Best and Worst

Within the past week I've experienced two great examples of the highs and lows of my job.  For the most part being a personal trainer is fantastic.  Everyone knows they need to exercise so I'll always have clientele, and the environment where I work is relaxed and everyone likes each other. 

First I'll share the uninspiring client.  He probably needed to lose about 60 pounds when he first came in.  I made it clear that training with me twice a week for a half hour is great but not going to come close to getting the job done.  He would need to change his eating habits and find time to exercise outside of our appointments.  He agreed.

Over the course of the next five weeks he had lost two pounds and then gained it right back.  He only had one session left when I got the dreaded e-mail "we spoke with our financial adviser and he told us to get rid of some luxury spending, blah blah blah."

This is a lame-duck excuse and usually when this comes out it's not financial, it's simply that they don't see the value in having a personal trainer anymore.  Most people who come to us can fork out a few hundred dollars every once in a while.  This fact can be tough to swallow but we can choose to take it personally and attempt to blame the individual or we can use it as a learning experience to figure out how to avoid this happening again.

On the other hand I had a guy come in exactly eight days ago.  He told me he wanted to lose 10 pounds in a month to look good for a wedding.  At this point my warning signals were going off because we see this person all the time.  They want their check to clear and the weight to magically fall off without putting in any work.  But I took a deep breath and went through the usual stuff. 

"It's doable but you're going to have to change your diet drastically.  The easiest thing to do is to go on our cleanse which will last you 21 days and everything you put in your mouth will already be planned.  I'm going to recommend you come see me three times a week for an hour from now until the wedding and during that time I'm going to bust your butt.  Outside of here I'll need you exercising on your own but I'll help you program that."

I told him to come in for the first session the next day ready to do an initial assessment and get down to business.  Standard procedure dictates that we ask if there are any medical concerns we need to know about before starting.  At this point I found out he had been in a coma for about two months and really doesn't remember much for several months after he woke up.  This happened about eight years ago but he had to undergo physical therapy, occupational therapy, and all kinds of other stuff.  His body was pretty wrecked from the whole thing and he told me his balance and coordination wasn't great.  I knew I had my work cut out for me but his attitude suggested that he was ready for a change.

After he left I alerted our nutritionist who got him started on our cleanse that same day.  The workouts have been an interesting game of tic-tac-toe.  Basically I've been trying to find ways to strengthen his body to work on the coordination while also keeping his heart rate up, which is the important way to facilitate weight loss.  He followed the nutrition program 100% for the next seven days.

Today, a week after our first session, we weighed him in and he had lost 6.5 pounds.  He told me he's felt great the whole week and his clothes are fitting better.  While he was warming up I was asking the standard questions about is he staying with the diet, how that's been, is he getting enough water, etc.  We talked for a bit and then he threw this at me:

"I wanted to tell you two other things.  Today, for the first time since I left the hospital eight years ago, I was able to put on my pants without using a bedpost or something else for stability.  I just slipped them right on.  Also since the accident it's been very uncomfortable when I go the grocery store and need to see an item on the bottom shelf.  In the past I've had to awkwardly bend over and it can be quite painful.  But today I had to get something from the bottom shelf and just squatted right down there.  It was no problem and felt great."

Need I remind you that I've only worked with this dude for a week?  He finished by saying "between those two things alone this whole experience has already paid off."

I recounted this story for another trainer later and he said "that's the stuff that makes being a personal trainer awesome."  I agreed.

Barbells

I'm not sure what age I picked up my first barbell but it was pretty funny.  I remember doing my first set of bench press with my dad's 25-ish pound barbell.  He was so cautious and careful when showing me the form and clearly very nervous while spotting me through those first sets.  Definitely one of those moments that you clearly remember your parents doing parental things.  Like when I was 14 and he got fed up with looking at the awful peach-fuzz crustache that had formed above my upper-lip and showed me how to shave. 

Adam Morrison has a crustache

Anyway, barbells have become my favorite piece of equipment.  They're effective and humbling and brutal and fun at the same time.  Monday there were front squats where we worked up to heavy sets of three and I was able to do sets at 255.  It felt heavy.

Wednesday we did the press and were instructed to work as heavy as possible but I was not able to hit my previous 1RM, probably due to the handstand push up volume training.  The METCON was 100 overhead squats with 95 pounds and this is where the barbell becomes brutal and humbling.  I had seen that we would be doing this workout the night before and it was posted with a video of a guy doing all 100 reps in a row without stopping.  Naturally I told myself that I could do it too.  Boy was I wrong!  I did sets of 25, 20, 15, 15 15, and 10.  I think my time was around 9:45.

Thursday it was deadlifts for a 1RM.  In the past I had done 415 with lifting straps but only 405 without.  I was able to hit 415 without, so it was great to see progress here.  Friday I came to the open gym and did some sets of 3 bench presses at 225 and a few sets of 3 back squats at 275 but my lower back started to ache, probably due to Thursday's deadlifts.

Lots of barbell stuff which is right up my alley.  Soon I'll need to buckle down and start drilling the gymnastics movements. 

First Post

This will be my third attempt at blogging.  The first two attempts came in college when I was still super opinionated about things and wanted to go on rants about things I was passionate about.  Problem was that I quickly ran out of things to rant about, or the energy to write about them.  Probably the latter. 

My hope for this third attempt is that I'll have a place to practice my writing and gather my thoughts about training.  For those who don't know I am a personal trainer for a living so between CrossFit and my career I'm around people exercising all day.  I read about it all the time and am generally very interested in fitness and nutrition.  I also try to be a multi-tasker.  My friends make fun of me all the time because of these two facts.  When they saw the gymnastic rings in my apartment they made this.  Fortunately that's not my actual phone number on there.

Anyway, a group of people are interested in training for the CrossFit games next year and I'm one of them.   I suggested to the group that everyone identify three strengths and weaknesses with the idea of helping each other and I've learned quite a bit since then.  Coach Phil from CrossFit Durham (where I train for the most part, known as CFD from now on) suggested a great volume program which has been working extremely well for my handstand push ups.  The gist is that you pick an exercise you suck at and perform between one and five repetitions every minute for 20 minutes without deviating more than two reps.  I did 21 ugly, busted looking reps on June 27th.  Yesterday I was able to do 54 strict reps.  Thanks, Phil, for suggesting a great program to work on a serious weakness and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking to get better at a body weight movement.

The owner of CFD, Dave, who is responsible for most of the programming has had a burpee fetish lately because people aren't putting weight plates in the correct stack and today the workout was a 20 minute AMRAP of 5 burpees, 10 sit ups, and 15 box jumps (24").  This felt like an eternity of sustained hell and I did it with a 20# weight vest and got through 11 rounds.  Brutal. 

I'm going to make a legitimate attempt at keeping this blog going.  I can't promise perfect spelling, grammar, or language but I'm confident I'll learn something along the way.  Thanks for reading!

Paul