Fitness Gym Review: LFT Personal Training in Plano

With LFT, I love the idea of standardizing personal training as a service and making it much more affordable and accessible to people looking to take their fitness to the next level. Personally, I’ve felt myself plateau in some of my the group classes and am looking for more of a challenge with strength. Reviewing LFT would be a fun way to challenge myself.

How It Works: LFT offers a membership-based service for personal training. It’s a private gym for clients to schedule their session and pay-as-you-go. That monthly membership rate gets you one session and it can be based on a month-to-month contract or an annual contract. After that, you add on as many sessions as you’d like. Unlike some big box gyms, you aren’t locked in to pre-pay for  a certain number of sessions. It’s not a use it or lose it type of scenario either. They’ve also created workout types to choose so you are able to tailor your sessions more to your goals. There are 6 to choose from. Similar to Fit180, you aren’t assigned one trainer. Instead you are able to work with a few trainers depending on your schedule and their availability.

My Experience: Whenever I get the opportunity, I’m definitely a strength girl. It was really cool being able to choose the type of workout instead of just winging it with my trainer and hoping they come up with a good workout off the top of their head. For my first session, I asked for the Bulk It or a strength workout. I also tried a Tone It, Fix It and Pair It Up and loved working with two different trainers that brought a different expertise to the table each time.

The Space: LFT isn’t very big. It’s a medium sized space with all the necessary equipment to train. It’s perfect for 2-3 clients at a time. You’ll find weight rack, a few cardio machines, astro turf, stretch area, and various other equipment. It’s not cramped and is pretty comfortable to workout in. There are lockers, cubbies, 2 unisex bathrooms and a shower.

The Session: LFT wants to give more control back to it’s client by offering 6 signature sessions to choose from. This gives the client an opportunity to customize their workouts and monitor the kind of progress they want to see. Here are the offerings:

Bulk It – for strength
Burn It – intense cardio workout
Tone It – Mix of strength and cardio
Fix It – recovery workout, stretching, mobility, flexibility
Pair It Up – bring a friend, spouse, or workout buddy for a dual workout
Pick Two: Pick two body parts you want to focus on instead of a general full body workout

The Trainers: Everyone was super friendly and attentive. They were meticulous in their training. They gave me 100% of their attention and were encouraging throughout the workout. During a Pair It Up session, where I brought a friend, I loved that my trainer gave ample attention to her to make sure she maintained proper form and was challenged.

Loved: I love that a heart-rate monitor is incorporated into the workout. It helps the trainers know when to push harder or to back off a little. And, of course, instantly knowing how hard you workout at the end of each session. I burned an average of 500-600 calories per session.

Feedback: For the Fix It, I’d love to see an abbreviated option of that for the other sessions. Perhaps a 10-20 minute added on after a Bulk It or Burn In for a lesser price. Fix It is a great restorative option for people who have been sitting on day, want to work on recovery from an injury, or maybe were on a plane for 40 hours. However, I wouldn’t just do a Fix It by itself on most occasions. After all the sessions, the trainers do stretch you out a little it, but I’m always craving a little more attention to that part.

FYI/Costs/Parking: Parking is pretty easy. LFT is part of an expansive shopping center, so it’s never been a problem. Water fountains are there to fill up your bottle, but if you need a towel, you must bring your own sweat towel or bathroom towel.

The way membership works, is you pay a monthly membership rate of $49.00 a month. That gets you one premier training session. And from there, you add on as many sessions as you’d like for a member-discounted rate of $39.00 and dictate what type of sessions you want. Essentially, you’d be paying less than $50 a session and in my research, that’s a great price. Most trainers charger upwards of $70 per hour. Nutrition is not included in this program though. That accountability is in your hands.

LFT has instituted gratuity for its trainers. Before LFT, I never realized personal training was also a service you would tip on.

The Takeaway: In my past experience with personal training, I’ve never wanted to pay more than $40-$50 a session. Of course, with that you get what you pay with the plethora of trainers in Dallas. The majority of trainers I’ve met do charge nearly twice as much as that and it would never fit into my monthly budget. LFT makes personal training more approachable from a training and budget stand point and I’ll definitely be recommending people to get their feet wet with training here. You get to work with several trainers, customize your workouts, and train in a controlled environment where all the attention is on you.