5 Dirty Little Secrets About Fitness I Learned From a Decade in the Industry
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10 years ago, I got my personal training certification and started an internship at one of the top gyms in America.
Thus began a wild journey that took me to all kinds of places I never imagined. I went from a personal trainer to a fitness expert for large magazines to creating my own fitness products and much more.
But I’ve also seen that the fitness industry can be very maddening and unethical. For many reasons, it does a disservice (and, sometimes, even a danger) to its consumers. And while I still love fitness, there are many reasons why I eventually retired from personal training and went on to do my own thing.
I want to share with you some of the dirty little secrets I’ve learned after a decade in the industry. I hope this helps you avoid a lot of common problems and that it arms you with more knowledge so you can make better decisions for your own health and fitness. Good luck.
Too Many Trainers Are Dangerously Underqualified
There are many different ways that trainers are under-qualified so let me explain more clearly.
First, there’s the trainer who just studied a book for a weekend and then passed a test to get "certified." (By the way, that is the only qualification you need to work at a gym.)
They know little about the human body. They don't read any books, watch videos, or listen to podcasts about fitness. They don't know many exercises or how to intelligently build a training program for one, six, or 12 months.
All they know is how to sell. And if you work at a commercial gym, that is pretty much the only requirement to keep your job. As long as you can keep your client roster full, it doesn't matter that you know nothing—you will have work.
The danger here is that this person can make their clients worse without the client even knowing. When you walk into a gym and buy personal training, you assume that the person training you knows exactly how to help. (After all, they have a muscular body and a certification, right?)
But far too often, they really don't.
Second, there’s the person who got a Master's Degree in kinesiology, knows all the muscles, and knows everything about biomechanics, but can’t train for shit. They're completely lost. They don’t know how to design a fitness program. And ultimately, they do a massive disservice to their clients.
The problem is that they spent all their time in books, but none “on the floor,” working with people one-on-one and seeing what actually works. To them, fitness is just peer-reviewed studies; not what works in the real world over and over again.
Then, there's the person who thinks they know a lot about training, acts like they know a lot about training, and writes countless articles about it, but they never actually spent thousands of hours in a gym training real clients.
But that is the only way you can actually learn how to train people.
It doesn't matter how you went from "skinny to muscular" or "obese to a six pack" and it doesn’t matter if you’ve “helped your friends,” training yourself is categorically different than training another human being.
Until you're one-on-one with someone and you see how they move, you see the physical weaknesses they have, etc., all you know is theory, not reality.
You won’t understand what people are actually like.
I've had people cry in the middle of a session because of things going on in their life. I've had people show up to the gym under all kinds of various circumstances. These are things you have to deal with as a real trainer.
But until someone has had that experience, they're just some keyboard jockey who believes that, just because they know the "7 best exercises to get in shape," it qualifies them to give fitness advice.
But all they're doing is regurgitating other people's advice without understanding the basis behind it or creating anything of their own.
And it makes the fitness industry so much worse.
Sex Sells
This is pretty obvious, but it bears repeating.
Oftentimes, the most popular and most successful personal trainer isn't the smartest or most helpful one—it's just the best-looking one.
Fitness is inherently a surface-level industry. We are in the business of making people "look better" so, by and large, people want to train with professionals who look very good.
But a lot of gyms know it is and take advantage. They will take the sexiest, most-attractive trainer and just give them all the clients even if, as I mentioned above, they are dangerously underqualified.
(Trust me, no one picked me as a personal trainer because they thought I was the sexiest, most-attractive trainer.)
I have seen this happen way too many times. I've seen trainers who literally are a health hazard get all kinds of clients because they’re very beautiful. And there was nothing I—or any of my fellow trainers—could do.
Many Products Are Bogus
When I was starting out and I told people that I was a personal trainer, a lot of people would say something like, “Oh, have you heard of Jillian Michaels?? She’s great!”
I would just smile and nod while thinking to myself, “Oh dear God.”
Look, I'm happy if someone was inspired by a fitness celebrity to get in shape and change their life—I'm not criticizing that.
But my beef is that a lot of fitness products out there are pure shite. It's just a claptrap of random exercises, shitty technique, and catchy phrases (ex. “muscle confusion”) thrown together by someone who doesn’t know anything except how to look good on camera.
Years ago, I worked with a now-famous trainer who released a series of fitness DVDs that many of you've probably heard of.
Before this person released their DVDs, however, they actually wanted me to train them because they knew I knew more about fitness than anyone in the gym. They also wanted me to train them because they had a jacked-up body.
Everything hurt. They were so many basic movements this person could not physically do because of various injuries due to neglect and ignorance. I tried to help, but I didn't have much of a chance because I ended up quitting shortly after (which, to this day, is still one of the best decisions of my life).
Lo and behold, a few months later, I saw that they released some DVDs with a leading fitness company and that was that.
Hilariously, one of my cousins bought it (unbeknownst to me). Eventually, I found out and my cousin said, "You know them?! What are they like?!”
We ended up having a good laugh because the trainer was nothing like how they portrayed themselves in their DVDs.
Gyms Don’t Care
I've worked in enough large, commercial gyms—and know enough people who worked in large, commercial gyms—to know that there is a ridiculous amount of unscrupulous behavior that goes on behind the scenes.
It's like a combination of Glengarry Glen Ross, Dodgeball, The Office, and maybe some softcore pornography.
Trainers, sales managers, and more regularly lie to clients and prospects, manipulate information, and do other bad juju in order to beat quotas, get bonuses, or hook up their friends. (There is an insane amount of conflict of interest that goes on.)
Among the staff, turnover is extremely high. They will regularly hire unqualified trainers en masse in the hopes that one of them will be able to sell enough training in order to make profits. And for everyone who can't, they will gently give underachieving trainers “the squeeze” until they quit.
Boring Is Best
You see all kinds of cool trainers on Instagram or YouTube doing all these super cool workouts with state-of-the-art technology, working with celebrities, professional athletes, and more.
But more often than not, it's just a bunch of smoke and mirrors.
The people who really know a lot about fitness aren't in Hollywood. They aren’t using sexy equipment. They aren’t filming their lives in 4K resolution.
The best fitness coaches on Earth are people you’ve never heard of. They might not even have social media. They were quietly going about their business, helping people get incredible results. They don’t spend all their time cranking out articles every day about “the one food you need to eat to lose weight,” etc.
They're waking up at 4 AM to get to the gym to set up. They're staying until late at night, cleaning up long after their last client leaves. Their "weapons of choice" are extremely basic (generally some sort of barbell or dumbbell movement).
And they do this over and over (and over again) for years.
That is what works.
That is what gets results.
And I hope this helps you in your journey.
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