What Should a Trainer Look Like?
“Don’t judge a book by its cover”. You’ve heard this probably from your mom. It’s not bad advice. I’m not sure it really has to do with books in this case, but I would like to explore what an exercise expert might look like, what they should look like. Or maybe how we look at somebody and assume they’ve got to know what they’re talking about. Now this is a tough subject, because there are a lot of people who look the part and have lots of real experience and have made real mistakes and do have great advice for people of all categories or demographics that are interested in their version of fitness. But we’ll get there.
Consider the photo above: Who is this guy? A potential expert but not on fitness. What if I tell you he was Muhammad Ali’s trainer? The greatest had this guy not only in his corner, but outside the ring and at every sparring match and every training session for some 30 years. My point is: does he look like a boxer? Does he look like the person that would create what is arguably the greatest boxer of all time?
So this is how we historically recognize the true Guru, the master of something. They often look very different. There’s often decades of age difference. I know Rocky is a movie, but you know why they chose Burgess Meredith to portray his trainer, his wise crotchety old trainer – because that’s what trainers look like. That’s what we respect, at least at one point in time, for their wisdom and what they could offer us. It probably wasn’t a mistake that this person was cast in contrast to who they were training. They had to have some personal experience. It is likely that, if you read the rest of his script, Mickey might have been more recognized as a trainer of boxers than he actually was a boxer.
Quickly consider our world today. Out there we have our current set of experts. Out there if you’ve got a bottom, if you’ve got abs, if you’ve got great arms, whatever the case may be, you can put your pictures all over the internet and people go: “How did you do that?” Here’s the deal. I don’t know this hypothetical instagram model guy. If he’s always had those abs or a version of it, if he’s always been relatively lean, he has no idea how to expose his abdominal muscles. He has no idea how to get the fat off of him. Because if you’ve always been that way, what did you have to do to achieve it? What struggle did you have to go through to get there?
You can read a lot, you can study about diet or philosophies on diet or food but, when there’s a struggle this person is going through, whether it is addiction or self medication, it is that kind of stuff that you are unlikely to know much about because you think it’s a matter of these calories in this food. When it’s really a matter of emotions and dopamine and serotonin and other chemical reactions for them. The point is that I’m not dismissing what this guy looks like and I don’t even know what he knows. He might have weighed 180 kilograms two years ago. I don’t know. I’m not dismissing him. What I mean is, when you look at face value, you look at the cover and assume a level of knowledge and not only knowledge about what he did or didn’t do, but how it can help you and that is a mistake ocurring many, many, many times. So, as a personal trainer, not only is it potentially valuable for your client that you have experienced the losing of 20 kilograms. There’s more than that, because the evidence has shown over and over and over again that anybody can lose fat and a considerable amount of it with any version of a diet. You can go on the latest diet (the onion diet or the pineapple diet or the insect diet) and, if you stick with it, you’re liable to lose. The question is: is this sustainable? The best way to reach your goal, sometimes the most obvious and the most popular, are not the best. That, by the way, is what helps to define the wisdom of an expert and sometimes you got to screw up a lot to see that but you’ve got to be willing to admit that you screwed up and recognize it.
So here’s a lot of internet experts sitting at home pontificating on why everything is wrong in the world without any real solutions or understanding of it. So if you think I’m saying that you need to be old like Burgess Meredith in order to be a boxing trainer, I’m not saying that. Experience is valuable, real experience, not the six months of experience repeated 40 times that you call 20 years of experience or someone calls 20 years of experience. But really understanding where the failures and pitfalls are.
If you really paid attention you understand that the continuum of true knowledge might include some studying (really might and probably will). True expertise comes of having tried and failed and tried and failed and learn from that. And then see how that needs to be adjusted for individuals. It’s a blend of those things. So anyway, bottom line, what we’re doing right now in calling a fitness expert, we’re judging the book by its cover, dismissing a lot of people that could help us and giving a lot of people money and worship that don’t deserve it.