I guess this article is my first real rant, although you can check out my article on bad personal trainers previously posted if you want to.  One of my main problems within my industry of personal training (and the gym industry as well) is that there is so much misinformation put out there to poor uninformed people who are just desperate for anything to help them.  I don’t think a day goes by without me hearing some person saying, “I heard blah blah is good” or “I’m trying this new thing to help me” or “what is your opinion about x?”  Often this is also a way for them to magically change faster, without putting the hard work in that is really required for permanent change.  Then the cycle rinses and repeats.

The latest one that made me snap this week was for a wonderful new class where the participants hold something called a ViPR, which is touted as “the evolution of fitness”.  There is a great promo Youtube video of people doing classes and movements with this thing.  Here’s the funny part – it is a log.  With handles.  It really kind of looks like s strongman log that someone looked at one day and said: “if I could make that lighter, I might be able to sell it.”  They have varying weights and if you go to their web site they have all sorts of crap on there about how effective it is for “whole body integrated exercises”.  Because you can’t do these types of things without holding a 10 pound log?  Or just maybe you can do the exact same thing holding ANYTHING that weighs the same amount?  Even better – if you want to buy one (and please remember that this is essentially a weighted plastic log with handles) the 10 pound version costs $180 plus shipping.  The 45 pound one (so the same as any standard Olympic bar) costs almost $400.

I’m going to a conference next weekend in Montreal.  I just know that at the trade show for that conference I’m going to see booths and booths of equipment just like this that make me cringe when I see people spending their money on them.  From the Shake Weight to the brainwashed masses who support Body By Vi, my industry unfortunately is a marketers dream, because they prey on the fact that people want a quick fix and any solution that they can find to their issues of being overweight and unhealthy.  Here’s a novel idea:  why don’t we as fitness professionals decide one day to get rid of all the extra things and actually teach people how to move properly and get strong without all of the toys?  Last I checked, I actually don’t need any fancy machines or special ropes in order to make someone increase their heart rate, add force to a joint to help make it stronger or stimulate some positive change for your mind and body.

Tell you what.  For your next workout try to do one with only your body.  No extra equipment beyond altering mechanics and motion in order to make things a bit more difficult.  Can you squat a lot of weight?  Try increasing your depth or changing tempo to go really slow.  Do lots of push-ups?  Try handstand ones.  Pulling?  Wide grip chins can be quite difficult even for a strong person.  Try a totally isometric workout and see if you are sore the next day.  I’ll almost guarantee you will be.  Work on a movement you have trouble with – without weight – before loading yourself up.  Get it perfect.  Make sure that you can do one variant before moving onto the next.  Forget about things like amount of reps, weight, how many calories and what the WOD is for today and just work on controlling your movements.

Always remember that the body adjusts and improves based on application and specifically designing things in order to stimulate the change required to head towards your goal, whatever it may be.  No goal?  That’s a completely separate issue but an easy one to address.  So many people spend years and years fighting to improve themselves when the answer, as simple as it is, is right there in front of them.  Breathe.  Move.  Eat healthy, vital things and get enough rest in order for your body to repair itself.  These things are what will help you the most, not a $180 stick you could make yourself at Home Depot for $5.  Do this for long enough and within a year you will be looking in the mirror at a whole new body wondering why it took you so long to figure it out in the first place.  And, you will be miles ahead of all of the other struggling masses buying gym memberships on a daily basis and then never using them.

Now, if you will pardon me I’m going to go and exercise.  Without a $180 log.  I think it will work just fine.

When people seek out a personal trainer, in some way they have a vision of a better life because they will look amazing. They will be able to do amazing things with their body, attract a partner, and have people pay positive attention to them or achieve something athletic that they potentially couldn’t do before. What is really most important behind results when it comes to physical fitness is the reason that you are doing it in the first place.

Probably 80% of the time (more for some trainers) the first reason we get hired is that people want to “lose weight” or “get toned”, which is a complicated way of saying “I want to wear smaller clothes and look better naked in the mirror or to my partner.” The hard truth is that to achieve the type of body you see in movies and on magazine covers it takes an incredible amount of time and dedication unless you have high levels of resources. The reason celebrities and athletes look the way they do is because it is their job to do so, and they also have trainers every day, coaches and healthy food available to them on call and in any form that they desire. Brad Pitt’s personal trainer who got him in shape for the movie Troy worked with him two hours a day – every day – and he also has a personal chef cooking him meals all the time. Naturally he is going to get results. But the average person I sit down with doesn’t have that type of resources.

The average person who has a gym membership wants to lose 20 pounds and become more attractive to their partner, or possibly attract a new partner (reproduction). Another common reason is that they have received a bad scare medically and have decided to not have the high potential of dying (survival). Third is that they want to get over an ailment that is limiting their mobility and quality of life (usefulness in society). Fourth is pure narcissism where they just want to look great naked, but this often goes into not feeling good about who they are for some reason, often due to a previous partner, or bad parental guidance or trauma. These reasons are all part of our genetic makeup and goes back to primal days, but I’m not going to digress into that here because it would be another ten pages of writing. There are other reasons, but this likely comprises about 95% of the reasons that a client hires myself or any other trainer. I’m removing any athletes from that equation because often they have different motivation. Normally their training patterns have been put in place since they were young and have had years to develop.

So if you have hired a trainer previously, gone through the motions and not gotten any results, or gotten results but then slipped back into your old patterns and then destroyed them (and please don’t blame your trainer for that) then there is usually one main reason that you aren’t seeing any results, and that simple reason is:

You don’t really, really, really, really want to.

There is a video online by an amazing man called ET the Hip Hop Preacher where he lectures to a group of high school students about success (you can YouTube it if you like). The point of the talk is essentially that within all of us, there is stuff we would rather do than be successful – like sleep, hang out with our friends, or waste time doing various things. When you remove all of that and have 100% focus on what you really, really, really want then it will happen. When you are really, really focused on something you forget to eat. You forget to go to the bathroom. You forget about anything because the only thing you can think about is achieving what you want at that moment. Fitness and health is never really enough of a priority for most people. It is often 3rd or 4th on the list, or even lower depending on how many other demands you have in your life. Athletes have a different perspective – they are getting paid (or are hoping to get paid) to perform. Therefore it is much higher on the priority scale. They will miss work rather than miss a workout. They will get up early and sacrifice some time with their family in order to work out. They will forgo a night out of partying in order to be ready for a practice or an event. The average gym goer will rarely do this, and that is why they don’t achieve the same result.

Tony Robbins has a saying that you need to turn your “should” in anything you say into a “must”. “I should go to the gym today” sounds a lot different than “I must go to the gym today.” A must implies that unless something of incredibly high priority comes up, there is absolutely nothing that is going to stop you from doing it. Think about it for a moment, and think about all those times when you said to yourself “I have to do x” – that is the thing that always gets done. Change your brain and you can change everything.

If you want results physically, you have to get uncomfortable. You have to change your previous patterns, you have to change how you eat, sleep, spend time socially, interact with some people that you may care about and several other ways so that applying time and effort towards your physical fitness and healthy eating regimen becomes more of a priority than a few other things on your list that are always an excuse for not going to the gym or eating that unhealthy thing that is getting in the way of whatever reason you have for changing the way you are currently. You have to be sore and tired. You have to eat things that sometimes don’t taste great or don’t trigger that rush of pleasure. And if you don’t choose to do this, then you simply can’t expect anything beyond what the effort you are putting into it is going to give you. The great thing is, you can also apply this strategy to many other things in your life. Work, family, even taking up a new hobby or skill can all be prioritized so that you can truly be excellent at them – if you make the choice to revamp the order in which you make things important to you.

Here’s an example from the movie Fight Club: Ask yourself this – if someone held a gun to your head and told you that if you didn’t do something you were going to die, would you change things? Think about that the next time you make a decision.

http://vimeo.com/1790734

In my many years as an exercise professional I’ve worked in many different types of facilities, including chain gyms, private studios and corporate facilities.  When I began in the industry as a wide-eyed personal trainer working for a national fitness chain (you can guess which one) I was probably a pretty poor trainer.  The fact that anyone can call himself or herself a trainer with no formal post secondary education and a certificate from attending a 20-hour weekend course – or even via online correspondence without attending a classroom at all – means that the industry is full of unqualified, inexperienced individuals.  A case in point happened to me a couple of years ago when I moved to a new city with my wife and had to restart my practice up from nothing.  I was hired by (ironically enough) the same national chain gym I began my career with to train in a brand new facility.  Attending the first staff orientation session and starting to talk to the other trainers that had been hired, I received some startling news.  Guess how many of the “trainers” in the room had ever trained anyone before other than themselves?

One.

And it was me.

Out of – and this is the true number – over TWENTY new trainers, I was the only one who was even certified, or with any practical experience handing weights to anyone beyond “I’ve trained my buddy/parent/Aunt Sally in their garage”.  Shock was not even a small part of my emotion when I found this out.  The worst part was, these people were allowed to train clients right away without having even attended any coursework or receiving any actual training about training!  Of course this was never revealed to the clients in question but ethics never seemed to come into play working for that particular company.  I’ll get to that situation in another article in the future.

So what would happen is that a client would pay money (sometimes thousands of dollars) for someone who was dangerously unqualified, had no clue about proper movement, form or progressions, and in a large part didn’t have any idea about how to actually help the people they were “training”.  Or, the client would pay the exact same amount and get someone with ten years experience, and a high level of knowledge of the human body and how force and movement actually affect it.

Through the years due to working in an unregulated industry I have seen some horrendous things.  I have worked across from people who spent most of their time with clients doing the same routines over and over – with entirely different people.  I have worked alongside people who injured their clients through ignorance, referred them out to therapists (at massive expense) – and then the clients continued to train with them!  Lazy and potentially dangerous trainers are commonplace in most commercial gyms today, and to me this is just ridiculous.  So I ask anyone who is reading this who is thinking about or currently has a trainer who does the following things:  why are you paying for that?

• Inattentive or distracted trainers.  They would rather make conversation or stare at a television than pay attention to you and what you are doing.  And, I believe that any trainer even touching a cell phone when with a client should be fired on the spot.  A trainer who sits on his/her butt while their client is exercising should be reprimanded as well.  This is a huge pet peeve of mine, but it often makes me look good compared to others when I’m actually engaged, spotting my client properly and coaching them like a trainer should.  When a person is holding excess resistance and being asked to do movement that is taxing their neurological system, you might want to keep an eye on them.
• A trainer who can’t tell you what progressions you have made and why they are following that path, or why you are doing a particular exercise in a particular way.  And “I saw this really neat thing on YouTube” doesn’t cut it.  You are not a guinea pig.  Tracking your results should also be happening on a regular basis.  Ask to see your file once in a while.
• A trainer who can’t properly demonstrate or do what they are asking you to do.  If your trainer can’t do it, do you really think you will be able to?  If you can’t do a proper lunge movement standing with your feet on the ground, why would you be doing it with a foot off of the ground, on an unstable surface, or with impact?  Far too often clients are asked to do things not because of any purpose beyond the trainer wanting to create “muscle confusion” (whatever that is supposed to be) or because the trainer is bored – not the client.
• An obviously overweight, unhealthy trainer.  Yes, I said it.  Unless the trainer participates in a sport that requires them to be overweight (and there are many examples of this) trainers should constantly be applying fitness principles to themselves i.e. working out.  My personal program is constantly changing based on my personal goals, just like the clients’ program should be.  Lead by example.

In order to change this paradigm there are two things that need to happen.  The first is that fitness facilities need to see training as something other than a cash cow and stop packing in unqualified, undereducated trainers for the sake of more revenue from vulnerable new members who just don’t know any better or fall for a slick sales pitch.  The likelihood of this happening is probably .001%.  However, the other is that as a client, you need to expect more of your trainer.  And, as a trainer you need to expect more of yourself and give your clients what they have spent their hard earned money on.  Personally if I was paying a high amount of money per hour I would expect a pretty high standard of quality, and so should you.  If you are a trainer reading this, remember that these people are entrusting you with their physical health and well being, and what you do to them every session can either create a strong, healthy body – or destroy it.  As one of my instructors used to say, use your powers for good, not evil.  Although I guess I shouldn’t complain too much – it keeps me busy!