Careers

I found a job. Sort of.

A few of you know that in college I worked at a gym and eventually got my personal training certification. The problem was that after working in a gym for a year, giving introductory workouts to new members, I didn't want to use my personal training certification when I finally got it. I realized that so much of personal training was people with more money than me paying gym rats like me to work out for them. Anyway, the program I went through (ACE, because the study materials were in my gym's staff library) was more about covering your ass legally than it was about training people. Furthermore, it was a job that involved touching fat people. So I let my personal training certification expire and moved on with my life moving onto a couple of other low-paying, unrelated, and ultimately doomed career paths.

That was in 2005-2006. Flash forward five years, and here I am living off unemployment for eight months. The only calls back I seem to get are from companies who are interested in my athletic knowledge, not the jobs I apply for that would use my fluent Spanish, editing experience, or writing skills. I begin to pass myself off as a "fitness expert," even though secretly in my head this makes me snicker. I feel like more of a fitness iconoclast than an "expert." Imagine, me-- someone who does things differently than how they tell you to do it, just because I can't stand being told what to do--offering advice on how to train. It's a farce!, Finally, after revising my resume until it is so threadbare that I can't even see my errors anymore I walked into the Y where I'm a member and filled out an application. Within two days I had two callbacks, one even came from a club that was under a hiring freeze. I guess this is a good sign.

But to get started I have to renew everything. I'll be working on getting my CPR certification, Spinning Instructor certification, and American College of Sports Medicine Personal Training certification. In the meantime I'm working a few shifts as a "floor instructor" (you know, the person who Windexes the Nautalus machines and teaches old people how to do low back extensions). Floor instructors are the serfs of the gym kingdom. My pride is bruised.

On the path to the $50K/year that the Internet promises me I could be earning as a personal trainer, I got my Spin certification on Saturday. That was... interesting. I was shocked at how little most of those people (including the instructor) knew about exercise physiology, and thus how easy the certification was. The test was like 50 true/false questions, and since you took it online, it was open book. All the questions were taken verbatim from the manual. But back to the course...

The instructor told us that we would want to do most of our training sessions in the "fat burning zone." The "fat burning zone" is probably the biggest bullshit myth in fitness, up there with the "spot training theory." I was shocked!
Then she asked us if we knew in what order the human body used its fuel sources. "Glucose, creatine..." a girl with a masters in exercise physiology started to say.
"Whooooooa, you're getting way too specific!" the instructor said. Then she gave us the right answer: "First the body uses carbohydrate, then fat, then it starts to cannibalize itself for protein." Ummm... not exactly. Seventeen heads bobbed in agreement and the girl with the masters in exercise physiology and I shook our heads in disbelief.

Later, talking about music she asked, "What music might you guys use?"
"Bon Jovi!" said the exercise physiology girl. She was from New Jersey.
"Okay, maybe some Bon Jovi, but not the whole CD."
"Why not?" asked the exercise physiology girl. She was really from New Jersey. She said "wooter" rather than "water" and obviously had a thing for big hair.
"I like Yani," said the instructor.

Another thing that made me cross were the commandments of Spinning:

1. Thou shalt not instruct "enthusiasts" to ride at a cadence faster than 110 rpm. While I would never suggest keeping up such a cadence in a race situation, there are definitely advantages to practicing some high-cadence pedaling. I take issues with many stupid Spinning exercises, but this is not one of them.
   
2. Thou shalt not allow "enthusiasts" to hold the handlebars in any position other than the accepted hand positions set forth by Johnny (the Creator). No aero bar position, no "hands on the hoods" position. If training is all about specificity, then why shouldn't people ride in the position that best mimics their outside riding position? I swear you could adjust those bikes to mimic a TT position. The bikes adjust in all the same places...
   
3. Thou shalt not take thy hands from the handlebars except to grab a drink or adjust the music. Psh! If I can take both hands off the handlebars on the road, I can most certainly do so in class. How stupid do they think that the people who participate in Spinning classes are?! Look, mom! No hands!
   

There's a reason that I decided to get back into the gym... and no, it's not the possibility raking in a whopping $50K a year. At the gym I worked at in California, all the trainers gave their clients lists of three sets of twelve. It was basically the same format as we serfs were giving, but with slightly more advanced exercises. At the gym I went to in Spain, the aerobics instructors were excellent, but the trainers all gave their sessions in a whisper. The trainers looked more like they were going to lean over and plant a big, fat kiss on gramps' lips before they would make him break a sweat. At the Y where I go now, the trainers do the same thing: they whisper as they walk the chattering housewives through their three sets of twelve. They stare at other members as they count, and then wander off to the next machine without Chatty Cathy missing a beat in her story. To these people, "cardio" is just something that clients do between sessions. Who cares if it's a walk around the block or gut-busting hill sprints.

No wonder people aren't losing any weight! Would you lose weight if your trainer had as much personality as dirty mop water and let you talk through all your sets? Now I'm not saying that all personal trainers should be like Jillian Michaels on the Biggest Loser (my new sick fascination). In fact, I'm glad that there's only one Jillian Michaels out there and that she's surrounded by off-camera EMTs every time she goes to work. But who ever decided that fitness belonged in the gym on an endless cycle of three sets of twelve should have a 45-pound plate dropped on his head from a great height. If a trainer were to step into my gym and offer workouts that were different from week to week, interactive, unpredictable, and didn't leave enough breath to talk about little Jimmy's science project, they could make a mint (or more than the $18K/yr that I'm making on unemployment). If someone were able to take people outside to the trails that are across the street from the gym and structure a workout ouside the plastic weight room... well they may actually be able to rake in the industry standard of roughly $46,700/year. I have a bit more of a business plan than that, but you all don't care about that.

And on a side note...
As I mentioned, I'm obsessed with the Biggest Loser lately. At first it was all about watching fat people crying on treadmills. Haha! Take that fatty! I would laugh and think about how fun it would be to stand in front of them eating Ben & Jerry's. I would never do this in real life, but these people agreed to have their fat asses put on TV, now they're crying, and therefore they deserve my ridicule.

What's even better is that the fat people crying on treadmills are being yelled at by skinny people who are calling them "pathetic" and telling them to shut up and stop crying. It's like my fat phobia is finally validated. And these fat people scream and fall over all the time. It's like watching a turtle flipped on its back. Just once I would like to see a pop challenge that involves sumo wrestling.

But as I started following the show (out of professional curiosity, of course), I started to feel for the fatties. I actually had my favorite fatties, and I got mad when the other fatties made them cry. (They all cry, all the time!) In a week, I watched the entire season 8 of the Biggest Loser on hulu while doing push-ups and sit-ups. It was amazing to see these normal-looking human beings emerge out of these giant lumps of lard. I was surprised to find out that many of them had become parents while being fatasses, because I had assumed that fat people didn't have sex. I wanted Rebecca to win so bad, and was so excited to see in the finale that she was still the only female contestant with knees. I hated her haircut though. It made me mad that I cared so much about her cutting her hair, but I just couldn't like her as much now that she was a blonde. It ruined the whole experience for me.

And Biggest Loser has inspired me to set my own goal for season nine: Figure out what the heck it is about Jillian Michaels' face that is just so damned busted!

The end.