I remember this pretty vividly ;
I walked into the gym wanting to do some form of drag or carry, but the space was taken.
This dude working as an independent trainer out of the place (charging something like $75 or $80 an hour) had a morbidly obese woman client walking with an empty sled, making her technically dragging the sled, but with effectively no resistance.
He’d allow her around 5 minute rest periods, and after maybe a quarter mile walking total, if that, over a 45 minute time frame had her end with 2-3 sets of about 10 reps benching a pair of at heaviest 10lb dumbbells to end the allotted hour.
Now, I get obviously he’s providing a service that she found worth the money at least that one time, but I personally struggle to be dark enough to charge for something like that.
I’d rather consult with a morbidly obese client, fix their diet, and have them diet + walk off 100lbs while doing yoga like and calisthenic top position holds before bringing them to the weights.
I saw this dude do dangerous stuff, having frail prepubescent boys, and frail barely in puberty girls benching when the empty bar was far too much for them.
Now having the kids work towards chins, and doing sled drags for the legs isn’t bad, but every time he had them at the weights I cringed, praying the kid wasn’t going to get injured.
He was at best 50/50 good/bad, and generally unnecessary.
I’d seen him training an 8-10 year old kid for football, and thought to myself “why isn’t the dad just playing catch with the son, having him run routes”.
The dad spent the money to drop the kid off for an hour of training during his weekend custody. That blew my mind.
The trainer was making at least low six figures. I could see him pulling off 200k.
(He had a regular job, plus his lucrative personal training thing, and coaching youth sports, they all fed into each other. I’d guess he was convincing parents their kids need training, and convincing the morbidly obese among the parents that they needed training.)
I just need to market myself, as I’m not gonna injure kids, and I actually want my clients to be healthy and get results.
I struggle a bit with how I give help for free, yet want to make a living from the gym.
Back to story ; I watched that woman train with him for the hour, and thought “She doesn’t need to pay for a trainer, or even come to the gym for this. With what he brought her through, she could stay home, open her front door, and instead of walking to her car, wasting gas, time, and money, she could do this for free out in front of her house. It’d even be better, getting fresh air, and sun, while dodging the fluorescent lights.”
I had the same impressions about the football elementary schooler and his dad.
Why on earth was that dad dropping $75-80 for a guy to make his son run fancy gadget sprints while he bought groceries instead of doing the shopping a different time and actually tossing a ball to his kid?