Enter"train"ment vs. Results Based Training

Enter"train"ment - see if you can spot the douchebags

It seems to me that many trainers are into entertaining their clients as the primary responsibility and getting results their second. It’s kind of like hiring a mechanic to work on your car and all he does is park in the garage and do cartwheels around it. I actually spoke with a trainer that said he focused more energy on entertaining than anything else because, “I’m not that good. People come to me because I keep them entertained.” My response was, “So, you like wasting peoples' money?”.

Trainers should live by the motto “Show them you care, and then show them results”. The fitness industry is full of entrepreneurs looking to make a quick buck. Trust me; I have no problem with people wanting to make money. The thing that I have a problem with is people trying to make money without having something to offer. Take the terms “functional training” and “corrective exercise training” for example. As soon as a physical therapist came up with the term “functional training” to get their clients off the leg extension machine and introducing “real life movements”, someone decided it would be a good idea to come up with little gadgets like stability balls, bosu balls, and wobble boards and call them functional. This is because, for a while, anything that said functional on it was a huge hit. We have all now realized that most unstable surface training does not work for the healthy individual. Now, corrective exercise training is the new functional training. Don’t get me wrong, stability balls and foam rollers definitely have their place in my programs; I just don’t base it around them. I base it around getting results for the individual client. Any good program should incorperate the individual needs of the client.

The bottom line is, all enter”train”ment does is make the client and the trainer both look like douchbags!