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Old Forum Why we need StrongFirst SFG certs and why I don't trust many personal trainers

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niggel

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G'day StrongFirst community,

 

First let me start by letting you know i am not in anyway an elite athlete , powerlifting guru accomplished martial artist, military service-men or fitness instructor of any kind. I'm just an everyday average bloke who's into everyday average bloke things. However I wanna do those things better than the other everyday average blokes and that includes being stronger than my mates and beating all challengers down at the local pub when we're all drunk and decide to have an arm wrestling comp.

Anyway I've been in and out of strength training and combat sports for the last 14 years. I was also fortunate enough to learn that training for strength and bodybuilding/toning/sculpting. Were not the same thing. So when i discovered Pavel and certain others I knew i was onto a good thing. however I have also seen many things that agitate me and causes me to despise the fitness industry.

I shall now list some of my gripes.

1) While walking past a well known personal training training studio I seen a woman doing bench-presses using probably a quarter of her weight with her feet on the bench arms splayed out wide while being supervised/spotted by her trainer.

2) Walked into a gym and seen a guy in wearing shoes with at least an inch of air in the soles flashy gloves with the fingers cut off them doing what could be called mini range deadlifts with a trap bar for multiple reps with maybe 30kg , and a line up of maybe 5-6 people waiting to do bicep curls.

3) An outdoor session with an out-of-shape middle aged lady doing wobbly walking lunges, hunched over struggling to hold the dumbells as  her mid 20's aged personal trainer shoutd at her to keep going "push through it doesn't hurt thats the burn its good for you" ,yes believe it or not thats what was said.

5)At a martial arts class during warmup doing certain dynamic movements with students showing horribly poor form with no correction. Potentially warming up nothing but a future injury.

4) Even my own friends have said . "I love doing squats" then proceeded to do a power clean that resembled a reverse curl and held the bar in his hands a did maybe quarter squats with 30kgs (he weighed 92kg at the time)

Now as i said i am not a fitness insrtuctor but have been lucky to train with/learn under some great guys and am intelligent enough that through pavels books that i read /reread/studied /reread again. I have learnt to successfully employ many of the methods and principles to great effect. And I do hope earn my SFG cert. My problem is with this information known how is it that within the fitness industry supposed proffesionals can take peoples money while knowingly or unknowingly allowing the to workout ineffectivelly or potentially endager them.

Pavel and team that is why we need StrongFirst. I will do my best to spread the message .

All the best mate (do i have to say comrade i fee weird saying it can i say mate instead.)
 
This is exactly why we need strongfirst certs. However, it's not going to help the mainstream population much. Most people don't want to hear strongfirst. They will continue to try whatever is new hoping that they've finally found the magic bullet. Progressive overload + sound nutrition just isn't shiny enough.
 
Howdy Niggel,

From a random dude to an average bloke, I hear ya.  Great post & very real.  Sometimes your sport is manual labor and drunken arm-wrestling.  I doubt there ever was a golden age of authentic information.  Charles Atlas was ripping kids off in the 1930s.  It was at least as bad twenty-five years ago when I started -- machines, circuit training, low-fat calorie-counting and indoor bicycles.

If anybody thinks "there oughta be a law" they are mistaken.  Top-down solutions never work.  Things are very slowly getting better all on their own.  Everybody on this forum probably has a much better grasp of exercise and nutrition than five or ten years ago.  Pavel and StrongFirst are part of the bigger trend of increased information with the internet.  Even the gimmicks are improving.  When I started, it was soloflex.  Now it's P90X.  Still not exactly right, but much better.
 
It's hard to have too much sympathy for people who choose lame "trainers", there's so much information out there readily available.  And like Dan John says "anything works" for the first few weeks.  Raw beginners are usually too weak to hurt themselves much, don't you think?  I like what you said Matt, a lot.  "Even the gimmicks are improving".
 
 

Sorry Mike but i disagree with your opinion regarding people who choose "lame trainers". The studio which i mentioned with the women doing bench presses had quite a convincing radio ad and to the lay-men would seem like a competent place to learn fitness /strength techniques. It took myself 2 years of seeing pavels ads in my favourite martial arts mag, reading a few of his articles and visited his website before I decided go ahead and purchase his books and a kettlebell.

And who here can not say they have had made a bad choice on some product despite the information out there saying what was good and what wasn't.  I guess your right Matt" they won't make a law to stop these injustices".  But maybe we can call on the 90's  version of steve seagal to give these outlaws a good a#@ kickin'.
 
I'm 50/50 on whether or not I sympathize with the people who can't figure it out.  I suspect deep down they don't really want to know.  But I also despise the bullshit artists out to make a buck.  It's a big commitment of life energy to learn this stuff.  I started reading and experimenting on myself when I was fourteen and I'm still learning.

When I first read Power to the People I thought "Wow! This is the guy I've been looking for!"  I couldn't understand why the writer would then turn around and sell expensive funny-looking dumbbells.  Just another con artist, I figured.  For once I was too skeptical.  Now my training is almost all kettlebells.
 
You know, I've got a group of friends who are really into cars. None of them are trained mechanics, but they work on their cars themselves. Not just changing the oil, but even bigger jobs like changing the timing belt, and one ambitious venture to perform an auto to manual transmission conversion. This is all without the help of any professional and purely from the research they've done. On the other hand, my family (and the majority of the population) all just go to a mechanic who they get to do everything that needs to be done.

People get a trainer because they're outsourcing the need to get the knowledge and apply it themselves, and they're trusting in the experience of someone who is meant to be a professional. Just like not everyone wants to service their own car, not everyone wants to figure out this stuff on their own. Instead they assume that a personal trainer knows what they are doing and is trustworthy, just like most people assume a mechanic knows what they are doing and is trustworthy. But, sometimes, people accidentally get a bad mechanic. It's not their fault when they do, though.
 
I prefer to stay in the house, close to my kettlebell collection and the sanity they bring to my strength and conditioning world.  I made the mistake of walking into an LA Fitness last week and could not believe how many guys were masturbating their biceps on the preacher bench.  Totally gross.
 
Niggel, maybe it's because I'm older (64) I remember when people were a little more skeptical of 20 yo's who think they know everything.  Perhaps it's the public school rote educations and "self-esteem" training.   I think that people need to take responsibility for the bs they swallow.  Also, there's a risk in everything worth doing.  I get your point though, if a "trainer" is truly a con artist and doesn't believe in or know what they're doing that is an injustice.  I enjoyed reading your first post and look forward to reading about your progress and future insights.  Cheers.
 
I dont think its easy to tell at all how good a  trainer is without working with them personally  for a while.  Of course if your trainer hasy ou doing situps and bicep curls and stretching for an entire session then you can know pretty fast about their quality.  But i think the grey area in training is pretty large.

Samuel I think said it pretty well just want to agree :)
 
It's nice to say that people should educate themselves and they should know if a personal trainer isn't any good but: When you hire someone, it's because that person allegedly knows more about the subject than you do and the assumption is that you will learn a lot from working with a professional.

People who aren't educated about exercise can't always be expected to recognize when the "professional" they hired to teach them about exercise is giving them bad information. Sure, they could put the time and effort into doing their own research and verify everything they're told, but the whole point of hiring someone is so you won't have to do all that.
 
I'm not sure about the US but our training institution are quite poor in Australia. If you were to rely on your training and your text books then you would be a very terrible trainer. So the issue is systemic and it would require a trainer going against what has been taught to them for them to become a trainer of excellence.

Unfortunately, Pavels and authors of that echelon are quite difficult to come by and so mediocre authors and trainers tend to dominate the market with their fat to fit in 15min's mediocrity.

So I guess I'm suggesting that the problem Samuel highlights extends to the trainers themselves trusting educational institutions to be responsible and up to date, which sadly, they are not...
 
Some very good points have been brought up here, I am also in Australia and have to agree that Australian Training Institutions are at best a joke (you can basically pay, do a few short tests and walk away with a certificate).

This is good and bad in some respects, bad that there is so many shonky trainers out there with no idea of what they are doing, however that is good in a way for those of us who know a little better because once we pick up clients who have been on the mainstream merry go round it is quite easy to give them substantial results and hence hold onto them as customers.

One other point to consider is that we are quite lucky the industry is not regulated heavily because if it was we probably would not be able to teach the stuff that we on this community know works. We must remember that unfortunately we are a minority, steadily growing but still a minority.
 
Samuel's car analogy is perfect.  I originally just wanted to own a musclecar, and instead became an amateur mechanic.  I'm really against top-down standards.  The government would have us wearing velcro lifting belts, pumping away on machines, and eating GMO soy oil.  Free flow of information is the only solution, and it slowly works.  Just look at Pavel's fifteen-year career in the US, and what any of us have learned in the internet age.

There is a real incestuous dynamic between faux-trainers and clients.  The clients want to feel like they did something, but not really train.  The trainers want to make it seem complicated and keep the client dependent and paying.  It makes me nauseous.

A good trainer skips the gimmicks and aims straight to the heart of the matter -- free weights and bodyweight, progressive resistance, compound fundamental movements.  Communism jokes are a bonus.

 
 
I was in a discussion the other night about how kettlebell certifications are not widely accepted by gyms as legitimate fitness certs and therefore it would be near impossible to get hired anywhere.

 

My response was politely along the lines of  "Clearly you do not understand what these organizations are doing. They are doing what you should have been the whole time! Besides, I would not wish to shame myself with the dishonor of Zumba when I would rather snatch a 24 kilo bell for my cardio".
 
The situation is the same here in the UK. I've done a little research and as far as I can tell there are no regulations or certifications needed to become a personal trainer. If there are any UK based fitness professionals based in the UK who know different then I'm happy to be proved wrong.

When I started out training a couple of years ago I did what most people did and joined a well known local gym. When you joined you got three sessions with a personal trainer for free. We started with an assessment that was really just a test to see how fast I could run on a treadmill and how long I could hold a plank for. We then started a 'program' of circuit training. There was no real direction, or any tracking of progress, no was there much in the way of instruction when it came to correct form (apart from the phrase 'Pain is progress'). The thing was, at the time I didn't know any better.

Most people, when they start don't know what's good and what's bad. Like the car mechanic analogy. I don't know much about how a car works so I can't really tell the difference between a good mechanic and bad mechanic. When you don't know anything about fitness, or sports science, how do you know a good trainer when you see one. Unfortunately, most people's education about fitness comes from magazines or TV and so they think a good trainer is someone who shouts a lot. Fortunately for me I couldn't afford the gym and the trainer long so I was forced to find ways of training at home which led me to Kettlebells and Pavel.

I joked to my wife the other week that after reading the books I have (Enter the Kettlebell, Return of the Kettlebell, Easy Strength, Super joints, Movement etc) that I'm more qualified then most regular trainers down the gym (that I no longer go to) and that I should become a personal trainer. She wasn't impressed and said surely I need to have some formal qualification or something. She didn't believe when I said you didn't.

To fix the problem we need an attitude change in the UK. We need to get away from the 'feel the burn' workouts, to take a long hard look at the effectiveness of the treadmill and the training methods written about in mainstream magazines. I've thought recently about what kind of reaction I would get if I re-joined my local gym and took my kettlebells down there to train. I would, I suspect, at least get a couple of questions from the regular gym rats and maybe that would get them thinking. Maybe I should start evangelising Strong First.
 
I agree with Samuel and also, with all the others OZ posts.
At the opposite of Stephen, I liked to have training buddies, and like the friendly " ambiance " of old fashioned gym, this kind of small gyms where you are checking hands when you arrived, and said see you later, when you are leaving. Real weights lifter or bodybuilders ready to spot you, no need to ask.
No air cond, no tv, no treadmill, just weights, friends and a coffee machine.
I also don't find anything wrong in " working " biceps for hypertrophic, I liked nice and defined biceps, much nicer for me as a skinny arm, for males and for females also, just a personal aesthetic opinion.
 
Great thread. A lot of wisdom here.

Not to sound like the "old man" (which I am) but the observations that are being made here are applicable to more than just training. One very hard lesson I have learned in life is that conventional wisdom is certainly conventional, but it is hardly wisdom. Indeed, if you wait a few years it will no longer be conventional but will be replaced by a new "conventional wisdom".

Our culture (including the physical training culture) knows everything new that happened in the past 24 hours, but doesn't have a clue about what has succeeded for centuries. That was one of the things that attracted me to kettlebells and to Pavel's "do this" approach to fitness. Nothing as crude as a ball of iron with a handle on it could possibly be a fad. There was a "realness" to it all that I am just beginning to understand.

Don't look to any top-down bureaucracy to impose truth upon the masses, including in physical training. Look to those who have actually been successful in what you are after and follow them, no matter how uncool it may appear. Coolness is way over-rated.

Most so-called leaders see which way the mob is going and jump out in front of it. Then they say "follow me". Real leaders seek the truth which sets them free and don't much worry about the size of the crowd that follows them.

Jim
 
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