If the quality of a personal trainer can be gauged by how much you hate them, then I have the best personal trainer in the world.
The quality of a personal trainer
can be gauged by how much you hate them. I have the best personal trainer in the world.
Meet Anthony. Anthony works at Goodlife fitness at the Rideau Centre. He is the personal trainer that Goodlife suckered me into getting for six weeks. He is me, but with an extra fifty pounds of muscle, biceps that look like he's hiding grapefruit under his skin, and a faux-hawk with frosted tips. Anthony has been wearing tear-away track pants every day for the last three years. Anthony is
exactly what I envisioned a personal trainer to be like. In this regard, I am totally satisfied.
So why do I hate him? The nature of personal training hinges on the fact that the human body is capable of much more than the human mind understands. If you can lift eighty pounds, you can lift a hundred and fifteen. You
can lift a hundred and fifteen, but you sure won't
like lifting a hundred and fifteen. That's where Anthony comes in. His job is to make me do things that I would normally never inflict upon myself. He is there to cause me pain that, in theory, is for my ultimate betterment. He is there to say, "you are going to lift this fifteen times. You will feel like your muscle is about to tear off the bone and smack you in the face but you are going to keep doing it because I said so. If your muscle does rip off the bone and hit you in the face I will make you do three more reps and then I
might take you to the hospital if you've been doing your reps right."
Let's use an example. Say for instance I am sitting on the chest press, and pushing ninety - no, wait, you can do one oh five - thanks Anthony, pushing one hundred and five pounds. Now I've pushed off about seven of these things, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I am having serious doubts about how number eight is going to go. I want to do eight, but the muscles are not having any of that. Unfortunately, good intentions mean nothing in the gym, so Anthony initiates a complex process wherein he utilizes guilt, shame, intimidation, and in a number of instances blunt objects applied liberally to the kidneys in order to make me abandon all sense of self preservation and push out whatever it is that I have left to do.
Of course, I have no idea how many I have left to do at any given time. I long ago stopped counting my reps because I know that if I am so impetuous as to stop before Anthony tells me to he will most likely crush my skull with his triceps. So I let Anthony count, and he has a very interesting system of counting. Works like this:
Anthony: Three more!
Me: *groan of pain indicating one rep*
Anthony: Slower! Really slow.
Me: *another groan of pain indicating another rep*
Anthony: Two more!
Me: This goes against everything I know about numbers!
Of course, this is just what I wish I could say. When I'm in the gym it is Anthony's job to be right and my job to trust him. If he tells me that, for the betterment of my body and health, I am supposed to do bicep curls until my spleen ruptures, then I will grab my phone and dial 9, 1, and when I hear something go pop, I will dial 1 again.
So for the next few weeks you'll be able to find me and Anthony in the gym. He'll be hurting me, and I'll be thinking of new and creative ways to kill him. The most recent one involved a gun that shoots angry badgers. I think it will have to use compressed air of some kind. This is an indication of a healthy trainer-trainee relationship.
