Will your best friend or partner make the ideal gym buddy?
Potentially, training with a gym buddy has lots of benefits. Among other things, these include: -
- Increasing your motivation when your enthusiasm is flagging.
- Helping you reach your fitness goals faster.
- Encouraging you to perform better.
- Making sure you stick to your fitness regime.
- Offering a bit of competition to make you push that little bit harder and get you into shape faster.
- Helping keep you on the straight and narrow with your workout routine, since you will count on each other to show up reliably at the arranged time.
- Offering you guidance on how to perform exercises more effectively, if your gym buddy is more advanced or experienced than you.
However, your best friend or life partner may not be the best person to work out with and here’s why: -
- Working out with a close friend may be fun, but too much chatting and fooling around will waste a lot of time and may sabotage your fitness plans.
- Your best friend or even your partner may subconsciously feel threatened by or even jealous of the prospect of a new, fitter you and be less supportive of your efforts. Because of this, they may undermine your confidence and may even cause tension within the relationship :(
- You and your friend or partner may have very different levels of fitness and if they’re way better than you, you may feel undermined and therefore more inclined to ditch your fitness goals.
- Similarly, if your friend or partner is less fit than you, they may slow you down, so you don’t get the maximum benefit from your own workout.
- If you’re both inexperienced, you may reinforce each other’s bad habits or poor technique or risk injury by being too competitive.
To avoid any of the above pitfalls, rather than making your best mate, partner, husband or wife your gym buddy, it may be preferable to just join them in a bike ride, swim or run or to play a sport you both enjoy together, like tennis or golf.Instead, it may be better to choose someone you’re less close to - an acquaintance, colleague or a fellow like-minded gym member to work out with. You can even seek out someone suitable online, using an app or website, such as Findafitnessbuddy or gympartners . Unless you are both experienced gym-goers, the best strategy might be to enlist the help of a Personal Trainer to design a fitness programme to suit you both, sharing the cost (as well as the benefits) of working out with a gym buddy, and concentrating on your fitness, rather than your personal relationship.
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