With the competitive golf season over, I am back in the gym regularly to continue my efforts to build more swing speed and keep an arthritic hip and back healthier. And as I spend more time there I realize that I would be a terrible personal fitness trainer.
Based on my close observations, it appears that every half-hour trainer session at the gym where I work out is five minutes of the client doing actual exercise, 20-minutes of the client telling the trainer why he or she can’t do those exercises because of a variety of physical maladies, and five minutes of the trainer trying to come up with some alternate exercise that the client can do more than two reps of without quitting.
At the first fitness club that I was a member, I got a month’s worth of “free training”. If I recall correctly, the trainer was to spend 45-minutes with me each session. After about a half-hour into the first session, the trainer admitted he would have to start “making some stuff up” because we had run through all of the exercises and sets he had planned for the day. He shared that usually, clients don’t make it through half the workout because they waste most of the first 15-minutes complaining about their bad knees, sore back, weak shoulders, lung conditions, or not getting enough sleep to have “good energy”–or they have to continuously stop and insist that they cannot go another step or rep.
That trainer also filled me on an open secret of the fitness industry: very few people actually see a plan through to completion–even if they pre-paid for the services on top of their regular gym membership. While I am not there every day, I can vouch that the trainers where I’m working out never seem to be with the same people more than twice or three times.
Personally, I think those trainers are being too nice. Maybe it’s required of them where I work out, but I am yet to see any trainers there really challenging someone to push through and meet their goal. “That kinda hurts” is always met with “OK. Let’s stop and try something else.” As I mentioned at the start, I have arthritis in my SI joint, lower spine, and both ankles. Some days, doing squats, or split squats, or box jumps, or lateral jumps doesn’t feel real great. But you know what? I do them anyways, because I know building up the strength of the muscles around those achy joints will help reduce the pain in those joints.
It’s not an ignorant bromide from old-school high school football coaches when you say “There is a difference between ‘hurt’ and ‘injured’.” Hurt means your muscles are being used in a different way than they are used to and the reaction is a negative response sent to the brain–or a build up of lactic acid. Injury is loss of function or range of motion. You can accomplish a lot while you are hurt. Injury means you should stop, and get proper medical treatment. I tend to doubt that any trainers are “injuring” their clients–yet they defer to requests to stop immediately.
And that is where I would fail as a modern trainer. I would insist that yes, you can do one more lift of that kettle bell. Yes, you can do one more lap on the walking track. Yes, you can do one more pushup (or one pushup based on what I see at the gym). I would not be one to say “It’s ok if that’s too hard for you. Let’s find something easier.”
In many ways, the fitness trainer exemplifies so many other aspects of modern society. A recent New York Times article relayed that professors in even the most prestigious of universities as Columbia are no longer assigning students to read entire books. An exasperated instructor that teaches the school’s exalted Literature Humanities course can no longer ask kids to complete the classics–either because they will refuse to do so, or they will not have the reading skills necessary to stick with a long tome or understand its complex storylines. She now merely asks students to read (usually together in class) short passages of classics and to discuss amongst themselves what the authors were trying to say.
If an Ivy League professor can’t ask what should be the brightest minds of our future to stretch their attention spans or expand their ability to think and comprehend, how can we expect a fitness trainer to demand even minimal effort from a 45-year old housewife whose only exercise the last 15-years was chasing after her children and carrying around every toy, snack, and electronic device their offspring might need on a 10-minute trip to the store?
President John F Kennedy famously defended the expense of the space program during a speech in Houston by eloquently saying “We choose to send a man to the moon and return him safely to the Earth by the end of this decade, not because it is easy, but because it is hard!” The people at Rice University that day cheered and applauded Kennedy because he captured what was at that time the essence of the American spirit: nothing is impossible if we try hard enough.
I fear that if Kennedy had issued the same challenge today, those Columbia students that can’t read a whole book, or the gym members that can’t find the determination to do five kettle bell rows would answer “Dude, can’t we just like build a robot to do that or something?” If America is a country in decline like one presidential candidate and many college students say over and over again, it’s not because we can’t rise to meet the challenges facing us. It’s because we refuse to even try.
