Conversation with gym-goers

A young man came to me recently for a new routine. I asked him about his progress and previous routines. I'm using poetic license a bit but this was the gist of my hour with him.

"I've been coming four years, at 1.81m tall I used to be 62kg, now I'm 67kg. I have never done a below-parallel barbell squat, I cannot do a chinup, and I can bench 45kg, I have never run more than 3km in one go, I get tired and stop. I've done 12 different routines since I've been here, usually I do them for about 4 weeks then stop and just do whatever I feel like."
"Okay... um, what are your goals?"
"What?"
'Why do you come to the gym? What do you want to achieve?"
"I want to be bigger and have a V-shape in my torso and leaner and be able to run 10km, and ride my bike faster and be stronger."
"Usually it works best when you focus on one thing at a time. Which one thing is the most important to you?"
"I want to be bigger and have a V-shape in my torso and leaner and be able to run 10km, and ride my bike faster and be stronger."
"Which one thing... nevermind. Rightyo. I suggest this more focused routine. Goblet squats, pushups and inverted rows, start with 10 reps total of each, add 1-3 reps each time. Barbell back squats for 20 reps, bench press for 4 sets of 5. Start with the empty bar, each session add 2.5kg. If you can't make the lift, that's okay, just try again next time. Dumbbell bent-over rows with 10kg, do 2 sets of 10, then press overhead for 2x5. When these are easy, get the next heavier dumbbell. Go through it quick and you'll get fitter, too." I coached him on all these lifts.
"Only 2.5kg each session? That's very slow."
"Come twice a week, that is 20kg every 4 weeks. In 8 weeks you'll be squatting 60kg for 20 reps, and benching 60kg for 4x5. So in two months you'll be lifting more than you've lifted after 4 years. Too slow?"
"Okay, but this routine would only take about half an hour. I want to spend an hour here."
"You could just talk to the girls."
"What?"
"You may find it takes longer when the weights are heavier. Squatting and benching 20kg you can go again straight away, 60kg will be a bit different."
"Still, so quick..."
"If you want, just add on some cardio, aim for 20 minutes with your heart rate around 140."
"Will this help me with my goals?"
"Not really. But it will take 20 minutes, and won't do you any harm."
"Okay, I'll do it."
"Good."
"So how do I get bigger?"
"Eat more."
"I eat heaps."
"I would suggest that if at 67kg, you probably do not eat heaps. Try drinking an extra litre of milk a day."
"I can't drink that much!"
"That's four glasses. One glass with breakfast, one with lunch, one with dinner, and one before bed."
"So much."
"Up to you. To get big, eat big"
"I don't want to get big."
"Um, sorry, I have to go to my next appointment."

The next day as I was going about the gym, I saw a guy standing on an upturned bosu ball, slamming a medicine ball down on the ground and catching it on the bounceback.

"Why are you doing this?" I asked.
"It's a challenge."
"Certainly. If I were to kick you in the groin while you're doing it, that would be even more of a challenge, but would it be useful?"
"Well, I play sports."
"Ah, which sport?"
"Cricket."
"So to prepare for standing on a flat stable surface and hit or catch a cricket ball, you stand on an upside-down bosu ball and fling a medicine ball to the ground?"
"Yes."
"Is it working for you? Do you feel your cricket game is helped by this?"
"I don't really feel any difference. But it's a challenge."
I didn't really know what to say to him after this, so I left him to it.

While it would be fun to blame other trainers, generally I find they've made these odd exercises up themselves, like the guy trying to do a pushup with each of his hands and feet on a medicine ball. Another "challenge."

Figure out where you are now. Choose your destination. Map out the route between the two, that's your workout routine and diet. Do that and nothing else until you reach your destination. If you do not, I will laugh at you.

weakness and dysfunction

When is it dysfunction, and when is it just being weak? Fact: there are many people in gyms with a history of serious injuries and health conditions who are stronger, fitter and with better joint mobility than many "healthy" beginners.

It's often said in physical training that we should not apply load to dysfunction. For example, if someone does a bodyweight squat and as they rise they always swing their hips to the right, there is some sort of imbalance there that needs to be dealt with before we put even a 20kg barbell on their back. When you add load to an imbalance, the imbalance is amplified.

But what's the cause of that imbalance? There could be a previous injury like a hip dislocation, or a condition like scoliosis. Obviously these should be looked at and considered, a competent trainer or coach will know about this in their lifters, and work with medical professionals to help the person. 

But what if the person's just weak? Few of us stand with the weight evenly distributed between both feet, usually we'll shift our weight to one side, and usually it's almost always the same side. This then leads to a muscle imbalance left-right, and something like that could cause the person's hips to shift to the right as they come out of a squat. We don't need a medical professional for that, we just need some proper training, lots of one-legged work to balance things up. 

This is something that's rarely talked about in physical training and medicine, the line between injury or condition and ordinary weakness. There's a guy at my gym, I've seen him do around 5 wide-grip pullups, benching around his bodyweight - and deadlifting his bodyweight. He has a below-knee amputation with a prosthetic, you don't get any more imbalanced than the limb being missing! But despite his medically-caused imbalances he works out hard and with good results.

And yet at the same gym there are guys who say they can't squat deep because it hurts their knees, and beginners whose posture resembles that of a gorilla say that they can't deadlift because it's bad for their back. And when you look at their squats or deadlifts you see why, their movements are imbalanced and rough. Their ordinary weakness is worse than a medical issue. 

A one-legged guy deadlifts 80kg and does wide-grip pullups with added weight, and is called "disabled." Another guy cannot deadlift with correct form, and cannot pull 60kg from the ground, and is called "healthy." 

Of course there are people in between, for example someone might break an ankle, it's in a cast for six weeks so gets weak and stiff, after that they tend not to use that foot as much, it's usually not a medical problem but twenty years later when they squat that ankle is less mobile and strong. However, if it's bad enough it might be a medical problem. Maybe to strengthen the ankle we put the person on a one-legged leg press, and they get shooting pains up and down the sides of their calves. 

Thus the issue of where a medical problem ends and simple weakness begins can be a muddled one. Trainers are usually pretty bad at dealing with medical issues, it goes beyond our scope of practice, and too many will get all butch and tell people to work out despite injuries or conditions, "everyone needs to barbell squat," etc. But medical professionals are pretty bad at dealing with simple weakness, being overcautious about proscribing movements, "just rest." 

The vast majority of people don't have any real medical issues preventing them from doing particular movements in the gym, however they will find lots of things very hard, and will have all sorts of funky muscle imbalances going on. These are usually dealt with by teaching correct movement rather than focusing on individual muscles, and simple verbal cues will often do a lot to balance things up. 

Don't give 110%

"Give 110%!" is a phrase beloved of marketing gurus, self-help seminar speakers, people trying to convince themselves they won't give up this time, and – I'm ashamed to admit – many personal trainers. Of course you cannot actually give 110%, you cannot give more than everything. But many people try, which leads to burnout, illness, injury, general misery and fuckups.

If you try to give 110%, you have to take something from some other area of your life. Most of us have been in love and found we're spending all our time with our beloved, leading to loss of friends, calling in sick to work and so on. Or we've stayed up all night reading a book or playing a computer game and our work the next day was far from our best. Perhaps we worked late and missed a dinner date with our lover. Or maybe we trained too hard.

When it comes to physical training, we have to be able to look at our lives and ask ourselves how much we're giving in all the areas of our lives, including physical training – is it all balanced? Two stories should help here.

Firstly, me. My son was born in June last year. For the last month before his birth I did workouts, but really only went through the motions, I couldn't push myself at all, I just couldn't focus. For two months after his birth I was just tired, I didn't work out at all. Things settled down and I felt ready and started back. Three weeks later I got sick – and I hadn't had so much as a sniffle in the past 18 months. But here I was knocked down with the flu, and I had a cough linger for four weeks afterwards. Now I'm back into things, and better, and lifting again for several months now, it's all good. I'd thought I was ready, but I wasn't. Why? I was giving 110% to my son, and 110% to my work – this had to come from somewhere else, so it came from my health.

The second story is a gym buddy, Greg.

"My lifts were stalled for ages," he said, "then in the last couple of weeks they've just flown up easily, I don't know why."

"Anything changed? Food?"

"Food's the same."

"Rest?"

"Same sleep."

"Work?"

"Well, there's much less pressure and stress at work than there was before... ah, I get it now."

He was giving 110% in work, this had to come from somewhere else, it came from his lifting. When he gave less to work, he had something left over for lifting, and got stronger. 

Never give 110%. Giving 100% is plenty. 

"I don't want to bulk up."

But if you did bulk up, would that really be a bad thing? 

What follows is an unstructured rant, because to be perfectly honest, I've had enough. 

I've heard "I don't want to bulk up" a thousand times from women gym members and personal training clients. Generally it comes from women who are already overweight or underweight. Susan was 153cm tall and 127kg a year after lap band surgery. I knew of no tactful way to say to her, "Having too much muscle is not your problem." Jennifer was 178cm tall and 52kg, looking hunched over, sickly and tired, she needed more muscle and more fat both. Medium-sized women don't seem to be as fussed about getting bigger, it's just the overweight and underweight ones. 

Many trainers will go into some spiel about testosterone and how women have so little of it that putting on muscle is more difficult for them than men. That's true but also irrelevant. Most women, like the scrawny teenaged boys doing their bench and curls, simply won't eat enough good food to gain a lot of muscular mass. Hormones influence what your body does with the food you eat, but if you don't eat enough the hormones have nothing to influence. You can deadlift 200kg but if you go home and eat only a stick of celery or a soggy McD's cheeseburger, you are not going to get any bigger however much testosterone you have. 

The simple truth is that each of us has a certain natural size and build. My training partner Aron is the same height as me, I'm usually around 81kg and him around 95kg. If Aron were 81kg he'd be a scrawny rake, if I were 95kg I'd be either a bodybuilder or my belly would stop me being able to see my penis. Aron's just got a bigger frame. Put us shoulder-to-shoulder and his are broader, put our wrists next to each-other and it's like a sapling next to a grown oak. When he's had time off training it takes him about three weeks to get to the lifts I struggled to over six months. He's just naturally bigger. 

This natural size and build gives us natural talents and weaknesses. There are not many 1.95m tall Olympic-style weightlifters, nor are there many 1.52m tall basketballers. Having a big broad frame is a big help on the rugby field, it's not so great if you want to do ballet. There's nothing we can do about this. You can't turn an oak into a willow, or a willow into an oak. When it comes to sports, certain heights and frames will have great advantages. Most of us accept this and just find the sport that suits our build and nature. That's part of being an adult, realise your talents and build on them, and the stuff you're simply hopeless at forget about. Everyone understands this except for people auditioning for Australian Idol. 

When it comes to looks we forget all that and all want to be someone else. In the case of women, they want to be someone tiny. No, smaller. "I don't want to bulk up." Would that be so bad? You're 127kg Susan, would it be bad for you to have some more muscle to heave that around? You're 52kg Jennifer, would it be bad to be the size of an adult woman? 

This is why I'm not that comfortable with the other trainer response to "I don't want to bulk up," which is, "oh but lifting heavy weights can actually make you smaller! Just look at so-and-so." It's true, but do we really want to encourage women to all get smaller? Let's take that sacred cow to the slaughterhouse. Why can't you get bigger? Didn't you women invent this thing called "feminism" once? I vaguely recall something about you getting the vote, but maybe I'm wrong.  Emmeline Pankhurst didn't go to prison just so you could go on a lemon detox diet. Aren't you allowed to occupy physical space?

I think there's a backlash against feminism, and it comes from women. As women have grown to occupy more social and financial space, they've apologised for it by occupying less physical space. 

"Yes honey I earn more than you, but look, I no longer have an arse!" 

"I have been made CEO at this time of crisis in the company so that when it goes bankrupt a woman can take the blame, however my arms are as thin as my stylish pen and you can see my ribs just below my collarbones, so it's alright."

You are allowed to occupy physical space. You are allowed into the power rack. That's where you belong. 

When people get into progressive resistance training (most resistance training is not progressive, people don't increase the weights over time), the increase in confidence is quick and obvious. I'll often find some woman doing a stack of pushups from the knees, and I say, "You know, if you can do 15 or more good pushups from the knees, you can almost certainly do a few from the toes."

A look of frightened wonder comes into her eyes. "Really? I've never tried, I mean -"

"Give it a go."

"But I can't."

"I think you can. Try it."

She tries, and she knocks out two shaky pushups from the toes, a little shallow but okay. "Well done," I say, "now rest a bit and try again." And she tries again, and this time does two really good ones, steady and deep. "Did those two feel stronger than the first two?"

"Yes!"

"So you're already stronger than you were two minutes ago."

Now the frightened wonder fades, and a nervous surprised pride appears. The woman now feels confident and competent. She feels awesome. Not bad for a few pushups. All she needed was someone's permission to be awesome. Maybe when she grows up she won't ask for permission. 

The same thing happens when they first do a barbell squat or deadlift, especially the deadlift. Cardiovascular fitness is very important to general health and sports, and joint mobility probably more so, but they don't seem to do as much for people's souls as strength does. Strength brings confidence in a way cardio and mobility don't. Hardly anyone remembers the first time they ran 5km in under 30'00" or touched their toes, everyone remembers the first time they pulled 60kg from the floor or did a chinup. 

A client Stacey once said, "Kyle, I came to you because I wanted a smaller bum, but when I put 40kg overhead, at that moment I don't care about the size of my bum." And the fact is that when she put 40kg overhead, at that moment she was beautiful. Competence is attractive. Beauty is about more than the size of your bum. Anyway beauty is not all that matters. Recently Germaine Greer decided to take a giant steaming shit on her feminist icon history by commenting that the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard did not dress in a way that flatters her figure. Honestly,  Germaine, nobody gives a fuck. We do not elect members of parliament based on how much we'd like to shag them, we're not voting on Big Brother. 

Yes, if you are 127kg Susan then you need to lose weight. There are not many 75 year olds your size, and you don't need a knee replacement, you just need to stop carrying all that extra weight.. If you can't or won't drop some weight, then you should at least get stronger to make it easier to schlep around. But Jennifer, women your size get sick all the time, get weak bones, then one day fall and break their pelvis and about a quarter of them never leave hospital. Both Susan and Jennifer need to get strong as fuck, their lives will just be better, and they'll be more confident and better able to deal with the shit life throws at them. 

An adult male should be over 80kg, an adult female should be over 60kg. We should not all look the same, some of us should be bigger, some smaller, some good at this, some at that. We didn't defeat communism just so we could all become the same. Life gets better when you stop weighing yourself and start weighing your deadlift. If you did bulk up, would that really be a bad thing? 

"But I just want to tone up", Part Three - Assessment

A navigator with sextant
I am exactly like this, except
with iron not brass
and also not a woman

You the trainer have now got yourself the right education, you've got employment and recruited a few clients. How do you begin? Remember that the personal trainer is a navigator. A navigator finds out where you are, where you want to be, and plots out the safest and quickest route between the two places – it's up to you to actually make the journey. Where is the client now? That's their capabilities. Where do they want to go? That's their goals. So in the initial appointment the PT should assess the client's capabilities and goals.

A health screen is not an assessment

Most responsible gyms and competent PTs will have some sort of health screening system, commonly called a PAR-Q (physical activity readiness questionairre). A health screen is not an assessment, it's a tool to discover any major health issues which might mean the person is likely to hurt or kill themselves in the gym. Things like diabetes, heart disease, stroke, recently dislocated limbs, high blood pressure and so on. If the person has these issues you may want to refer them for medical advice before letting them do anything at all, and considering your own level of knowledge about these issues, you may actually refuse to train them and refer them to someone who can train them safely and effectively.

Yes but what's his VO2 max? 

For example, my manager once sent me a new PT client Larry, I rang Larry up and he told me he'd had a shoulder reconstruction, this was no problem for me, I was certain that I at least wouldn't hurt him, and with good communication with his physiotherapist I could actually help him . But then, “oh,” Larry added as an afterthought, “I should also mention that I had a major heart attack 12 months ago and had a triple bypass. I've been fine though, been walking with the dog and lost a lot of weight.” This was a problem for me. So I referred him to my colleague Dave, who is an exercise physiologist and often works with elderly people who've had heart attacks, stroke, arthritis and so on. And Larry has done well since.

In that casual conversation I was adopting an informal health screen. Of course we need a formal health screen as well, a series of questions written down covering common and dangerous health issues. But this is a screen, not an assessment. It's like when recruiters look at resumes and toss out anyone who doesn't have the relevant degree or experience – that's a screen. The assessment when they look at the resumes left over and start interviews and later reference checks. We use a screen to filter people into “no way!” and “let's look further.”

The screen though not an assessment will give us things to look for during our actual assessment. For example, the other day I began training Yvonne, who reported a previous knee injury. So when assessing her squat, I looked for any instability in that knee, and compensations at ankle and hip and in the other leg.

Assessment

Assess movement. Measure what's important. PTs can and commonly do assess many irrelevant things. If my goal is to rehabilitate my injured shoulder, you don't need to take my waist measurement. If I am 180kg and my goal is to lose weight, you don't need to measure my bodyfat percentage – I'm 180kg, unless I'm 3 metres tall my bodyfat can be measured as “too bloody much.” Contrary to popular belief, measuring many things to several decimal places doesn't make us look smart – people can smell bullshit. Measure what's important to the client, what's relevant to their goals. And nothing else.

When I was overfat I had a 97cm waist and only a 103cm chest. I signed up for the local gym and the PT got out the bodyfat calipers. That's exactly what a chubby 36 year old guy wants, to take off his shirt in front of a pretty and fit young woman in her twenties and let her pinch his blubber. I said, “My waist is almost as big as my chest, that's all I need to know. I don't need to know my exact bodyfat percentage, it means nothing to me. When my waist gets smaller and my chest gets bigger I'll be happy.” What she needed to do was set aside the calipers and get out a tape measure which could be used without any shirt-stripping or fat pinching. But she insisted. I put up with it then but didn't go back to the gym. She did not measure what's important.

What is important to everyone is movement. Physical training can change how you look, feel and perform. How you move affects your looks (eg posture), how you move affects how you feel (are you stiff and sore, do you lose your breath easily?), how you move affects how you perform (in sports and everyday life). And an exercise is just a movement. This is why as personal trainers, our job is to teach correct movement. So we begin by assessing movement.

But on what basis will we assess movement? There are many ways to do it. The functional movement screen is a famous one, but I don't find it very useful, since most people will score so badly on it. For example, only at most one in ten typical gym-goers will be able to do anything resembling a competent overhead squat. We may as well measure how well they do the splits. The FMS will be useful with athletes, but much less useful with general population clients. PTs rarely work with athletes, so we need something different.

The Van Damme Movement Screen
If you cannot do this, you FAIL
and the Belgians win, which is never right

I have previously laid out the basic human movements when I spoke of training movements not muscles: squat, lunge, push, pull, bend, twist and gait. Since then I've changed my thinking a little. If a person can do a good squat they will be able to do a good lunge and vice versa, and if one is bad the other will be too. If they get strong in the squat their gait will become stronger and faster, and further improvements in gait are usually the domain of running coaches or physiotherapists, depending on the issues. And so on.

Movement assessment

None of those things are a bad idea left as they are, but I'm now more inclined to Dan John's scheme laid out in Intervention: push, pull, squat, hip hinge and loaded carry. I'll talk about this further in the next article.

"But I just want to tone up", Part Two - Employment

In part one I discussed the educational requirements of training, now it's time to look at employment.

Firstly, employment requires qualification (as discussed in part one), first aid and registration.

First aid is usually Level 1 first aid - knowing how to treat spider bites, sprains, shock, do CPR and so on. Technically a workplace only requires one person on duty with first aid, but in practice this would make rostering a headache ("Let's put Bob on to replace Anna tonight, no wait, Bob doesn't have CPR"), so fitness centres simply require every employee to have it. If self-employed, your insurance company will not cover you if a client is injured and you didn't have first aid. 

To be employed or insured as self-employed means registration with a professional body such as Fitness Australia or Physical Activity Australia (formerly known as Kinect). These professional bodies require continuing education. This is not very demanding, usually around 10 hours of face-to-face classes each year. For example, the kettlebell coaching course I did most recently was two 7 hour days and was worth 14 points of the 20 I require every 2 years. 

Where does a PT work, anyway?

There are three basic ways a personal trainer can get employed.

• community gym - run by local council, YMCA, or large company like Belgravia Leisure
• commercial gym - privately owned and run, often by a large company such as Fitness First or Genesis
• self-employed - this could be the PT in their car with a medicine ball and skipping rope, all the way up to a large shop in a busy strip. 

Community gym

The trainer begins with a base of 1-6 gym shifts of 3-5hr each in a week, during which they do the initial appointments discussed here, and after about 3 months will be expected to be ready to take on personal training clients. Of course those appointments are the trainer's chance to meet potential clients. 

Gym shifts will be paid at a casual rate of $20-$25 an hour. Council-run gyms will often have further penalty rates for weekends, early mornings, etc, bringing it up to as much as $30 an hour. In most cases the staff contract will state that after six months the trainer can ask for these casual shifts to become permanent part-time. The hourly rate will drop to $16-$20 an hour, but the trainer will now have some sick and holiday pay; on the other hand when they need to miss a shift they'll have to officially request leave, rather than just ringing up a colleague and asking if they can do the shift. 

PT clients will pay around $60 an hour for their sessions, and the trainer will see $30-$40 of this. There are never permanent part-time rates for PT. New trainers will earn on the lower end, more experienced trainers doing a lot of PT will earn on the higher end. 

Commercial gym

The PT typically pays a franchise fee of $500-$2,000, does an introduction to the franchise which is really a short marketing course in how to do the hard sell, and then pays rent of $200-$400 a week to work at the large commercial gym.  The trainer signs a 12 month contract which is very difficult to get out of. Usually the first month is rent-free, the second month 1/3 rent, the third month 2/3, and the fourth and following months are full rent. During the first few months the PT is required to do gym floor shifts. The rent paid is not really for access to the facility's equipment, but access to the potential clients. 

Usually the PT is free to set their own rates they'll charge clients in a very broad range of $45 to $125 an hour. Some centres will restrict the rates based on the PT's seniority and previous success, newbies with 0-3 clients $45-$60/hr, people who've been there 3 years and have 20 clients $70-$125/hr, that sort of thing. The PT will get 80-90% of the client's session fee. 

So you get more money per client, but have to pay that rent each week. This is, incidentally, why PTs at Fitness First and the like will be more pushy about getting people to do personal training than PTs at Woop Woop Community Gym. The Woop Woop trainer with no clients brings in no money, but the FF trainer with no clients will actually be losing money. 

Working in a commercial gym is really like being self-employed. 

What about insurance?

In both community and commercial gyms, the facility itself covers the trainer's insurance. If through reckless stupidity or bad luck you hurt someone, the person won't be able to sue you, but of course you'll most likely lose your job. 

At one centre I know of, a trainer we'll call Sue coached a 45 year old obese woman to do one-legged half-squats with a dumbbell curl on a bosu ball. Since the woman couldn't squat, let alone squat one-legged, trying to do it on a bosu ball was a bit much for her and she fell over. As she had avoided weight training her whole life (she just wanted to "tone" her muscles, and not be "bulky"), she had early-onset osteoporosis and broke her right radius and ulna. By the time the matter came before the courts, Sue was no longer employed by the centre; the centre said it was reviewing its recruitment process. 

On the other hand, Sue didn't have to pay the $11,000 compensation. If she were self-employed she would have had a large bill to pay. 

Self-employed

This is hard to generalise about. Some trainers have made a living with whatever they can fit in their car boot, others have set up a gym in their garage, others still will rent a warehouse or factory somewhere. The trainer must pay rent on whatever facility they're using, get their own equipment and insurance, and so on. 

Most importantly, they have to find their clients from somewhere. In a mainstream community or commercial gym only around 3% of members will be interested in PT. However even a small university gym will have a few hundred members and thus 15 or so potential PT members, and most community gyms 2,000-5,000 and thus 60-150 PT members. Most PTs can only handle 15-20 individual clients at once, so even a moderately-sized gym can support a few PTs. The trainer need merely to demonstrate competence, establish trust and rapport. 

But where does the self-employed PT find those 15-20 steady clients? In this respect, PT is like any other business, opening a cafe, hairdressers, bookshop, clothes shop or the like. Most new small businesses fail in the first 18 months. 

The self-employed trainer can charge whatever they like, or rather whatever clients will pay. And they get every last cent of it, especially if they do what many self-employed people and receive payments in cash and fail to declare it on taxes. 

Given a typical level of new business success, the trainer should become self-employed not for money but for autonomy. If it's my place I can do things however I want. However, a lack of money also impinges somewhat on autonomy, and most self-employed trainers are spectacularly unsuccessful. Recently I met a trainer I'll call Trent.

"Where do you work?"

"Oh, I'm self-employed."

"Yeah? What sort of equipment have you got?"

"I got a squat rack in my garage, a few kettlebells, medicine ball, skipping rope, punch gloves and pads."

"Sounds cool. What sort of clients do you have?"'

"Oh, um... all sorts."

"How do you like to train them?"

"Um, I like to mix it up a bit."

"Doing well? How many clients have you got?"

"Pretty well, I've got... a few."

Trent was not self-employed, he was unemployed. Successfully self-employment takes a certain set of skills which are rarely taught in the courses we do. 

Overview

The new PT is best advised to first seek work at a community gym. The gym shifts will give the newbie a basic income until they've built up their PT, and help them meet lots of potential clients. A commercial gym won't offer that base income, and if the trainer is unsuccessful they'll end those 12 months with a heft debt.  Fitness is like any other industry in that many people enter it and a year or two later leave it; it wasn't what they thought it'd be. Trying out and failing at different careers is part of life, but it's probably best to minimise how much debt you finish with. 

If the PT turns out to be a real gun, gets clients easily and keeps them for a long time, then they can take the second step, since financially they'll be better off at a commercial gym. 

They can then save money and build their reputation and at some point go private and be self-employed.

Of course, this considers only money. Some people have strong marketing-oriented and self-promotional personalities and will be more comfortable at a commercial gym. Others are more warm and fuzzy and would be happier at a community gym. Some are fiercely independent and would be better-off self-employed. 

Training men and women

Many people imagine that men and women need to train differently. Even in high school sports with qualified coaches, it's been found that,

"Compared with coaches of male athletes, coaches of female athletes were less likely to know the credentials of their strength coaches, and they were less likely to use certified coaches to plan and implement their strength and conditioning programs. [...] Compared with their female counterparts, male athletes were more likely to have required training, participate in strength training year round, and train using more sessions per week."

That is, the coaches didn't really care about the strength of their female athletes, or about the competence of their strength coaches. I don't have statistics as they do, but from what I've seen in gyms, female gym-goers are less likely to be given strength-oriented routines, and when given them, will be pushed and supervised less (form will be allowed to be sloppier, there'll be less encouragement to increase resistance) by the instructors. That is, the greatest barrier female athletes face is the low expectations of their coaches - who are mostly male. 

Men and women's bodies react in the same way to training. If a person around 20 years old gets their heart rate up to around 140 beats per minute for 20 minutes, two or more times a week, they'll get an improvement in their cardiovascular fitness - that is, in four weeks if they go at this speed or resistance/incline their heart rate will be 130 instead of 140. If they can today just do 10 pushups, and now do 3 sets of 5, next session 3 sets of 6, and so on progressing in the same way, well in a month they'll be able to do 20 pushups in a go. If they eat less they'll get smaller, eat more they'll get bigger, and so on. Gender's irrelevant. It's all the same. 

All need to think of movements, not muscles, to do more over time, and so on. Exactly which movements and how much weight and so on depend on the capabilities and goals of the individual. Take two 30 year olds, the woman has done netball for 10 years, the man has done nothing but sit in front of a computer. Neither has done squats before, but the woman will learn them more quickly and perform them more strongly than the man for the first few months at least. But she mightn't expect so. 

The actual differences between men and women come from their different capabilities to begin with. In brief, these are that men have more lean mass than women of the same size, so they start off stronger; but women learn new movements more quickly and better... if they stop saying "I can't" and actually try. 

Body composition - a typical healthy man and a woman of the same weight, the man will be around 15% bodyfat, and the woman 25%. This leads to,

Strength - A man of 60kg might be 50kg lean mass (bone, muscles, internal organs) and 10kg fat mass, the 60kg woman 45kg lean and 15kg fat. Fat doesn't help you lift heavy stuff. So the man begins with 5kg more muscle and bone, 5kg more stuff to help him lift. If neither has trained before, he'll have more strength simply because of sheer muscle and bone size. Of course if he sits on his arse and she trains for a few months, she'll be stronger. I once had a woman client quit because she beat her untrained boyfriend in an arm wrestle and he couldn't handle it; a trained woman is stronger than an untrained man of the same size. 

Bodily awareness - If I say, "bend at the hips, not the lower back, but here at the hips," do you bend at the hips, or the lower back? If I say, "shoulders back," do they go back, or do you hunch up, or just look confused? That's bodily awareness. In general, women have more of this than men. So they learn new movements more quickly. And only once a movement is learned can we add resistance and get the person stronger. This is why when people get interested in strength, men mostly go to powerlifting, and quite a lot of women go to Olympic weightlifting. You can be a physical idiot and eventually squat, bench and deadlift well; but you have to be pretty switched-on to ever snatch and clean & jerk.

Joint mobility - since women's pelvic girdle must be able to open up during birth, they begin with greater joint mobility than men. This makes some movements easier for them, such as deep squatting, front squatting and so on. Many men simply can't get their shoulders forward for a front squat, or back for an overhead squat. Mobility like strength can be improved over time, but it's hard work which most people avoid. 

Psychology - women underestimate their current and potential strength, men overestimate it. A woman will say, "I can't" before even trying something, a man will say, "I'll try." This is why men get more injuries than women, and why women fail to reach their potential in physical training. Women will for example press a 12kg kettlebell overhead for 6 reps, then when you ask them to do it again, say, "I can't."

"But you just did. You've rested, now do it again."

"I can't."

Obviously there are cultural issues here, women being taught that being helpless is attractive, etc. That's a bit above what we're looking at here, though, which is just what happens in the gym. Your body can never get stronger than your mind. It's for this reason Neghar Fonooni and her friends have started Girls Gone Strong. The development of physical strength will at the same time develop mental strength. You're not "tough" until you've been buried under a weight, got up and then tried again. 

The differences in body composition, natural strength, joint mobility and psychology will of course lead to different approaches in training. Men will need more practice at the basic movements to master them, more joint mobility work, meanwhile the mobile woman who's mastered the movement is loading up the plates and getting stronger at it - if she's decided to let herself. 

That said, all these things are individual. A person may have a long training background giving them great bodily awareness, but a bunch of injuries to work around. The women clients I've trained for a year or more, if any other trainer gets them half-squats and curls on a bosu he may get a rude surprise. 

Recently a fellow trainer had to be cautioned for giving overly-complex routines to beginners.

"Just keep it simple, build the movement skills. Barbell lunge and press? Seriously? Can she do a squat? First squat, then a dumbbell squat, then a barbell squat, then a lunge, then maybe lunge and press. One step at a time, start simple, teach the movement skills."

"Especially with girls," he said.

"No, especially with people who lack the movement skills."

"Usually girls."

He's a new trainer, he'll learn in time. Without naming the trainer, I told this story to a woman client who has squatted 60kg for 30 reps.

"That guy sounds like a douche. Makes me mad, that people think like that. Can you point him out to me and I’ll show him how effective a simple move can be. That’s right, I’ll bitch slap him."

This is a woman who I originally found doing crunches on a swiss ball. She's come a long way. Strength and confidence. 

There are differences between men and women. But there are greater differences between individuals. A competent trainer will deal with the individual and their capabilities and goals. I don't care what you have in your pants, you still have to fucking squat, deadlift and press properly.