers, children, family responsibilities and increasingly complicated diaries. Some are pregnant or returning to exercise after having a baby, while others are navigating perimenopause, changes in energy levels or simply a stage of life where they finally want to start prioritising themselves again.

There can be a lot going on.

There might be weeks where you feel brilliant and have plenty of energy, and weeks where sleep has been terrible or family life needs more from you. Your exercise programme should still have enough structure to help you progress, but I do not believe it needs to ignore everything else happening in your life.

I would much rather we adapt a session, move an appointment or find another way of keeping you active than have you feel guilty because your week did not look exactly as planned.

That is also why I think one-to-one personal training can work so well for women who have previously struggled with rigid gym routines. The personal element is not just about choosing the right exercises. It is about understanding the person in front of me and working with their actual life.

Flexible does not mean casual

This is probably worth saying, because flexibility and commitment are not opposites.

My clients still have goals. We still have a plan. I still expect you to show up and put the work in, and I will absolutely encourage you when I know you are capable of doing more.

The flexibility sits around how we make that happen.

There is a big difference between deciding you will “exercise if you get a chance” and having two personal training sessions booked into your diary that happen to fall on different days from the previous week.

The first relies on finding spare time, which most of us know rarely appears by magic.

The second is still a commitment. We have simply made that commitment fit your week.

For many people, that balance between structure and flexibility is much easier to maintain over the long term.

Personal training should be personal in more ways than one

When people look for a personal trainer, they naturally think about the training itself. They want exercises suited to their goals, appropriate progression and someone who understands their body, experience and confidence levels.

Of course, all of that matters.

But I think the way your training fits into your life should be personal too.

If you love having the same appointment every Wednesday morning, we can absolutely do that where availability allows.

If your working pattern changes every week, we can work with that too.

My small group personal training sessions in Colinton naturally have to operate at set times because that is how group training works. One of the advantages of one-to-one personal training, however, is that we have much more scope to work around each other and arrange sessions at times that make sense.

That flexibility is something I have consciously chosen to protect within my diary rather than simply filling every available hour with permanent weekly appointments.

Finding personal training that works with your life

I work with women in Colinton and across Edinburgh, and one of the most common things I see is people assuming that they need to get their life organised before they can properly commit to fitness.

They tell themselves they will start when work calms down, when the children are back at school, when they know which days they are going into the office or when everything feels a little more predictable.

The trouble is that another busy period normally arrives straight afterwards.

If your exercise plan requires life to become perfectly organised first, you may be waiting a very long time.

I think a much more useful question is: how can we make your training work within the life you have now?

Sometimes the answer is a regular weekly appointment. Sometimes it is arranging a few sessions at a time around a hybrid working pattern. At other times it might mean combining one-to-one sessions with some training you can do yourself at home.

There is no single routine that is right for everybody.

What matters is finding something that is realistic enough to continue.

So, if you have been looking for a personal trainer in Colinton or Edinburgh but have hesitated because you cannot guarantee that the same weekly slot will always work, please do not assume that means personal training is not for you.

Get in touch and we can have a chat about what you are looking for, what your week actually looks like and how we might make it work.

Because ultimately, your fitness should support your life rather than becoming another thing you have to rearrange your life around.