My Very First Personal Trainer (a.k.a. Getting Ripped Off!)

I hired my very first Washington, DC personal trainer way back when I was just 17 years old.  I had been talking to one of the trainer’s at the gym for several weeks about taking my body to the next level.  He seemed very confident that he could help me reach my goals, and I liked that.  The only problem was the price – I had no idea that hiring a personal trainer would cost so much!

That summer I was working as a life guard, so for the next few months I worked overtime and I saved up for the personal training package that he said I needed.  The day finally arrived that I had the money to hire the trainer, and I was SO freakin’ excited.  I kept thinking about the muscles and the abs that he had promised me, and I couldn’t wait to transform my physique.

I arrived for my very first session.  He told me to warm-up.  I did.  Then he met me in the weight room and he kicked my ass like there was no tomorrow.  I barely stumbled out of their on my feet.  I though to myself, “this is it!  This is what it’s going to take to get the body I want.  All that time at the pool is worth it – I got myself a personal trainer.”

He told me that he wanted me to see him two more times that week, so I did.  I even showed up early so that I could be warm before our session started.  He kicked my butt even harder, and I smiled both times.

The same thing happened in week #2 – he wanted me to see him three times, and I did.  At our first session in week #3 he tells me that I am all out of sessions, and asks how many more I would like to buy.  I tell him that I spent my ENTIRE summer savings on those seven personal training sessions at $75 a piece – I can’t afford any more, and Washington, DC’s pools are closed for the summer.

I ask him for the workouts that he has been taking me through.  He tells me that it is against club policy to hand them over to clients.  (By the way, I checked, no such policy exists.)  So, that’s it – seven sessions over the course of less than two and a half weeks and I am on my own again.  I have NO plan, NO program, NO guide whatsoever about how to get what I paid for.

In case you were wondering my body had not miraculously transformed over the past 16 days – I don’t even know if I’ve made a single ounce of progress because he never measured anything.  I am really pissed.  I feel embarrassed for being broke and hurt that he didn’t want to help me and the sneaking suspicion that…

I Just Got Ripped Off!

If you really think about what happened I just got ripped off.  He promised me the body I’d always wanted and he told me that I needed to buy the package that I did buy in order to get it.  I held up my end of the bargain, but I didn’t actually make any noticeable progress whatsoever.

The VERY sad fact is that my experience is the exact same as 99.99% of ALL people who hire a personal trainer, whether that be in Washington, DC or anywhere else.

How do I know?  Because I eventually became a personal trainer, and my managers and peers told me to do exactly the same things to my clients that the unethical trainer did to me that summer – “just try and get as many sessions out of them as possible” (no mention or discussion of results whatsoever).  That is a REAL quote that I heard over and over and over again.

No, that’s not just the particular health club chain that I worked for because I’ve worked for four different clubs in three states (CA, MD, DC).

Because of that experience I have made it my professional mission to make sure that I do whatever I possibly can to make sure that no one else gets ripped off like I did.  With that here is my guide to getting the truly professional advice that you need and deserve to create the body you want.

Josef Brandenburg is author of The Body You Want and 2009 Personal Trainer of the Year Nominee. He focuses on helping regular, busy people create rapid and sustainable fat-loss in the time that they actually have.  Click here to find out more.

The REAL Reason America Is Losing The War on Obesity and Getting My BS in BS!

MSNBC recently ran a story with the headline “Getting The Facts On Weight Loss”. They had interviews with six “experts”, all with very prestigious titles at national universities such as “director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver,” and “managing director of the Lipid and Disease Management Preceptorship Program at Duke University Medical Center.”

They were also all DEAD WRONG about fat-loss. One of our biggest problems is that the “official” big-title leaders in our war on obesity are actually disseminating DIS-INFORMATION.

Here’s what these clowns had to say (yes, I did just call the managing director of the Lipid and Disease Management Preceptorship Program at Duke University Medical Center a clown.):

1. “Aerobic activity is far and away the best [type of weight-loss exercise], for one simple reason: You burn more calories”

FACT: If you were going to exercise for 45min (or any time period), aerobic exercise will actually burn the LEAST number of calories in that time period. For a 150lb woman here’s how that actually breaks down:
-45min Jog = 286 kcal
-30min of intense free weights + 15min of interval training = 409 kcal
-70% more calories burned… I smell a bull going to the bathroom.(1)

Further more aerobic exercise is THE least efficient way to burn body-fat (2 -5). I have beat this one to death on www.thebodyyouwant.com already, but I will give another example just because I am angry:

Researchers in Australia took two groups of people and put them on very different programs:

Group 1

*20 minutes of high intensity interval training (at week one they did only 5 minutes)
*3 days per week
*In 15 weeks, they lost an average of 5.5lbs of fat

Group 2

*40 minutes of steady state aerobics (TWICE as much exercise)
*3 days per week
*In 15 weeks, they GAINED an average of 1lbs of fat

In HALF as much time, the interval group lost body fat while the aerobic exercise group actually got fatter. (3)

2. “Successful dieters typically [perform aerobic] exercise a lot — 60 to 90 minutes a day.”

FACT: Uh, NO! 60 to 90 min of aerobic exercise per day is BOTH a completely unrealistic time commitment for most people AND almost completely worthless in terms of actual fat-loss results.

60+min of aerobic exercise performed 6 days per week by men resulted in a grand total of 6.5lbs of fat-loss in 12 MONTHS! For women, it was barely over 4 POUNDS for 6 HOURS of exercise per week for a YEAR. So, if you need to drop 20pounds that will cost you 20hrs per week if you are a man, and roughly 25hrs per week if you are a woman. (2)

I routinely beat their 12month results in the first 4 WEEKS of my fat-loss programs, and I do it in about HALF the exercise time (3 to 3.5hrs). We get better far results (like 8-10 pounds of fat on AVERAGE) because we only use resistance and interval training like the workouts in this article.

3. [It is nearly impossible to lose and keep off more than] 5 to 10 percent of your body weight…Every person’s body is geared to be a certain weight, within a range of maybe 20 pounds or so…Getting below that is very difficult, but with a healthy, low-calorie diet, you can stay in the low end of your range.

FACT: I used to weigh 236lbs and I had 26% body-fat (61.4 pounds of fat). My nickname in summer camp was “Blubber Thing”. (My “friends” would sing a little song about me that sounded like “Wild Thing” when I went up to bat at Wiffle Ball.) My pediatrician first told me that I was obese when I was 7 or 8 years old. So, if there was anyone with a genetic pre-disposition to being a fat-ass (and staying that way) it’s me.

*I have kept off 45 pounds of pure body-fat for years (about 20% of my old body weight)
*I eat 800 MORE calories per day than I did at 236
*I only exercise for 3-4hrs per week (not the 7 to 10.5 that the author recommends, or the 11hrs per week that I used to spend exercising at 236 pounds)

4. “Q: Doesn’t strength training build muscle and therefore increase your resting metabolic rate?
“A: That’s actually a myth. You’d have to be totally ripped — like, bodybuilder ripped — to get a noticeable bump in your metabolism. Most people burn about one calorie per kilogram of body weight per minute, whereas a bodybuilder burns about 1.2.”

FACTS: First of all 1.2 is 20% higher than 1. If there was a type of exercise that you could do that would boost your metabolism by 20%, then I think that would be a GOOD idea. His response is actually a great argument for weight lifting. Wouldn’t you like to be able to eat 20% more food without gaining body-fat? (Please note: going to the gym and doing bicep curls, bench presses and crunches won’t do much besides injuring you. You need a SMART program. That is NOT what you see the other people at your gym doing, and sadly, NOT even what you see the people doing under the supervision of their “trainer.” I’ll even give you a smart program for FREE, click here.)

Second, when losing weight on a low-calorie + aerobic exercise plan a VERY large portion of what you lose is actually muscle (metabolism). This means that you are much more likely to regain what you lose because reducing your metabolic rate means that you must eat even less to maintain. It is very difficult (if not impossible) to be hungry forever. But, even on a ridiculously low calories diet (like an 800kcal liquid diet) you can actually BUILD muscle (and thus boost metabolism) if you include resistance training.
(6)

Third, resistance training will boost your metabolism for AT LEAST 36 HOURS after your workout. Aerobic exercise yields no such boost. IN fact, every time you do your aerobic workout you actually burn FEWER calories. So, aerobics become LESS effective over time. Whereas resistance and interval training actually become MORE effective over time. (7, 5)

A BS in BS

Everyone thinks that Licensed Nutritionists (LN), and Registered Dieticians (RD) are good resources for fat-loss nutrition – including the RD’s and LN’s themselves. Actually, NOTHING could be farther from the truth.

I am currently a Dietetics major (to become an LN/RD) at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD). UMD is actually one of THE highest ranked schools to attend for aspiring RD’s and LN’s. Do you know how much of the FOUR year curriculum is devoted to our nation’s #1 preventable health problem (obesity)?

FOUR weeks! That’s right, four weeks out of four years. And the time that we do spend on obesity is all VERY outdated, non-scientific BS such as low-fat diets, and aerobic exercise. Also, our professors are OBESE themselves and do NOT actually spend any time working with human beings to test their theories.

I don’t think you need to walk around with a 6-pack all year to be credible, but if you’re obese yourself then your advice sucks because either:

A. your advice is so ridiculously unrealistic that you can’t even follow it yourself. (I don’t know about you, but I don’t have 10hrs per week to spend exercising, and I really can’t make myself be hungry for very long.), or

B. it just doesn’t work.

By the way, I checked out Yale and Harvard – same damn curriculum.

Is it any wonder that award-winning dieticians look like this?

Bottom line: demand proof of results, and an iron clad guarantee of results before you trust anyone’s advice, no matter how many letters they have after their names.

REFERENCES:
1. Dr. John Berardi’s Calorie/Exercise Estimator, available at precisionnutrition.com. Numbers are for a 150lbs woman with 25% body-fat in both cases.
2. McTiernan, Anne, et. al. Exercise Effect on Weight and Body Fat in Men and Women. Obesity (2007) 15, 1496-1512
3. Trapp EG and Boutcher SH. Fat loss following 15 weeks of high intensity, intermittent cycle training. Fat Loss Laboratory, Faculty of Medicine,
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
4. Tremblay A, Simoneau JA, Bouchard C. Impact of exercise intensity on body fatness and skeletal muscle metabolism.
Metabolism. (1994); 43(7):814-8
5. Williams PT, Wood PhD. The effects of changing exercise levels on weight and age-related weight gain. Int. J Obesity (2006) 30(3):543-51
6. Bryner RW, Ullrich IH, Sauers J, Donley D, Hornsby G, Kolar M, Yeater R. Effects of resistance vs. aerobic training combined with an 800 calorie liquid diet on lean body mass and resting metabolic rate. J Am Coll Nutr. 1999 Apr;18(2):115-21
7. Shuenke MD, Miket RP, McBride JM. Effect of an acute period of resistance exercise on excess post-exercise oxygen consumption: implications for body mass management. Eur J. Appl Physiol (2002) 86(5):411-7

Josef Brandenburg is an award-winning Washington, DC and Internet based personal trainer. He focuses on helping regular, busy people create rapid and sustainable fat-loss in the time that they actually have. Josef is also the author of The Body You Want, and a nominee for 2009 Personal Trainer of the Year from Personal Fitness Professional Magazine. Click here to find out more.

(c) 2008, Josef Brandenburg, All rights reserved