What I'm Most Proud Of...

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of reading and observing in an effort to better myself as an exercise professional, and by transference, a better person I guess. Many of the things I’ve seen, heard and read lately have kind of led me to a common theme:

I’m very proud of many of the things my clients have done over the years and things we’ve done as a group that have led to many improvements, both physical and otherwise. But the more I thought about it the thing that I am most proud of, is that the overwhelming majority of Training Rim success stories are real people.

I know you’re wondering what I mean by “real people”. I mean someone who was not born looking like a magazine cover, and/or has limitless time, money and resources to make him or herself even more beautiful. The fact that so many take exercise advice from people like that really frustrates me.

A real person is also someone who wasn’t born with once in a lifetime genetic athletic ability. I can almost guarantee you that my strength and conditioning program is superior to many professional athletes routines (I’m sure it’s better than Albert Haynesworth’s for example). But because I was born with a very bad case of small and slow, I’m never going to be a professional athlete no matter how effective my workouts are. Luckily, I figured this out relatively early in life.

Training Rim members are real people.

TR members have jobs, many with long commutes, many sedentary in nature. They have children, many who are young and require a significant investment of time. They have spouses, many of whom have jobs themselves. They have family and friends. They have homes that need to be taken care of. Many TR members have all the above.

Not one of them is independently wealthy. They can’t hire full time nutritionists, chefs, cleaning people, trainers, etc. It is NOT THEIR JOB to be lean and strong – and they are anyway. This is what I’m most proud of.

This is not a knock on Beyonce (or fill in the name of another super hot celebrity) who’s had great success. It’s just that we, meaning non uber-rich, non uber-good looking people, simply can’t do what she does and expect the same results. I have Beyonce on the brain because I recently saw her workout routine on E!: It was absolutely absurd. The amount of time wasted on idiotic stuff was beyond measure. And somewhere right now some soccer mom is doing what Beyonce/Kardashian/Ripa whoever does for no other reason than “they do it and it works for them.”

Watching great athletes train isn’t much different. I read a blog post recently from Mike Boyle (if you don’t know who Mike is, he’s generally spent the better part of 25 years getting better results with high level athletes than just about anybody on the planet.) In it, Mike wrote:

“I wrote an article called ‘An Apology Letter to Personal Trainers’. I’ve been telling them how to do their job for years and never trained a single non-athlete. Over the past few years I’ve started to, andit’s hard work. I think personal training is much more difficult than working with athletes. We’ve got 2 hours per week to counteract the other 166 hours of the week. It’s not a good ratio to try and make changes.”

As you would imagine, he’s EXACTLY right. Almost every TR client falls into the 1-3 hours per week category, trying to offset everything else mentioned above.

And the reasons TR members get results in spite of having the deck stacked against them isn’t so much a result of what we do. In most cases, it’s what we DON’T do. We don’t waste our time with things that are obviously ineffectual and/or overly time consuming. When you have two hours per week you don’t have 18 hours per week to jog like Beyonce, and even if you did, I would tell you your time would be better spent elsewhere. You have to get to the gym, get to work hard and fast and get out – period.

To paraphrase Mike Boyle again, people are always surprised when they see and try our training methods 1st hand. For some reason they think we’re alternating between bouncing on stability balls and staying still. Then I’ll get an email that says “I tried that move you had on your blog the other day – holy sh!t that hurts!”. Or, they’ll tell me “Oh that’s easy.” Then I’ll watch them try it and it will be an embarrassingly bad half assed attempt at what they thought we do. Then I correct them, and it’s not so easy all of a sudden.

We spend our time getting strong and getting conditioned. Anything else is a waste of time.

And if you think Zumba Cardio Kick Step Mocha Latte class is conditioning, you’re in for a rude awakening. Frankly, if your condition sessions are fun, they aren’t really conditioning sessions, they’re time killers.

A facility full of lean strong people with lives outside the facility. This is what I’m most proud of. (Admittedly, the fact they tell me they have fun too is a cool residual side effect though!)