Every year I hear from regular exercisers or newbie trainers at the gym comments of disdain for all those “new years resolution people who take up parking lot spaces and then ‘give up’ in a couple of week or months”.
Maybe I’m just a softie, but I know what its like to feel like a perpetual beginner, in martial arts, mountaineering, and fitness.
After helping people for over two decades I have heard the countless stories of people sitting in the parking lot, trying to get up the nerve to walk in the door of the gym for a tour, look around and size up the bodyweight and presumed fitness of the average member, then say “oh can I just have a price list?” and scurry off.
I’ve had people come in while they have been high or a little buzzed. I used to write that off as just a horribly backwards moral dilemma for the person, but you haven’t been training people long enough until you run into them at the local watering hole or restaurant after a few drinks, and then they have the courage to tell you about craving their glory days, that they hear stories about training with you and they could never be in shape enough to do that, and that you have probably never had some body as heavy, unfit, etc as them, which is rarely true.
I have great sympathy for these people.
Then there are the people who are depressed, those who just feel disenfranchised in some way by trainers and gyms, whose role it is to be educators, ALL of these people are typical of the “new years resolutions” crowd, forget about the details of S.M.A.R.T. goal setting, those are details for later, for many of these people, if it wasn’t for the cliché of a new year and new start, they might never have even tried, they might never have taken that symbolic step towards greatness, for which I am honored to have the shot at helping them with.
It’s ok to start again and again and again. ☺
