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Work out with a personal trainer

It was once the case that personal fitness trainers were exclusively for the super rich or celebrities. But as fitness centers have spread throughout China's big and middle-sized cities and the number of personal fitness trainers has increased, getting your own has become a real possibility for the average person.

Shi was once a professional tennis coach. But now, as he works as a personal trainer, most of his time is spent with amateur students.

Miss Zhang is one of his clients. She has already improved after hiring the coach one-on-one for a year.

"At the beginning, I put all my strength on the tennis racket, taking for granted it was the right method. But later I found out that's wrong. To play well, you should relax your body. With the professional help from my personal trainer, I've learned standard movement skills and patterns."

Once considered a luxury, personal fitness trainers are more and more common in Beijing gyms and sports clubs. Most of them are graduates from sport institutes or once professional coaches. And their prices range between 100 and 200 yuan per hour. More than the attractive income, being a personal trainer is quite a demanding job.

Shi says, "As a personal trainer, you should first be good at the sport you're teaching. It's also important that you understand the sport, not to mention, its basic skills and patterns."

Gao Xiaotao is also a personal fitness trainer.

"Knowledge concerning sports and gym workouts is the basic requirement. We should also be equipped with knowledge in sports-related fields like nutrition and medicine."

A survey shows 10 percent of exercisers in Beijing are already coached by personal trainers. But why do these people pay for somebody to tell them to exercise when they can just go and work out by themselves for free?

Exercisers see a lot of practical advantages to having a personal fitness trainer.

"It's less effective if you just work out blindly."

"It saves time and it reduces injuries. Before I hired a personal trainer, I was often over exercising, which hurt my health rather than improving it."

Now it's also popular for several friends to hire a personal fitness trainer together, which not only saves money but helps build a friendlier exercising environment as well.