The difference between being a trainer and being an a**hole

When I started down this whole "getting fit" path, I was pretty scared. I wanted to change some of the basic ways I live my life. I wanted to venture out of my safe zone and try things I'd not really done before. I was willing to risk failing. Or maybe worse, I was willing to risk being a failure, since what I was fundamentally putting to the test was my ability to take control of myself and change the direction of my life. Tell me about scary.

It didn't take me long to discover that I needed help.

I'm telling you this because I'm setting up what I perceive is often going on when one hires a personal trainer. Sure, sometimes the client will be an experienced or athletic person who wants to get their fitness up to a new level. But as often as not, it's a nervous, inexperienced housewife who is taking a big (and somewhat expensive) risk, putting herself and her sense of self in the hands of someone else in the hopes that this person can help them achieve what they believe (for good reasons or bad) they cannot do on their own. Whatever else is going on when someone hires a personal trainer, they have decided to consciously give someone else a great deal of power over them. There is an immense amount of trust bestowed on this person. We're trusting, fundamentally, that our trainer has our best interests at heart and is willing to do some work to help us achieve our goals, because we've accepted that we don't know how to go alone. By hiring a 1-on-1 trainer, and by that trainer being willing to take us as a client, we are expecting that the trainer will meet us where we are--to help me where I am now achieve our stated, agreed-upon goals. This can be a really scary place for a trainee to be (and possibly rather daunting for the trainer, too). Fortunately, I think that most trainers who take newbie clients embrace this role, and do their absolute best to help their clients make the life changes they need to get fit.

But not all of them.

I was lucky to find a wonderful trainer (you too can find her RIGHT HERE). She combines what I think are the most valuable features of any personal trainer:

1. Solid knowledge of physiology, exercise, and nutrition theory,
2. the willingness to listen to clients and create programs that help achieve their goals, and
3. the ability to be honest and straightforward (she calls herself a "straight shooter") without being abusive.

A good trainer, I think, is one who understands that they have a lot of power over a person, and they use that power as best they can to help that person. In the best case scenario, the trainer will be able to see when there are truths about that client that the client just is not in a place to hear yet. The client may be bullshitting themselves about all manner of things--how much time they have to exercise, how difficult it is to follow their diet, who knows what else. But a good trainer knows that it's not helpful to just yell at the person (a la "The Biggest Loser"). There's a trick to this. I don't imagine it's easy, to see someone sabotaging their own best interests, and having to try and find the right, the most productive way, to help them learn how to stop. 

So when I see a trainer proclaim, loudly and proudly, that they're "brutally honest" and that many people think they're an asshole because they will tell you the truth.... I take a few big steps back. I am certainly not saying that a trainer should lie to their client, or sugar-coat the truth. But for a trainer to be proud of being perceived as an asshole, well, that probably means that they are in fact an asshole. And I'm skeptical in the extreme that this person is really interested in helping anyone better themselves, so much as to exact their judgments on someone who is apparently paying them for the benefit.  If this trainer were interested in helping people, they would moderate the "truths" they dish out in such a way that they are at least trying to be helpful. Maybe it won't succeed--maybe the client is too firmly stuck in their own bullshit. Or maybe they're finally in a place where some tough love is just what they need. Individual cases will vary.

Bullshit does happen, people.

But if the trainer doesn't even try to figure out where the client is--to just shovel judgment on them without any respect for where that person is, where they've been, how far they've come, etc.? That's not training, that's paying someone else for personal abuse. Maybe the trainer thinks it insulates them from any responsibility for the client's failures, I don't know. I'm not really sure what motivates this sort of behavior. 

When I see the same trainer claim that they can tell within the first two minutes if their client will be successful or not, I'm sure they're right, but only because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. This person isn't interested in working with the client in front of them. They aren't going to take the time to help their client unlearn bad behaviors, they're just going to berate the client for having the bad behaviors in the first place, and explain how the client is a failure because they don't just stop. In other words, yes, this trainer is an asshole.

You see, being an asshole doesn't have much to do with whether or not one tells the truth. It has to do with why one tells the truth, and to what degree one has other people's interests at heart when they tell those truths. I think most trainers are probably great on this front--mine certainly was. She was willing to say things I didn't necessarily want to hear, but I always had the sense that she said them because she thought they would be helpful, not just because she's being a brutally honest juggernaut letting her superior training knowledge run over me. I was lucky to find someone like her right out of the gate, not really knowing what to look for in a personal trainer. If I'd found the other sort of trainer first, well, honestly I probably wouldn't have hired them, but more to the point, I probably wouldn't have entered the fitness world at all, at least not then. If my main perception of the fitness world is that it's filled with fitness professionals who have the utmost disregard for the person that is their client, I think I'd've run fast. I'm grateful that my first real exposure to the fitness world came in the likeness of folks like Suzanne Digre, Mike Vacanti, Dick Talens, and Fitocracy. Without them, and others like them, I would probably be sitting on my couch right now living out all of the bullshit self-sabotage that Evil Trainer would love to berate me for, were I willing to hire them.

{{ Side note: in case you can't tell, this post was motivated by the discovery of what I found to be a horrific post from a personal trainer. And I'm maybe even more horrified by the dog-pile of accolades it was receiving from other folks in the fitness world. I will admit, when I saw how effusive fitness folks were being about this post, it was the first time I seriously thought "Wow, is this what trainers really think? Maybe I don't belong in this world." So I want to do my part to push back. But I don't want to link it, mostly because I think the piece is awful and likely to be demoralizing and detrimental to others who are interested in fitness, and I don't want to drive any more traffic to them than necessary. If you're really interested, I'm sure I can find the post again, but I don't recommend it--I don't think this post serves as anything other than an object lesson in how to get people to pay to be in an abusive relationship. Or at least, that's how this trainer seems to be pimping themself. }}