24/07/2025
What makes a good PT?
Subjective question, there’s lots of ways you could measure a PTs effectiveness. Do we look at their busyness, there rate of short term “transformations”, turn over of clients, retention of clients, number of qualifications?
To me, what precedes these things is where the magic is, here’s what makes a PT a particularly good one in today’s society, IMO:
• Anatomical understanding - fundamentally we work with human bodies to get them moving correctly with relatively appropriate intensity. You cannot do that safely and thoroughly without a good idea of what moves when and how. We are engineers of the body and it pays to think like an engineer.
• Educational - just because we know it, it makes sense to us, doesn’t mean it’ll be that way for those who come to us. To be a good PT is to be a teacher. Meet the client where they’re at, have multiple teaching tools available to you to move your client on one step at a time. You don’t know your subject well enough until you can teach it, not simply repeat it.
• Listening skills - Everyone knows to get better health outcomes they need to make certain food choices and exercise choices by now. And yet, people still struggle, knowing the concept is often not enough. We have confidence, belief, information, trauma and social blocks to name a few. Listening to your clients, properly listening, with the intent to understand not just respond with soundbites. That’s how we can help reach the root of a person and nurture them to the life they’re asking for help with.
• Sociable - in a day and age where proper human connection and interaction is declining, where we’re glued to screens more and more, find it easier to message than talk, be a safe and fun space. When I was starting as a PT it was all transformations! And if you got labeled as an expensive “gym friend” you were a stain on the industry. Which I understood why, but that implies a narrow marker for what makes a good PT. If my client tells me they feel better about themselves, if I see them smile and laugh and they keep showing up consistently, without burying them in the gym for the sake of some clickbait, that’s fine by me.
Your thoughts?
