One of the pitfalls of being a strength coach/personal trainer is that you can never escape the inevitable conversations you’re going to have with complete strangers once they know what you do for a living. To be honest, sometimes I feel like all those parents who dread the day they have to discuss the “birds and the bees” with their children. It’s just not fun.
I attended my girlfriend’s company Christmas Party over the weekend, and while I insisted that she tell her colleagues that I’m an ex-Special Forces operative whose bare hands have been classified as lethal weapons (along with his wit and charm), she refused, and told everyone that I work as a strength coach and personal trainer. So instead of me telling stories of how I have parachuted into active volcanoes and destroyed tanks just by looking at them, I resorted to discussing the finer points of A1 adrenoreceptors and B2 adrenoreceptors and how they correlate with stubborn fat loss. Boooorrrring.
Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE what I do and I thoroughly enjoy helping people reach their goals. But sometimes I just want to be brutally honest with people instead of being nice:
Random Person: “So Tony, your girlfriend tells me you’re one of those fitness type people.”
(Cue theme music from Jaws)
Me: “Yes I am.”
Random Person: Like, how can I lose 20 lbs?
Me: Stop drinking four glasses of wine every night. Don’t skip meals, thinking that saving your calories throughout the day justifies eating a whole pizza for lunch everyday. Get off the treadmill; it’s doing more harm than good. Lift heavy things off the the ground. Yoga mostly sucks; sweating in a 100 degree room doesn’t mean you will get lean. Eat more veggies; and no that lettuce on your roast beef sandwich doesn’t count. Don’t tell me you don’t have time to train. If you have enough time to watch 20 hours of television every week (the national average in the United States), you have enough time to go to the gym and train. Oh, and those 100 calorie snacks you’ve been bringing to work everyday (thinking they’re a healthy alternative) are about as useful as a one-legged man in a kickball tournament.
