I hate Personal Trainers

I fucking hate the majority of personal trainers. They parade around gyms with an air of confidence and clipboards in hand. In my opinion, it is all just a big scam to make fat, wealthy people feel good about themselves. Such people are looking for fast ways to lose weight without having to radically change their diets or exercise routines. Hence, the job of a personal trainer is to devise easy routines consisting of brisk walks on the treadmill, half-repetition squats and bicep curls with tins of baked beans which make these people feel as though they are making improvements when in reality, they are no fitter, stronger or more physically attractive than when they started. Getting into peak physical shape requires hard fucking work. I am afraid to say that there is no magical secret.

Personal trainers also have a tendency to talk shit. My good friend, Canadian Steak, has a gym membership at a Fitness First in St. Paul's. He told me recently that he was approached by a large personal trainer who told him "If you give fifty per cent and I give fifty per cent, then that makes one hundred per cent and together we can get you into better shape." What the fuck are you talking about? How about I put in one hundred per cent and you take your fifty per cent and ram it up your arse you cunt.

In spite of my views towards personal trainers, I am normally quite tolerant towards them. After all there is a market for their services and why not take advantage of this for monetary gain? My feelings have reached boiling point recently from training with Pri to help her lose weight for her holiday to Australia. Pri, to her credit, worked admirably over three weeks to lose five pounds. She can now run for twenty-three minutes non-stop and has improved her strength in that short space of time. However, Pri has an annoying tendency to point out that people (including myself) are doing exercises incorrectly. On almost every occasion that she has done this, she has done so unjustifiably.

Ass to grass squats: "You shouldn't squat so deep, it's bad for your knees."

Behind the neck military presses: "It is bad for you to do it behind the neck. It has to be in front of the neck."

Tricep dips: "Your elbows are sticking out."

I know that Pri has gotten this information from personal trainers and gym assistants at her previously fitness club. Whilst I can see Pri's point of view with certain exercises, I strongly disagree that her method is right and any other way is wrong. Pri is naturally an inquisitive person and I know that she would have obtained the opinions of a number of trainers to support her convictions so in this sense I cannot fully blame her for being miseducated. In the interest of time, let me take squats as an example. Pri does what I would consider to be half-repetition squats. As alluded to previously, according to Pri, going any lower than this is bad for your knees and is consequently the wrong way to do it.

Allow me refer to the rules of the International Powerlifting Federation, which documents the world records for squat, bench press and deadlift. Competitors are deemed to have not completed a squat to satisfactory standard if there is a "failure to bend the knees and lower the body until the top surface of the legs at the hip joint are lower than the top of the knees." This would imply that to perform a proper squat one would have to descend in the movement to at least just below parallel. Competitive powerlifters, Olympic weightlifters and many other elite athletes perform squats in this way. Does this mean that they are doing them wrong? I don't think so.

Half-repetition squats with resistance can undoubtedly build the leg muscles. Their appeal is that they are infinitely easier to do compared to full squats and one can use heavier weights. Full squats in comparison utilise more muscles, e.g. the glutes and the lower back, and thus the greater range of movement is better for building muscles and developing strength. This is a fact. Girls are always telling me that they want to tone their legs and bum. Two exercises can achieve this: squats and deadlifts. Instead they mess around on machines in the adductor machines and power plates.

There are also a whole host of exercises which one is unlikely to find in the pages of Men's Health. As a practitioner of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, a lot of exercises that I do are sport specific. Examples of these include overhead squats, windmills and Turkish get ups which improve balance and core strength. The other day whilst on the treadmill I saw a girl out of the corner of my eye performing one-handed dumbell snatches. This is a rare but useful exercise for developing explosive power. Pri, who was running beside me, told me that she was doing the exercise incorrectly and that she wanted to go over to the girl and show her the correct form. Pri had obviously mistaken this exercise as a retarded attempt to do a one-handed clean and press. I told her as much but she dismissed my opinion.

Let me stress that this is not a personal attack on Pri. I have been resistance-training for nine years and have met many people like this in and out of gyms. Their views are a direct by-product of ignorant personal trainers. I would urge everyone to not believe everything that a personal trainer tells you and I would take the training advice of an elite athlete over a personal trainer any day of the week.