I read a statistic the other day which said that the average personal trainer lasts less than 18 months and never has more than 5 clients
I believe it.
When you get into the field, you show up with stars in your eyes. You get to talk about what you love, which is exercising, nutrition, and getting people in the best shape of their lives.
If you’re one of the fortunate, you’ll even get to do that some of the time.
Overall, it’s an awful, punishing racket if you want to make real changes in people’s lives.
What I’ve learned from my own observations and experience is that the industry of personal coaching is much too focused on exercise, workouts, diets, and mechanical nuts-n-bolts details…
…and too little concerned with the real live flesh and blood human beings who come to them for help in changing themselves.
If you’ve followed me for awhile, you may have noticed that I’ve changed my tune from the things I was saying in the 00s and early 10s of this century.
Back in those days I was a science-and-reason guru who lived and died by Pubmed searches.
I’ve since recanted and turned into a serious critic of my own former self.
Why?
Focusing on the kinesiology and biomechanics of human movement is fine stuff and, I believe, necessary. Having a friendly knowledge of human biology is a net good thing.
Where it goes wrong is not in the knowledge itself, but in the greedy gluttony to forever know more and more.
What I learned is that knowing more stuff rapidly leads to the dreaded death of diminishing returns.
And worse yet, this obsession blinds us to the fact that we are after real, tangible, visible, tastable results for real human beings.
Too much of The Science leaves no context for lives and lifestyles and what matters to a person.
Trainers, from the novice on up to the Certified Evidence Based Professional™ will throw the proverbial kitchen sink of facts, technical details, ideas picked up from studies and certification courses, Pubmed studies, and journalistic sensations at a new client who stands there blinking as a deer in the headlines.
The poor soul who just wants to fit back in her jeans is hit with a blitzkrieg of Things To Do when she is nowhere near ready for it in her mind and in her life environment.
Instead of getting into the other person’s world and working from where the client is, trainers work from their own world and try to pull the unwilling soul into it.
No wonder there is so much resistance.
Now, when it works, it works. I can’t dispute that. The folks that commit to a regiment of life changes will reap the rewards. Like any factory, it takes in raw material and spit out the finished product on the other side.
What you don’t see is all the wash-outs that don’t make the cut.
Years ago I got obsessed with systems thinking. If you’re not familiar with that, the summary is that everything is interconnected. What looks like a single “snapshot” moment in time is actually wrapped up in complicated webs of causes and effects.
Your living body is one such thing. Every time you hear some nerd go on about a vitamin or mineral that is “essential for” this or that, bear in mind that your body is so complicated that even the idea of a cause leading to an effect is near impossible to figure out.
This fact alone is why I threw in the towel on micro-managing diets and training. We have no hope of understanding, much less influencing, such a thing at the level of details.
Worse yet, our own behaviors are part of the system of a human body.
Your choices cause effects, often unwanted and unintended, which can be hard to see. A choice you make today can have an effect 90 days from now, and in some obscure part of your world you never thought about before. Delays in time and distribution in space make it difficult to tell exactly what results you’re creating.
And that’s before we talk about feedback loops, which can lay waste to the best laid spreadsheets.
The result?
All those big-picture goals and big-picture systems for overhauling a whole life that we love to make run smack into the brick wall of circular causality and structural forces.
The unintended consequences are negative feedback loops that throw the brakes on all those grand lifestyle changes you wanted to make.
You can read about biochemistry and biomechanics to your little heart’s content. Beyond the most basic principles, like progressive overload and specificity of adaptations, that reading doesn’t make a lick of difference to what is actually done in the gym and the kitchen, or what results happen on the other side.
What I do now is keep my eyes on right now.
Focus on smaller pains, smaller problems, and smaller steps to solve them.
Not a massive year-long plan broken up into 12 week cycles.
What am I doing this week? Today?
Smaller steps are easier to do, easier to keep doing, and they add up to big changes over time.
Momentum is our keyword, and how we get it is our goal.
Momentum, of course, is as much a matter of psychology and, dare I say it, of ethics as it is about raw knowing-of-facts.
It’s fine to know facts, but it’s better yet to know what you should do and what is good or best to do — and then DO it.
Crack that nut and you’ll get to the real changes, for yourself or your own clients.
That’s what I’m up to now. If you want in, use this link to join us.
Matt Perryman