It has been about 3 years since the post CanFitPro – Certification I Now Hold; a post about getting my personal training and indoor cycling certifications. For those who have been waiting around for an update, here it is:
I love personal training. It’s easy for me to get lost in the
coaching, the conversation, whole experience of it. I’ve been fortunate
enough to have worked with a lot of knowledgeable people and have had a
couple of very significant mentors when it comes to understanding how
the body, the brain and the mind work together to create the potential
for optimal health. I’m able to find a flow state when I’m training and I
find it very rewarding to see and coach to efficiency a movement
pattern that isn’t effective. In the same way my clients body, brain and
mind work together, mine do as well, to identify and correct / improve
the needs of these clients. If I didn’t need money, I would work cheap
at a gym and coach movement, health and performance. What I do has value
so I won’t give it away, but I don’t particularly like doing it for
money either. More accurately, I don’t like needing the money I get from
doing it. That part sucks.
If I’m a good trainer, people don’t need to see me for very long –
ideally 25% of the year once they have established some self sustainable
good habits. My role is to update their programs, monitor form and
movement patterns, as well as nutrition, address questions and tackle
some of the performance issues. When we do work together, it’s to
recondition their intensity and establish a new baseline. It’s easy to
forget how hard you can work and it’s even easier to remember again with
couple of weeks of one on one training. But that’s it once the proper
foundation of knowledge, behavior and attitudes has been established.
Being successful means constant selling and I’m tired of selling a
service that, to be considered valuable to the customer, needs to be
understood and followed 90% of the time by THEM. All I do is create a
training experience and try to foster a mental attitude that leads to
positive changes in their behavior but the result are 100% the
consequences of their actions.
Given what I now know about myself I can see that this doesn’t work
for me. I need for success to come from my effort, not my intervention
in someone else’s life and the direction of their subsequent efforts.
And I can’t go back to doing that now because that would be transferring
responsibility of my success onto something that I don’t control. My
money needs to come from something entirely outside the fitness field.
I love parts of the group cycling. I teach a 90 minute class on
Friday nights and there are times during the week that I dread the
thought of it. I do the choreography and music for the class so I get to
pick songs that I like. Most of it is club music remixes and I’ve had
to learn some sound editing to create profiles or specific length
intervals and cut out swearing. That’s fun! Music makes me feel good
inside and it can be fun to try and get a jump on the next big hit,
playing it out before it ever gets traction on the radio. I don’t dread
the work. I’m burning about 1100 calories in 85 minutes, average heart
rate of about 83% and a max of 88%. I hold back on really taxing my
heart because pushing as hard as I can will leave me ruined for the rest
of the night and Saturday. I dread the 10 minutes surrounding the
beginning of class because the class doesn’t have a big following; there
can be 3 or there can be 15. It’s my class. I created everything about
it and it’s the longest one on the schedule at the club. It’s the
expression of what I know about cycling, training, coaching and
instructing and it can make me feel down right pukey if my mind becomes a
rubber ball of “what if no one shows up” type of thoughts.
The truth is that I don’t teach a fitness class, I lead a training
session which happens to have some cool tunes and some heavy beat pop
music. We don’t really yell or cheer, we don’t really clap, we just work
our tails off and go home exhausted. Other than working hard, working
them hard, there isn’t much to feel about it. It is very different from
the RPM classes I teach because I’m encouraged to have more fun with
them and they are about half the length in duration.
These two certification opened my life to a number of fun and
important experiences, all of which have been critical at improving my
awareness of who I am and what I need in order to be happy. Without them
I would still be looking for a lot of things that I have found over the
last 3 years!