The following is a rant I wrote at the old Biologic Labs site.
WHAT YOU WANT
When you go to a gym or Personal Trainer your goal is pretty obvious: you want a better body! If you’d wanted to be a boxer, you would’ve gone to a boxing studio. If you’d wanted to be a runner, you would’ve joined a mate who liked running. And if you’d wanted to learn to balance on a large, colourful ball, you would’ve joined the circus! But you went to the gym/trainer because you never cared what kind of athlete you actually were, you just wanted to look (more) like one!
WHAT YOU NEED
The solution to how to look like an athlete was obvious back in High School. Remember the kids with the athletic, muscular physiques? They were always the ones with the athletic ability! Genetics be damned! It doesn’t matter WHY they were good athletes; the point is that the physique always came with ability!
Even when you were 10 years old you could’ve figured out, for example, that if you wanted to look like someone who can sprint 100 meters in 10 seconds then you probably need to be able to sprint 100m in 10seconds! Granted, not all elite 100m sprinters look exactly the same... but they do all tend to have a certain ‘look’! Its a similar look to elite rock climbers, gymnasts and elite athletes in any other sporting activity requiring an extremely high power-to-weight ratio. They are all really muscular!
At Biologic Labs we recognise that to achieve the athletic physique you want you need to develop the appropriate athletic ability! Thats the mathematical and philosophical basis of our Body Recompositioning Equation. And because weight training is the only infinitely adjustable, measurable and predictable strength sport, we can even predict exactly what weights you need to become capable of lifting in order to have the exact bodyfat percentage that you want. When you see our math you will realise its actually painfully obvious!
WHAT YOU GET
Yet when you go to a Personal Trainer and, for example, show them a picture of your desired elite sprinters body, you won’t get such a direct answer. Instead, they’ll talk to you about ‘core stability’ and ‘flexibility’ and ‘rectus abdominus’ and ‘heart rate’ and ‘vastus lateralis’ and ‘technique’ and ‘motivation’ and basically try to drown you in about 500 gallons of BS without ever even mentioning the sole determining factor in you achieving your goal: you need to become an elite sprinter (or as strong as one at the same bodyweight).
And then, if you let them, you’ll get given the same generic routine most trainers give to ALL their other clients. It will basically be a condensed 5th Grade PE lesson complete with stretching and calisthenics stolen from a 1980‘s Richard Simmons video followed by a bunch of ‘Retirement Village’ rehabilitation exercise. There’ll be some pulling on an oversized rubber band, lying hunched on a ball squeezing your bladder and, finally, leaning against a wall in a sitting position, but, wait for it... without a chair! Because thats gonna create a super hardcore athlete! Do you “Feel the burn”? Its actually your life, sanity and money being sucked into a black-hole, never to be reimbursed.
Of course, with a personal trainer in a gym you might also get a splattering of half-assed weights machine exercises with REALLY light weights! Heavy weights are dangerous, you see. Really Dangerous! Nothing like the safe sports such as Netball or Rugby where you run as fast as you can, leap through the air, land sideways on one foot while rotating quickly and, off balance, try to pass the ball before getting hit by a neanderthal traveling slightly faster than an express train. Knee and shoulder reconstructions? They only happen to people who lift those dangerous, heavy weights, obviously!
Anyway, lets say you argue and do not accept that the trainer gives you the generic garbage that they themselves would never, ever do (because they know its utterly useless, time wasting junk). What if instead you insist upon training like a sprinter to be a sprinter? Well then the trainer will give you a training program akin to the advice you might get from a retarded person copying the sprinters they saw in the background of the Olympics telecast. You’ll probably have to embarrass yourself in a public park by doing an incredibly gay, high-knee-kick run. Then, like a dog on a leash, you’ll get tied to your trainer with an oversized rubber band and have to try to run away. You’ll probably have to run up and down some stairs. And you might even get to run around the park with a parachute tied to you. And in fairness these are all things real sprinters do. The only difference is that your program doesn’t include the actual sprinting... or the stopwatch timing your sprints... or the expert guidance of a person who actually sprints... or the 5-6 days per week regime of a real sprinter... or anyway of making or measuring any sort of quantifiable progress toward your very specific goal of becoming an elite sprinter!
You’ll get your heart rate measured; but not your sprint times. You’ll get your VO2 Max measured; but not your speed. You’ll get your training session times measured to the nano-second; but not your workload. In fact, the trainer will jerk you around with every irrelevant measure that you never asked for (flexibility, heart rate, VO2 Max etc) and NOTHING relevant to the goal you actually stated at the start.
And people wonder why they fail to look like any sort of athlete when Personal Trainers do not train their clients to become any sort of athlete?
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