5 Unique Things Personal Trainers do Differently to Other People
If you asked me when I was a little kid what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said anything except a Personal Trainer. You see in the 80’s, the only Personal Trainers that I knew existed was Richard Simmons, and the ladies I watched every morning on TV, Aerobics Oz Style. Ahh Aerobics Oz Style, they should bring that back. If you don’t get those last two references, well, it just goes to show how old I’m getting.
For anyone who’s ever asked me face to face, I accidentally fell into Personal Training in my mid 20’s. I was a Fruit Juice salesman at the time, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. A gym owner friend offered me to train me up as a PT, and he said “Jerome, why don’t you do it for a year? If you don’t like it, as least you’ll have the tools to keep yourself fit forever.” Sold. So, I got qualified, started training people, and thought to myself, I’ll just do this until I figure out my next move.
20 years later……
I now own and run Balmain Health Club, a Fitness and Yoga Studio that specialises in Personal Training, Group Fitness & Yoga classes. We have a fantastic team of 9 Trainers and 2 Yoga Teachers. Funny how life works out hey?
Doing this job for 20 years, I’ve noticed a few habits that Personal Trainers do a lot that’s really funny. Or maybe I just find them funny? You decide.
(Oh, one last thing, if you like this article, here’s a link to another piece I wrote 2 years ago along the same lines – “The Answers to questions Personal Trainer’s get asked the most”.
Here are the top 5 things Personal Trainer’s do differently to everyone else:
1) We eat the same things every day!
For Personal Trainer’s, variety in your food is overrated. Interesting flavours, textures and food combinations? Pff, whatever. We don’t care about trivial things like that.
As we work mainly out of gyms, you can picture a PT turning up to work with his cooler bag full of prepped food for the day. And every day is the same. And it’s usually a mixture of three things: Protein, protein and protein. I’m shocked we don’t fart more.
Yes, food prep is a big constant in our lives. I personally make a HUGE 5-day salad every Sunday which makes up all my mid-week lunches. And every morning I eat (like most trainers) the same breakfast, overnight oats. If want that recipe. Click below:
https://feelgoodfoodie.net/recipe/overnight-oats/
2) We do “mini workouts”.
Working out of a gym has many positives, and maybe one bad thing. The one bad thing is there are mirrors everywhere in a gym, so you can’t help but keep look at yourself all day, at all angles. But then again, Gym mirrors are usually pretty flattering, so maybe it’s good after all?
Anyway, I’m getting off point. “Mini workouts”, that’s what I’m meant to be talking about. We do mini workouts all the time!
I’m not saying we don’t do full workouts; we do those as well. But if we have a 15-minute gap between clients, then, hey “let’s do a few sets of bicep curls”. A client is running late, then we’ll jump on a cardio machine for 5 minutes. A client cancels last minute, great, I’ll do those mobility stretches I’ve been putting off all day.
Don’t try this approach if you work in an office that won’t approve of you doing push ups or burpees in a common walkway at work between meetings.
3) We usually fall asleep in bars and clubs at 9pm.
This Saturday night, if you’re out at a bar or club, have a look around after 9pm and see if someone is: a) either yawning every 3 seconds, or b) asleep in a booth in that back corner of the room. If you do, turn to the person next you and say “I bet you 50 bucks that that person is a Personal Trainer”. See, I just made you 50 bucks.
Being a PT can suck all the fun out of your social life. Yep, us PT’s usually start work anywhere between 5am and 6am, which means we must wake up around 4am to 4:30am to get to work. Do this for a few months (or years), then you struggle to stay up with your friends. Whilst they’re on their 3rd round of Tequila shots, I’m either passed out on the nightclub floor (hey, I’m just tired, nothing more sinister than that) or I’ve backdoored it home 30 minutes earlier. (Do I have to explain what backdoored is?)
4) We drink lots of coffee, very early in the morning.
I’ve met hundreds of PTs over the years, and of all I met, only ONE of them didn’t drink coffee. ONE! They might have been an AI robot for all I know.
Have you ever wondered why you turn up to a 5:30am Bootcamp, still half asleep, bleary eyed, and yet the trainer is so bubbly, positive, and full of energy? Coffee. Lots and lots of coffee.
As a PT, we must be switched on and client facing as soon as we clock on to work. We can’t ease into work, not talk to anyone for the first hour, and say maybe I’ll just read my emails until the coffee kicks in. Nope! From second one we are YAY, LET’S GO EVERYONE! IT’S GOING TO BE A GREAT DAY! YOU CAN DO IT JENNY!
5) We eat Sweet Potato, a lot.
Finally, we circle around back to the first point about food and diet. Before I was a Personal Trainer, I had no idea Sweet Potatoes existed. My Lebanese mum never ever used it in her cooking. Sure, we had regular potatoes heaps, but never Sweet Potatoes.
Then I became a PT, and one day I was having lunch with a PT friend I made early on. He opened his cooler bag full of protein bars, shakes and portioned controlled food and pulled out his lunch of Poached chicken, and you guessed it, Sweet Potato. “What’s that” I said. I was serious, I’d never seen it before. He said, “Sweet Potato maaaannnnn” (yep he was a hippy). I said “What?”, he said “It’s way healthier than potato, because it has way less starch”. Ahh ok.
Now, he was jacked (eg: shredded, ripped), so naturally, I bought 457 kilos of sweet potato that night and replaced every potato recipe I’ve ever eaten with Sweet Potato.
Making a salad? Add sweet potato to it. Hmm, what shall I serve with my salmon tonight? Sweet Potato. How do I be healthier when I’m ordering at the Burger shop? “Let’s order Sweet Potato Chips instead of regular chips”. (Yeah right…)
Ok you’ve read this far, so I’m sure you’re wondering, are sweet potatoes actually healthier than regular potatoes? Well, yes and no. There are definite benefits to sweet potato (such as lower starch levels) but actually regular potatoes have benefits over Sweet potatoes (regular potatoes have lower sugar levels if you boil both of them).
So, there you go. Hope you enjoyed reading that. Small disclaimer. This was written by Jerome Samaha personally, not some AI, Chatpt thing. I promise.
And as always, here’s a Dad Joke to finish:
Waiter: “Sir, do you wanna box for your leftovers?”
Me: “No. But I’ll wrestle you for them”.