Should you hire a personal trainer? In L.A., there’s one for every body, goal and vibe

Admission: Working out with a personal trainer is the only thing that gets me motivated to exercise regularly and long-term. Sure, a “new year, new you” discount at the gym lures me there — but then I don’t stay. Workout buddies to hike or jog with? They often flake. Online workouts? Convenient, but it’s lonely working out alone in your living room, bathed in the glow of a laptop screen; motivation can become spotty.

Having someone to hold you accountable for exercising — not to mention someone you’ve pre-paid for a session — is a powerful tool.

It’s also an especially intimate relationship. A trainer is an advocate for your health, helping to reshape your body — and by extension, your life — whether the goal is strength-building, weight loss, bone density, flexibility, better balance or cardiovascular stamina. Trainers typically work with you one-on-one, often in close quarters, even getting physical at times (with your consent) as they make adjustments to your form, lowering your shoulders or repositioning your hips, during workouts. Inevitably, amid the weekly huffing and puffing, you share stories and life updates with a trainer, who oftentimes becomes a friend.

But personal training is expensive, on average about $120-$180 per one hour session in Los Angeles (though the price often drops in bulk and many trainers offer 30-minute sessions for half the price, or “duets,” which allow you to work out with a partner and split the cost).

But still, why bother when there are more affordable ways to get fit?

“The benefits come down to the three E’s,” says National Academy of Sports Medicine’s Tyler McDonald. “Education about form — knowing that you’re accurately performing the exercises so you don’t get injured. Efficiency — a lot of people don’t know what they’re doing at the gym and trainers help you maximize your time there. External accountability — it’s very easy to cancel on yourself, a lot harder with a trainer.”

Most trainers these days focus on strength and conditioning, often with weights, while weaving in elements of cardiovascular exercise. Many offer nutritional advice as part of their program, others healthy habit counseling addressing stress management, sleep hygiene and hydration, among other areas. All will make modifications to exercises and tailor equipment depending on your abilities, working with bands or body weight instead of handheld weights or machines, if necessary.

But often, it’s what makes a trainer different that sets them apart.

Here are five personal trainers who have very different points of view. One is a yoga teacher-turned-strength trainer who considers your astrological sign; another is a competitive swimmer who trains you in the ocean; yet another is a self-defense-oriented trainer who works you out through martial arts.

Despite their different approaches, the priority, for each of them, is getting you healthy and strong through functional fitness. Whether or not personal training is for you, perhaps just reading about them will motivate you to get moving this year.

The astrology-informed trainer, Natalie Burtney

The universe called and it left a message: It wants you to move your body.

That’s essentially trainer Natalie Burtney’s MO. She started her fitness career as a trauma-informed yoga instructor more than a decade ago, teaching classes at One Down Dog and Equinox before becoming a certified strength trainer. Since January 2025, she’s also co-hosted “The Universe Called” podcast, which explores “current astrological transits” and consults yoga philosophy to help listeners navigate through them.

As a trainer, Burtney focuses on functional strength-building (think squats, deadlifts, rows and weighted lunges as well as progressive weights), but she weaves in a panoply of other exercise styles and wellness modalities to fortify her clients. That includes yoga, elements of Pilates and mobility work as well as breathwork, meditation, reiki — and astrology. Most trainers tailor their programs to individuals, considering their age, fitness level, past injuries and goals, among other things. Burtney adds in another consideration: their astrological sign.

“I like to know my clients’ astrological placements,” she says, “because it [shows me] ‘Oh, this is the kind of person you are and how you like to communicate or what motivates you.’ I’m not an astrologer, but I know a lot about it and I love it — to me, it’s an art form.”

Burtney sage-cleanses her Eagle Rock studio before every client’s session. It’s a calming space with hardwood floors, plants, crystals and meditation bowls. She doesn’t typically read clients’ astrological charts — her sessions are often straight up strength training. But she does consider “what’s going on astrologically” at the time of their workout, approaching clients’ programs based on the sun seasons.

“So: if it’s Capricorn season — Capricorn is a really steady earth sign focused on practicality — I might be like ‘let’s get back to the basics. We haven’t looked at your squat for a while, let’s go back to that,’” she says. “There’s a natural feeling that happens to everybody when the sun changes signs and it just happens organically in my functional practice with clients.”

Not surprisingly, Burtney describes her training style as “supportive, mindful, creative and fun” — however, she does give homework. She provides an app, with exercises for clients to do, as well as more than 100 videos on demand that they can utilize for free at home or while traveling.

So what does Burtney’s own future hold, according to her astrological chart?

“I want to open up a gym that feels like a yoga studio,” she says. “Orange lighting and skylights and filled with plants. So it feels calm.”

It’s a dream aligned with the stars.

“I’m a Taurus,” she says. “We’re into practically, but also beauty and comfort.”

The somatic strength trainer, Melinda Hughes

Melinda Hughes would like to get to know your central nervous system — and you too.

Hughes is a certified personal trainer with a masters in holistic nutrition and about 20 years of experience helping clients get strong with weights. She specializes in slow-motion strength training, or “Power of Ten,” in which the exerciser moves weights on machines excruciating slowly, eliminating momentum and putting muscles under greater tension for longer periods of time, which forces them to work harder.

Hughes also practices somatic experiencing, a psychodynamic modality helping people tap into their bodily sensations as a way of processing emotions. “It helps them process chronic stress and unprocessed trauma,” she says. “The idea is: If you allow yourself to feel the painful or unpleasant emotions, they don’t stay trapped. You free yourself of them.”

Now Hughes blends both somatic experiencing and slow motion weight training at her personal training gyms, the Strength Shoppe, with locations in Pasadena, Mid-City and Echo Park. It’s a natural pairing. As clients go through guided workouts on five to seven machines, such as a leg press or shoulder press for example, they are pushing their muscles to failure. That can feel scary — I’ve trained at the Strength Shoppe and can attest. The heart rate elevates, muscles quiver, the skin can feel hot and prickly because of increased blood flow. “Your body goes into a natural fight or flight response,” Hughes says, at which point she (and other trainers at the gym who are educated in somatic responses) help clients regulate their central nervous system — whether they realize it or not — through verbal and physical cues.

If a client has stored grief or trauma, Hughes says, pushing the body to muscle failure can occasionally trigger “a big emotional reaction” that could include tears because the intense movement “can feel confronting. It’s a release of stress.” In such cases, Hughes encourages them to let the emotion out, to feel it, as part of the workout.

“You help them alchemize or metabolize the emotional experience and then it becomes an experience in the past, where that feeling has been able to escape the body,” she says.

In addition to personal training, Hughes and gym co-owner Arjen van Eijmeren offer stand-alone somatic experiencing sessions through the Strength Shoppe. About 20% of their clients participate. It’s a way for clients to “go deeper” with the modality. That, in turn, allows them to push longer and harder in weight training, Hughes says, expanding their “window of tolerance” or the nervous system’s capacity to deal with things that are confronting, challenging and stressful.

“There’s a level of emotional strength or resilience being cultivated through the binding of somatic experiencing with physical strength training,” Hughes says. “You’re becoming stronger in everything, not just physically.”

The self-defense trainer, Rashad El Amin

Foxy and Fierce is a women’s kickboxing gym that trainer Rashad El Amin opened 15 years ago in Hollywood with his wife, Crystal El Amin. The two are seasoned martial artists — she’s a third-degree black belt in Seido karate and he’s practiced karate, boxing and Muay Thai kickboxing since he was a teenager.

The gym offers group fitness classes for women mixing strength training and martial arts; and it holds self-defense seminars. But El Amin’s personal training program blends it all: Muay Thai kickboxing, strength training, cardio and self-defense moves to get clients strong — in both body and mind.

“We punch things. I teach people how to defend themselves if they need to,” El Amin says. “It’s very empowering to know how to defend yourself — you walk through the world in a different way.”

Muay Thai kickboxing is called “the art of eight limbs,” El Amin says, so he teaches clients how to fight using their fists, elbows, knees and feet. They learn to throw straight punches, elbow strikes, knee strikes and roundhouse kicks. They hit the heavy bag … and him.

“Your whole body becomes a weapon and you learn how to touch a target,” El Amin says. “That target, moving around with a chest protector on and a hand mitt, is me.”

El Amin also conveys proactive self-defense techniques, such as spacial awareness and being attuned to your environment, and he shows clients how to use their voices as defensive tools.

For extra sculpting and toning, he may also weave in strength training with weights and old-school calisthenics (think push-ups, pull-ups and dips). But kickboxing, he says, is “the ultimate conditioning because every kick you throw, your core is engaged. Your cardio gets strong; it’s good for building bone density. And it’s just fun.”

While a portion of El Amin’s clientele are celebrities (Kristen Stewart, Bill Burr, Ana de Armas), he also trains kickboxing newbies, teenagers and septuagenarians. Helping clients feel safe in the world is what’s most fulfilling, he says.

“There are a lot of women who’ve trained with us and have had an experience where this has saved their lives,” he says. “And I have so much gratitude for that.”

The aqua trainer, Igor Porciuncula

Igor Porciuncula is an aqua fitness trainer from Brazil who teaches private swimming lessons in Los Angeles, primarily for children, and offers personal training for adults. He’s also an open water competitive swimmer, participating in races internationally.

Have a pool at home (or a friend with an apartment complex pool)? Porciuncula will come to you for one-hour training sessions. He also trains clients at public pools, with the pool’s permission, renting a lane if need be (the cost would be included in the session). Live near the beach? Porciuncula loves training clients in the ocean and on the sand.

“Working out in water is great because you have resistance — you’re working your whole body, especially the core,” Porciuncula says. “It’s great for aerobic conditioning, losing weight and muscle toning. It’s also low-impact, so reduces risks of getting injured.”

The term “Aqua fitness” may conjure images of seniors tepidly wielding foam noodles to ‘50s pop tunes. But Porciuncula’s water fitness classes are … “hard,” as he puts it. His longtime business, Bootcamp H20 — fitness classes for adults held at private and public pools around L.A. — blended high-intensity interval training, circuit training, aerobics, plyometrics, strength training and endurance training. Bootcamp H20 closed during COVID, but Porciuncula works all of those modalities into his personal training.

Pool sessions are 70% aerobic-based, 30% strength training. “We use dumbbells like you’d use at the gym,” Porciuncula says, “not those inflatable ones or foam ones, plus weighted medicine balls, kickboards, paddles and other aqua resistance equipment.”

Porciuncula also weaves in workouts on the deck, such as planks, sit-ups and crunches. Clients stretch in the water and on the deck afterward.

“It’s a vigorous athletic workout,” he says, “but also suited for people temporarily unable to work out on land due to an injury, but who still want an intense workout.”

Porciuncula also trains clients at the beach, alternating between sand and ocean workouts, though clients must be intermediate-level swimmers for such sessions.

“You can’t really take a five-pound dumbbell into the ocean,” he says, “so we’d do that part of the workout on the sand, then do swimming drills in the ocean, plus treading water or maybe aqua jogging with fins, then going back onto the sand. Half and half.”

Pool workouts are effective, Porciuncula says, but working out in the ocean takes training to another level.

“The currents, the waves, it takes a lot more effort,” he says. “Personally, ocean swimming gives me a sense of freedom, of being in nature, it’s outdoors. You feel great after a workout — maybe sore but in a good way, not beat up.”

The trainer for bodies over 40, Kris Herbert

Kris Herbert will be the first to tell you: Older bodies have different training needs than younger ones.

Herbert specializes in training exercisers over 40 years old. He opened the Gym Venice in 2019 catering to that crowd and now 95% of his clients are between the ages of 40 and 65, with a few in their 70s and 80s.

“After 40 we lose muscle at a rate of 3-5% a year until age 70. Then it increases,” Herbert says. “As a result, your metabolism slows. Some of my clients also have osteoporosis or arthritis, others have balance issues. Building muscle helps protect our joints, our balance — we work to get all that back.”

Building new attitudes for his clients is as important as building muscle mass, Herbert says. Older exercisers who are new to strength training may feel shame or hesitation around their abilities, eventually leading to dropout.

“They tend to feel really far behind or out of place,” he says. “But you want them to come in and feel initiated, inspired. We give them the manual your body didn’t come with.”

Herbert gives all new clients a full body assessment followed by mobility and ability tests. He then designs a customized training program for each one, careful to modify movements if clients have limitations.

Much of the equipment at Herbert’s gym caters to mature bodies. There’s a belt squat machine, for people with shoulder impingement or spinal compression issues; a bilateral leg press which helps with imbalances; “specialty bars” which help avoid impact on the shoulders.

Many of Herbert’s clients are also lifelong desk workers, so they may have postural issues. To offset that, he pays extra attention to strengthening the posterior, or back, chain of their bodies. The added skeletal muscle mass not only helps with posture, but with metabolism, bone density and regulating hormones, he says.

“It’s about building a strong foundation,” he says. “We make you strong for everyday things, like getting up from a chair, carrying your children — real world movements.”

With age comes perspective, which is also an important piece of Herbert’s training philosophy.

“A deeper part of this is creating healthy lifestyle habits and passing on that manual of how to treat your body to the next generation,” he says. “That’s where longevity comes from — from being consistent.”