Working Out and the Personal Trainer Myth.....

Last night was my first "real" workout back in the gym.

I did about 20 minutes of cardio and spent another 30 minutes lifting weights. I was shaky when I was done but I felt good. I did the one thing though when I got home that I should not have done. I sat down in front of the computer for an hour or two. I should have just gone to bed as I was tired, but I did not. So when I decided to stand up, oy was I in pain. 

I must make a mental note in the future to take some advil when I get home and if I want to watch tv to lay down instead of sitting with my knees all bent up underneath me.

Now on to my other thought Personal Trainers.

I would have loved to have one last night. I felt kind of lost in the gym and wondered what I should do next. Which then started me thinking about my past personal trainers. Do not get me wrong. I loved every single one of them. They held me accountable to my workouts. I made appointments with them to work out and this forced me to keep those appointments. If you flake on a friend they do not still charge you $50.00 an hour.

This started me to think. Where are my personal trainers now? You know the ones that promised to be there for me through my journey? What they failed to say was that promise was conditional and only was in affect for as long as I paid them.

See I have huge trust issues. If we were to categorize trust as a mountain range mine would be the Himalayas. 

I do not trust easily and I have a hard time letting people in close to who I actually am. 

And then there were my personal trainers. Let me stress this trainers. All in all I think I had a total six personal trainers. At one point I had two. One for Pilates and the other for straight cardio and weight training. 

These last two were the ones that promised to be part of my support group. They would be there for me. At least that is what I thought, I mean that is what they were saying. Surely they would not lie to me? I mean they wanted me to get healthy right? 

Nope. 

As soon as I was unable to pay them they no longer were part of my support group. I have not had them as a trainer for years and to this day neither one of them has contacted me to see how I am doing. Wait that is not true. I had one contact me about a year after I had stopped using them to see if I was ready to sign up for training again. I told them at that time I still could not afford a personal trainer and that was the last I heard from them. 

And I actually signed back up with the other (the one that taught Pilates) but that did not work out. See at the time I decided to hire her again I was working the over night shift at work. So I would work from between 10 and Midnight to around 7 or 9 am in the morning. I would then get off work. Go home and take a nap until 1ish get up, get ready to go work out, head to the gym, work out, and then come back and fall back to sleep at around 4ish and then get back up around 8 to get ready for work. 

This is how the schedule would have gone if it was actually ideal. 

But usually I would come home and sleep for a bit, get up and start getting ready to work out and then get a text message telling me that she needed to cancel for this or that. The best is having your training session cancelled so your trainer can go get their hair cut. She knew when we went through the motions of me becoming her client again that I would not be getting that much sleep. 

I understand that things come up and things needed to be changed around. But it was getting to the point that she was cancelling almost every other work out with me either due to this or that. Maybe it was her way of telling me that she did not want to be my trainer. I will never know because she did not come out and just say it. But I did come straight out and tell her that she was slowly killing me by cancelling on me at the last minute. Again keep in mind I was sleeping in about two different 3 to 4 hour blocks instead of having straight solid sleep. Her and I have not spoken to this day.

I guess basically what I am saying in this post is you do not need a personal trainer. They are nice and they can bust your ass in the gym. They will say they are there for you and that they are your support team. But as soon as you are unable to pay them to be that they will not be there for you.

So build up a support team that is there for YOU and not your money.