Get Fit Now!: The Trainer Tells All

Most members would just ignore that kind of stuff. They’d notice. They’d smirk and laugh. Sometimes the cool people would come up to you and whisper, “That guy on the StairMaster has a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Can you believe it?” But nobody ever did anything. I swear, you could stab somebody to death in a gym and the members would just keep counting their bicep curls and not do a thing.

I was once training a woman on the leg press, she had a lot of weight on, was really straining. She was wearing loose jogging shorts, and she was pushing really hard and, all of a sudden … pfffffft. She crapped all over the machine. All over it. This wasn’t just a little, this was projectile. The poor girl looked down, looked at me, her face went totally pale, and she said, “I gotta go.” Everyone was watching. She knew that. And what, really, could anyone do? I felt bad for her, sure, but I also felt like I would explode if I didn’t get behind the closed doors of the trainer room a.s.a.p. so I could crack up.

After a while, I started to become really passive-aggressive. All the trainers did. Clients pushed us around all the time and we wouldn’t say anything about it. We couldn’t, really. So we were always saying it’s okay that you’re too tired to do that, it’s all right that you’re 40 minutes late, it’s not a problem that you don’t want to sweat and mess up your makeup. And then, behind closed doors, we let loose. We made up nicknames: Butt Girl, the Rack, Death Breath, the Brontosaurus. We kept a tally sheet of who we made throw up. We did anything we could to hold onto some kind of self-respect.

There was one guy who always parked in the handicapped spot. Now, we had a member in a wheelchair who had to park someplace else because this guy, this perfectly healthy guy, wanted to park his Jaguar close to the door. The cops even towed his car a few times, but he didn’t care. He just kept parking there. It made us all furious. But we couldn’t say anything to him. Our boss would kill us. So one hot summer night, I’d just had it. I went outside, hocked up a massive phlegm ball, and spit it right on the door handle of his car. We all watched him leave, watched him grab that handle. He jumped back. Groaned. Tried to shake the thing off of his hand for what seemed like 10 minutes. I felt vindicated.

And, of course, we told their secrets. They treated us like therapists. I heard everything, from sex issues to affairs to money problems. They’d say, “I hate my husband. I hate him. I just hate him.” “I hate my kids. I just hate them.” I was standing at the front desk with a member once who pointed to a guy on a recumbent bike and said, “See that guy right there? Well, just so you know, he gave me herpes.”

Another time, I was training a woman, about to put her on a seated machine. She stopped me.

“I can’t do that exercise,” she said.

“How come?”

“I’m really sore.”

“From what?”

“From what?” she said. “From getting fucked up the ass!” It took about .4 seconds from the moment she walked out of the gym for me to get back to the training room and say, “You guys are not going to believe this. … ”