Personal Training – A Cautionary Tale

At my gym, www.fortisfiness.ca we have on a few occasions had to politely ask personal trainers not to return.  It’s not that we have anything against them.  They usually have the most popular industry certification and they seem like really nice people.  When this has occurred these folks were almost always brought in by new members of the gym who insisted on having their long time personal trainer join them.  The equipment and methods at our gym are decidedly counter to what the mainstream fitness industry offers the public.  As such, for some personal trainers, our methods seem highly unusual.

One particular incident involved a trainer who came to our gym at the insistence of one of our new members.  This member joined our gym with the goal of losing 30 pounds for her wedding.  The first things she asked about were cardio machines and aerobics classes.  We promised that we would help her lose the 30 pounds permanently, but that it would have very little to do with cardio machines or aerobics.  We promised her that it would mostly involve diet and that successfully reaching her goal would actually be quite easy and fun.

Unfortunately, she had no interest in our methods, but just wanted to bring in her own personal trainer and stick with their regimen.  I asked her when she had first gained the extra 30 pounds and she told me it had been at least 5 years.  I then asked how long she had been with her personal trainer – the answer was 3 years.  It turned out that she was also getting dietary advice from this same trainer.

I met her personal trainer – very nice lady – and witnessed their first few training sessions.  These sessions were very high on the cardio side with a ton of huffing and puffing, no rests and little resistance work.  They were really quite tough for the member who was doing what looked like a continuous series of cardio exercises with little to no rest breaks.  Basically, this amounted to some continuous circuit training.  To get through this workout, the lady required the constant motivation of her trainer.

After one of their training sessions, I briefly explained our training methods to the trainer.  She seemed shocked and couldn’t understand how we could possibly teach ladies or new people exercises such as the squat or the dead-lift.  Her opinion was that these were dangerous exercises, and certainly not for her client (thankfully, we didn’t even broach the topic of diet).  She much preferred the newest isolating machines of the bigger gyms where she had previously worked.

My answer to her concerns was that these movements are not only safe, but are natural, biomechanically correct human movements, unlike the restricting machines she preferred.  I gave here the following examples of how people complete these natural human movements every day:

Squats = going to the bathroom
Deadlift = picking up a throw pillow off the floor
Bench press = pushing in a drawer
Standing press = putting luggage in an overhead bin on a plane, or a shelf in a closet

These exercises do in fact represent the natural, multi-joint movements of humans.  Some of the best examples of people naturally performing the squat include sitting (think of Asia) and infants as they are first learning to walk from a crawl.  At our gym, we make sure they are being done correctly and scale them with weight.  For beginners, we start with a 5 pound bar, or sometimes just body weight.  We then raise both the resistance and variation as people build new muscle and get stronger – this invariably happens very, very quickly.

Further, these natural multi-joint movements arguably create the most benefit – new muscle, bone strength, tendon and ligament strength, coordination, flexibility, optimally raising metabolism to burn fat, etc – of all free weight resistance exercises.  This makes them top of the list for highly efficient choices in the gym.

Sadly, 3 months later, at the time of her wedding our member was still 30 pounds overweight.  The only thing she had to show for all of her hard, expensive sessions with her trainer is perhaps a moderate improvement in her cardio-vascular condition.  Still, she was no where near the size and shape she desired.  She never once enquired about our philosophies regarding diet or exercise.  We would have shared the eco-diet with her. It’s a scientifically-based and nutritionally sound weight loss diet and exercise program. Sadly, she chose to remain exclusively under the guidance of her trainer.  I really wish we could have helped her, but we were never given the chance.