One of our clients left us a review that reads, in full: “Stone is my rock.” Five stars. That is the entire thing.
I love it. It also tells a stranger nothing at all about what happens in our building. Another one says “Amazing .” with the space before the period. Also five stars. Also useless to somebody sitting in their car outside a studio trying to work out if the money is worth it.
That is most of what you are reading when you scroll a trainer’s reviews. It is warmth and gratitude and relief that somebody was kind to them, all of it real, and almost none of it predictive. A person who liked their trainer writes the same sentence about a good trainer and a bad one, because liking somebody was never the thing you were trying to evaluate.
The reviews that carry information
Every so often somebody writes down what happened to them, and those reviews are worth more than fifty of the others.
Alexis came to us with left shoulder pain that was interfering with sleep and getting dressed. Her review has a sentence in it that does more work than anything I could write about our process:
Rather than just looking at the single spot that was hurting, they took my entire injury history into account and measured every single joint, comparing passive availability against active control.
That is a description of the Motive Movement and Mobility Assessment that is more accurate than most of our own marketing. She names the mechanism. Passive availability against active control is the gap between the range somebody else can move you through and the range you can produce yourself, and closing that gap is most of what we do. She did not learn that phrase from a brochure. She learned it because it was explained to her while it was being measured.
A review calling a trainer knowledgeable and passionate is a compliment that leaves you no closer to knowing what your first session looks like.
Amisha has trained with us for a year and a half and mentions that her programming includes controlled articular rotations and isometric loading alongside strength work. Bipin came in after a soccer injury and describes doing an assessment before anything else. Jill came in with chronic neck and shoulder pain and describes what changed:
My joint mobility has improved significantly and my chronic pain has lessened considerably.
None of those are dramatic. All of them are checkable. If you walked into our studio tomorrow and none of that happened, the reviews would be wrong, and that is the property you want. A review you could falsify is a review that means something.
The specific detail is the tell
When somebody invents a testimonial, or writes one out of vague goodwill, it lands on adjectives. Professional, life-changing, best in Austin. Nothing in those sentences could turn out to be false, which is the problem with them.
Real experience arrives with texture that nobody would bother making up. Alexis mentions getting dressed and sleeping comfortably, which is an odd pair of activities to name unless a shoulder had stopped you from doing them. Trey mentions that the gym is not overcrowded. Someone else mentions the space before the period.
Read for the thing the writer had no strategic reason to include. That is the part that happened.
Read for what the trainer would not do
The most useful review we have ever received is not a success story.
Frida came to us with chronic pain across her whole body, years of it, and a history of specialists who had not helped. She trained with us for a few months. It did not work well enough. Here is her account of that:
He was honest with me when I wasn’t seeing the results I was hoping after a few months and pointed me in another direction. That was when I was diagnosed with my spinal condition.
She was later diagnosed with a spinal condition that was never going to respond to what we do, and she is now near the end of treatment for it. Her review says we will not make false promises and will send you elsewhere if the problem falls outside our scope.
I would rather a prospective client read that than any success story on our site. It answers the question that matters most when you are in pain and have already been let down: what does this person do when they cannot help me. A trainer who has never referred anybody out is either extremely lucky or is not paying attention, and the line between training and clinical care is not always obvious from inside the room.
Look for that in reviews anywhere. Somebody describing a limit, a referral, a trainer saying no to something. It is rare, and it is the strongest signal in the set.
Where reviews stop being useful
Reviews work as a filter and stop there. They tell you what kind of place you are walking into and roughly what people get out of it. What your hip is doing is outside their reach.
Five stars from a twenty-year lifter and five stars from somebody training for the first time at fifty-eight are describing different experiences of the same building. Neither of them has your history. The review that made you book is not a prediction about you, and what the money buys is somebody looking at your situation specifically rather than applying what worked for the last person who wrote something nice.
So use them to narrow the list. Then go find out what the room is like, and pay attention to the first session, because the first session tells you more than the reviews do. Does anybody measure anything, and does the explanation you get match what you feel in your own body.
Our own reviews live on the client results page, and I would apply everything above to them too.
Written by
Brian Murray, FRA, FRSC
Founder of Motive Training
Motive Training is a coaching studio in South Austin built around assessment, joint health, and strength you can use. Train with us in the studio, come to a KINSTRETCH class, or work through the progressions in KINSTRETCH Online.