I can only generalise about how trainers from my country might behave. And I'm sure there are good trainers here, as well as mediocre and bad ones. I've only had three personal trainers, but I've met and talked to many of them, and after listening to them for a while, I can see most trainers born in this blessed southern land share indeed certain personality traits. This description may not fit any trainers you might have met. Nowadays in my country there's a cult to the external image; handsome men and gorgeous women are worshipped as the demigods and demigoddesses of this post-modern cybernetic era, and personal trainers see themselves -and we also regard them- as the reincarnation of the Gods of Classical Greece. That said, I'll make use of my personal experiences to extract the best and worst qualities in the trainers I've met, and express in my words and from my point of view -that is to say, subjectively- what a good trainer should be like.
First of all, does the perfect trainer exist? Well - no. Human beings are imperfect, in the first place - that's exactly what makes us human and not divine: fallibility. So any trainer can fail, and many trainers will fail short to your expectations. Trainers aren't either perfect or divine. However, it may take a life to the unfit and the worshippers to realise this basic truth.
I was in my early 30s when I hired my first personal trainer. I never got to know if he was a good or a bad trainer. When we met for the first time, it happened in a social background and I didn't know he was a personal trainer at all. He was stunning: tall, blue eyes, ripped muscles but yet skinny, so used to being spotted, to his own narcissistic delight - almost to the point of hysterical paroxysm. Coincidentally, I had lost a lot of pounds that year, and as my workouts in the Gym weren't getting me the results I wanted, I had been considering hiring a trainer before I learnt about this guy's job. I hardly remember his name - oh, he told me his name was Matias, but his real name was Sebastian and I found it out in an awkward situation. As soon as we started talking, he said he was a personal trainer. He could see I'd been losing weight. "Who's your trainer?", he asked me. I bet he could tell I didn't have one.
He talked to me as if we were good friends, and one of the things he got me with was, he used the pronoun "we" very often. So he started training me once a week. Well, nobody gets great results training once a week, but he lived too far from my town, and besides, he was incredibly expensive. To be honest, I could hardly manage to hide the effect his mere presence had upon me. We trained in a Gym he suggested. I had the impression that he was knowledgeable about how to exercise in order to get in shape, but I never paid attention to what he said (I was too enthralled). Every time he made do a new exercise, he would 'model' it for me, showing me the right way to do it, and then he'd watch me carefully while I was doing it, correcting any mistake I could have made as regards good form.
At that very moment, I was spending a fortune in a famous beauty centre providing services such as a diet designed weekly by a nutritionist together with three sessions a week of cosmetic body reshaping. And as they'd already helped me lose about 25 lbs, I believed in what they were selling me. I couldn't have been more mistaken - their 'miraculous treatment' finally left me weak, dehydrated, depressed, with hypothermia and low blood pressure. But I don't think Sebastian was able to perceive I was already in an unhealthy state. When he tried to convince me to leave the beauty centre and increase the frequency of my workout sessions with him, he was just trying to make more money. I don't think he was knowledgeable about healthy nutrition, as he never mentioned it (I guess if he had, his arguments to drag me out of the centre might have been more convincing).
After all, Sebastian was just another guy who was fond of the Gym - although he wasn't a muscular beast but was actually ripped - and then enrolled in a course to become a Gym instructor. After that, he would enroll in another course to become a personal trainer. There are hundreds of these courses everywhere, and some of them aren't very serious. But we're not used to asking these guys to show us their certificates, are we? That could even be considered offensive, why would we think that somebody saying he's a personal trainer isn't really a personal trainer? What kind of bond can you create with a trainer, who's supposed to be there to HELP, if at the very beginning you show signs of lack of trust?
After three sessions with him, something didn't sound 'convincing'. I'm not sure about what that was, but I had the feeling that I didn't know what I was doing. If I had been able to talk to him about this --- but I knew the guy had a HUGE ego --- maybe we could have sorted it out. I guess I realised I wasn't really motivated to train, or maybe I had already started to feel weak, I can't remember it clearly. Lack of memory might have been another consequence of my poor nutrition, after all. So I fired him. He just shrugged as if he didn't care. And that was all.
Something I'd never be able to forget about Sebastian: he was carrying my towel and my bottle of water everywhere, as if that was one of his sacred duties. He smiled all the time because he knew that made him look great. He touched my back, my arms and my shoulders a lot, because I bet he also knew what the effect on me was... He had an awesome body and wonderful eyes, and he loved to be worshipped. In every sense, I'd hired him for the wrong reasons, so letting him go after a month was my best move. But I learned a lot from my first experience with a trainer; next time, I'd be wiser.
He talked to me as if we were good friends, and one of the things he got me with was, he used the pronoun "we" very often. So he started training me once a week. Well, nobody gets great results training once a week, but he lived too far from my town, and besides, he was incredibly expensive. To be honest, I could hardly manage to hide the effect his mere presence had upon me. We trained in a Gym he suggested. I had the impression that he was knowledgeable about how to exercise in order to get in shape, but I never paid attention to what he said (I was too enthralled). Every time he made do a new exercise, he would 'model' it for me, showing me the right way to do it, and then he'd watch me carefully while I was doing it, correcting any mistake I could have made as regards good form.
At that very moment, I was spending a fortune in a famous beauty centre providing services such as a diet designed weekly by a nutritionist together with three sessions a week of cosmetic body reshaping. And as they'd already helped me lose about 25 lbs, I believed in what they were selling me. I couldn't have been more mistaken - their 'miraculous treatment' finally left me weak, dehydrated, depressed, with hypothermia and low blood pressure. But I don't think Sebastian was able to perceive I was already in an unhealthy state. When he tried to convince me to leave the beauty centre and increase the frequency of my workout sessions with him, he was just trying to make more money. I don't think he was knowledgeable about healthy nutrition, as he never mentioned it (I guess if he had, his arguments to drag me out of the centre might have been more convincing).
After all, Sebastian was just another guy who was fond of the Gym - although he wasn't a muscular beast but was actually ripped - and then enrolled in a course to become a Gym instructor. After that, he would enroll in another course to become a personal trainer. There are hundreds of these courses everywhere, and some of them aren't very serious. But we're not used to asking these guys to show us their certificates, are we? That could even be considered offensive, why would we think that somebody saying he's a personal trainer isn't really a personal trainer? What kind of bond can you create with a trainer, who's supposed to be there to HELP, if at the very beginning you show signs of lack of trust?
After three sessions with him, something didn't sound 'convincing'. I'm not sure about what that was, but I had the feeling that I didn't know what I was doing. If I had been able to talk to him about this --- but I knew the guy had a HUGE ego --- maybe we could have sorted it out. I guess I realised I wasn't really motivated to train, or maybe I had already started to feel weak, I can't remember it clearly. Lack of memory might have been another consequence of my poor nutrition, after all. So I fired him. He just shrugged as if he didn't care. And that was all.
Something I'd never be able to forget about Sebastian: he was carrying my towel and my bottle of water everywhere, as if that was one of his sacred duties. He smiled all the time because he knew that made him look great. He touched my back, my arms and my shoulders a lot, because I bet he also knew what the effect on me was... He had an awesome body and wonderful eyes, and he loved to be worshipped. In every sense, I'd hired him for the wrong reasons, so letting him go after a month was my best move. But I learned a lot from my first experience with a trainer; next time, I'd be wiser.
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