One category of people I don’t get are those who work with a personal trainer. Why would one actually pay to have somebody stare at one while one sweats, grunts, and adopts ridiculous poses?
Trainers
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
One category of people I don’t get are those who work with a personal trainer. Why would one actually pay to have somebody stare at one while one sweats, grunts, and adopts ridiculous poses?
Clarissa's Blog 
Because some people have no idea how to do something as simple as physical exercise properly. (You’d think if they could afford a personal trainer, they’d be smart enough to find fitness instructions on the Internet.) 🙂
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Exactly, in the age of YouTube, personal trainers seem to lose all relevance. Yet there are still so many of them.
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I agree with you on a personal level. I would never go to a trainer. I even reject the offer of free sessions with a trainer that comes with my annual gym membership. But the people I know who use them, use them for motivation/individualized advice. So they say that trainers make them a) more likely to go to the gym and not skip any sessions b) more likely to do things out their comfort zone and c) receive advice tailored to their specific body type: strengths, weaknesses, ability, weight, age etc. etc.
Like I said, I won’t use a trainer so I completely understand your comment. But I’m also a stubborn exerciser. I only do cardio and even then I pretty much only run the track (or sometimes use the elliptical machine or a bike.) A trainer would object to my practices. So I guess that’s why people see them- to break them out of their stubbornness. 🙂
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As if exercising weren’t bad enough, adding sociability to it would be the limit.
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I think it’s a status marker. Personal trainer’s aren’t cheap and having one is an indicator that you have a good salary and plenty of disposable income. The people who have them LOVE to talk about them.
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I feel excluded from the human race when I hear such things.
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The three main reasons I can think of are
1 status striving (every micro-signal counts). the US is in a kind of second gilded age and part of that (along with mass immigration and the return of child labor) is people wanting to show off their status as much as possible.
2 company, exercising by yourself can be lonely and miserable (doesn’t have to be, but can) and a trainer is kind of like a paid companion
2 someone to blame if the exercise regimen doesn’t bring about the desired results rapidly enough
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Paying for company is a concept I’ll never get. I’d rather pay for people to leave me alone. 🙂 🙂
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Haha, you’re channeling Charlie Sheen here, who, when asked about his love of prostitutes, famously said ‘I don’t pay prostitutes for sex. I pay them to leave.’
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Or as my husband said, “You want to hire a cleaning lady? How much will it cost me to have her not show up?”
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My first thought: oh dear, Clarissa has been to the UK and has discovered tracksuits and trainers …
You can tell who the upwardly mobile are in certain E postcodes by determining whether they’ve spent significant amounts of money on their chavclothes. 🙂
The last time I had a trainer of your kind, I needed to heal from one of the various self-inflicted outdoor/sports/everyday living injuries I tend to cope with, and I had some preening idiot tell me that I shouldn’t be doing fast repetitions with a leg press machine at 200 kg, the machine’s maximum limit.
He was going to make an arse of himself, so I quit that gym and joined a nearby gym for “meatheads”, where that machine topped out at 450 kg. There I could finally do slower repetitions starting at 240 kg that would do me some good, but of course I went from being one of the better-in-shape people to being pretty much the worst.
Trainers to me are buffoons and petit-policemen for the gyms they infest.
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Actually, I hadn’t meant for that image to be quite so large, but I’ll now have to go with it. 🙂
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