Good morning, dears!!
Surprise!! No playlist today :)
I´ve met Shay-lon a few months ago. I liked her energy and honesty on every post and any topic. Her blog, Staying healthy isn´t a crime-Fitness is a lifestyle choice is a must read. She is a recent graduate in exercise science and next month she becomes a certified personal trainer.
You may disagree, I think students and recent graduates are great sources of knowledge. I also think I´ve found a jewel and I would like to share it with you. I´m pleased Shay-lon has accepted my invitation to contribute to this blog.
Please, give a warm welcome to my new colleague and friend, Shay-lon. Sure you´ll enjoy her insight as much as I did:
To begin with, personal training in the beginning served purposes that helped people like Arnold become a fitness icon and helped athletes do better in their sport or event. It was a huge deal to look a certain way depending on who were at the time and what kind of activities you partook in. It wasn’t always called personal training but rather “coaches”; people that wanted to see you succeed and do better than the competition but nonetheless they wanted to make sure you looked the part. Also, the movement and exercises back then were hardly enough and things started to expand a bit in the 2000s when science was updated and we had people taking more risk to try something new to see if it worked and the purpose of it. Today, in my opinion I feel that personal training has become ever so very popular; especially among young people and it serves so many purposes that pretty much anyone could benefit from having a personal trainer. On the other side of things, it is slowly becoming a competition between trainers versus a learning experience and it is becoming a commercialized job that seems to want to push people to make money from having more clients. Once a upon time we actually cared about people’s well-being and health, now it seems the majority of trainers only care about the profit and their own physique and less about how they can make a difference in someone else’s health. This doesn’t mean all personal trainers feel the need to take, take, take and give 50 percent but it means some don’t have a problem with doing so. The expectations of personal trainers today is that we perform these same tricks you see people on Youtube doing to get exposure and to lie their way into making others think the exercise they are doing is beneficial and get paid for it down the road. The sad part is, this is what people want to see; people doing these ridiculous exercise (i.e lets take a basic dumbbell bicep curl and now make into a handstand dumbbell bicep curl and do it while on the roof of your house) yes this is extreme but this is what people are doing, being extreme! Not everyone who has a 6 pack is qualified to make meal plans and give people proper exercise advice but for whatever reason people would rather work with a female or male who looks like the hulk with no certification then work with someone who has background experience, certification, and educational background and still looks fit enough where maybe their muscles are not necessarily bulging but they can run a good mile under 6 minutes. You see my point? I personally think that if we continue to allow “clowns” to run our fitness industry most of us will be out of a job because our standard movements and exercises won’t be enough for people anymore.
Although I do believe that people might grow sick and tired of the games and decide they would much rather do exercises and movements that are beneficial to them versus “cool” and take a risk in potential injury. I am not saying we should ignore technology and not progress & come up with more movements/exercises, because in our field, we have to continuously keep up with new stuff and always work to get more experience BUT this doesn’t mean we need to stretch things to the extreme where people are now doing off the wall stuff just for the $$ and for the exposure. In my opinion the future of personal training should increase job wise; especially since everyone is now on this fitness kick and Crossfit lifestyle change, but the quality of personal trainers and fitness gurus seems to be declining and since we seem to want to always compete against other personal trainers and fitness professionals; it won’t help one bit because we will constantly be trying to “up our game” to whatever heights we have to in order to gain more clients and more money.
People like myself who love advanced movements but still see the benefits in the more standard/basic movements will have a hard time finding clients who are willing to work with us (not for the cool exercises and big muscles) but for the information, the experience, the and the purpose of making sure our clients gain confidence, and are not relying on us for the duration of their life but at some point will then know how to perform these exercises without our constant having to monitor their every exercise. The goal I have as a personal trainer is yes, I want to gain clients, I want to make money, and yes I want exposure too so that people have something good to say about who I am as a person BUT I also want my clients to eventually leave the nest and be able to take what I have shown them for however long I am with them and be able to continue down a healthy path. What is the whole point in keeping your clients hostage to the point where they need you for the rest of their lives? you haven’t done your job correctly if you have clients who never leave the nest; eventually our clients will need to be able to handle a healthy lifestyle change and make their exercise regimen their life without us being there, that is why we train them and help them to do so, not hinder them and have them rely on us for as long as possible. I do believe keeping in touch is the way to go, and some clients I might have for 6 months, some for a week and others for 2 years but if they met their goal within that time frame, the new goal is to teach them to be independent. So overall, the future of personal training depends on the quality of trainers and their history, experience, and background, education. The future could turn out bright or end up in a haze.
Thank you for reading, I hope that you all have enjoyed hearing my perspective and hope to have some good feedback.
Your fitness blogger,
Shay-lon xoxo