Get Fit Now!: The Trainer Tells All
After I’d been working at the gym for about three years, it occurred to me: We were the land of misfit toys. All of the trainers were college-educated; we all were very intelligent people working in a job that basically was going nowhere. No wonder clients used to ask us all the time: “What are you going to do when you decide to get a real job?” But they were right. It wasn’t that we didn’t have valuable skills. But we were working from six in the morning until God knows when, seeing about $15 to $20 of the $75 our clients paid for an hour-long session, taking home about $30,000 a year with no hope of ever making much more.
And there I was, constantly being barraged with all this money, looking at the cars and the watches and the huge engagement rings, listening to clients talk about the $20 million they made off of a business deal or the $40,000 they spent on a vacation. I would always nod and smile and say, “Wow, that’s incredible. Wow, that’s really impressive,” and, inside, I’d be thinking, “I don’t even know if I’m going to make my car payment this month.” And I started to want what they had. I would look and listen and think, “Screw all of this ‘I’m changing their lives’ shit. How can I acquire that?”
The thing is, your clients like you. They want to pull you into their world. They want you in their environment. You get close. You see each other two or three times a week. You create a relationship. And next thing you know, they invite you to be their guest at a big soccer tournament, promising to introduce you to all the players. They take you to Super Bowls. They ask you to fly to their home in California and train them. And stay. For as long as you want. Anytime. If you’re not conscious of what’s happening, if you don’t keep checking yourself with the reality of the situation — that you still work for these people — you start to buy into this world. You start to think that you’re actually a part of it. You start to wonder how far you can take it, what your clients can do to help you, what they can give you. You cross a line.
