Partnering with a personal trainer for your workouts can push you to a new level of fitness by adding accountability to your gym sessions and an understanding of how to perform exercises to give you the best results. If you're thinking about hiring this fitness professional, it's important to give consideration to the specific fitness goals you have. Sure, you might simply want to lose weight or tone up your muscles, but a personal trainer can help you meet goals that are much more specific. Take advantage of this partnership by considering goals such as these.

Lower Your Body-Fat Percentage

Lowering your body-fat percentage is a quantitative goal that your personal trainer can help you achieve. It's an ideal way to track your weight-loss progress and provides more of an accurate assessment of your physical health than simply stepping on the scale, given that you'll be adding muscle weight through your workouts. Personal trainers are experienced with measuring their clients' body-fat percentage -- there are a variety of tools for doing so, including a set of calipers designed for the job -- and tracking the progress week by week.

Take Part In A Marathon

Having a plan to run in a marathon -- or a shorter race, if desired -- gives you a specific goal to work toward with your personal trainer. Many fitness trainers love goals of this nature because they give extra purpose to the workout sessions; instead of simply meeting up a couple times per week and performing the same workout, there's a specific timeframe in mind and a number of accomplishments that need to be met before the rate you've scheduled. Your trainer will put you through a variety of running exercises, but also talk about stretching and strengthening your muscles to prevent injury, as well as helping you craft the diet you'll need leading up to your big event.

Finding Time To Work Out Daily

Even if you only meet your personal trainer once or twice per week, you might have the goal of making fitness a key priority and performing some sort of exercise every day. Sharing this goal with your trainer opens the door for learning a variety of non-gym exercises that you can perform on your non-gym days, and many trainers will even craft home-based workout regimens for you. You'll also get help with the psychological side of working out by learning tips on how to prioritize keeping active rather than seeing your workouts as a chore.