Whenever I meet new people, I dread the ‘So, what do you do for work?” question.

I’m not embarrassed by my profession, not in the slightest.

Rather, I find it very hard to portray what it is that I do, exactly. “Personal Trainer” is a job title, it’s not my job description. Like many in my position, I think of myself as a leader, rather than a motivator. I suggest movements that fit the person, rather than jamming my training system down their throat. And last, I find that I teach, rather than I tell.

I like to think that working with me is kind of like taking a really fun and engaging college course in your health. You should have some aspects of yourself brought to the forefront, you should learn that ‘health’ is an individualized term with some universal aspects. You should also learn how to make fitness a sustainable part of your lifestyle, but not make fitness your life.

Not everyone in the field of personal training shares this mindset, BUT what I feel very strongly about is that regardless of ‘who’, there should be some uniform ‘what's’ that you learn while working with a Personal Trainer.

1) How to manage stress and other loads on your body.

One of the first questions I ask people is the question, stated above. “What do you do for work?” The reason I ask this is to get to my second question of “what does that entail?”. This is super important for a couple of different reasons. Training, fitness in general, is an external stress on the body. 4 out of 5 people I work with come in to the experience having had very inconsistent levels of fitness so when we start to add scheduled training sessions in to their life, we are adding some serious stress.

It’s super important to understand how these stressors play a role with each other. Do you have a job that is physical? Do you have a job that already brings you higher levels of added stress? Do you wake up early for your job? Do you bring your job home with you?

All of the answers to the questions above impact the style of training, the intensity of training, and when those training sessions occur on a week to week basis.

In my opinion, this is why individualized training is individualized...you have to manage stress on the body in order to recover well and enjoy your life outside of fitness.

2) Manipulating tension throughout your body.

Now this one is super nitty-gritty training. One of the coolest things in what I do is helping people get stronger. There’s definitely some ‘tricks’ to training that can go a long way...managing stressors (see point number 1), programming that actually matches the clients goals (you’d be surprised how many Trainers whiff on this concept), and teaching some foundational elements of movement.

To me, nothing is more foundational than learning how to create tension in the body to provide the stability needed to produce force.

Now, if you read that sentence and said ‘what the fuck does that mean’, I don’t blame you, and I will explain...but I did say in the first sentence of this point that this one is super nitty-gritty training.

I don’t mean tension like the feeling you get in your neck when you get a shitty email from a co-worker, or a text message from your Boss on a weekend afternoon...I mean voluntary muscle contractions that you ignite as part of a larger movement.

Still confused? Think of two plates. The first plate is full of raw spaghetti and the second plate is full of cooked spaghetti. The cooked spaghetti is all limb and wiggly and represents your body with no tension...the cooked spaghetti is a little stronger, more stiff, and has tension. Don’t get me wrong, both are functional in their own way, but the ability to create tension is going to take you a lot further in your training, and your ability to move weights (or your body) during a workout.

Bonus- exercises that really work well for this? Hardstyle Planks….Eccentric Chin ups….and Inverted rows. Why? Because all of these require you to build tension in your glutes, abs, and legs, while still being able to effectively breathe.

3) You should learn about various types of effort, and when they are appropriate.

One of my favorite things to talk about with clients is the difference between focus and effort. All workouts should have a high level of focus...but not all workouts need 100% effort. Some weeks are low weeks, some weeks are high weeks, just like some days are low and some days are high. Not everyday needs, nor should it be, at 100% effort. Stemming from point 1 and 2 above, understanding effort helps gauge intensity which helps manage stress. If you’re doing high tension exercises, you’ve got a chance to get pretty zapped from your training, which is why you’ll have a day or a couple days after that are low effort or ‘easy’.

When working with a Personal Trainer, not everything is going to be hard. Hard is incredibly subjective. What’s hard today, might not be hard next week, likewise, if you’re stressed up the wa-zoo, everything can feel hard.

It’s all subjective.

But nonetheless, you should learn to understand what effort is, its various forms, and how to manage it alongside stress, so that you can constantly keep your progress moving forward. So many times I see this as the downward spiral that unmotivates people and stops them from reaching their goal.

So what do I do for a living? I help people understand their stress sources, teach them how to create good tension, and prescribe levels of effort, all of which helps people improve their current levels of fitness which can help lead to living a healthier life.

Sometimes it’s just easier to say “Personal Trainer”...regardless, if you’ve ever worked with a fellow Trainer, I hope you learned a little bit about the 3 things above.