Showy Students

• By vishwa on Health, Inspiration, Training

• July 23, 2018

Fortunately, in my experiences as a personal trainer, I have only come across a few pretentious gym clients.  Such clients are only about aesthetics. Their purpose to visit a gym is shallow. Fortunately, most of my gym clients don’t come to the gym for aesthetics alone and thus are long term clients.  They join my gym to build a strong and functionally fit body. It’s an authentic journey.   Since the environment in my gym isn’t conducive for hypertrophy, which leads to ego boosting those seeking aesthetics only don’t last.

However, I have seen some of my new gym clients buy new clothes, shoes, gym bag, etc.  They are wrongly seeking motivation from these external sources. It will not take them far. They don’t realize that it’s a resolute attitude they require to persist in the journey.   The clothes and the shoes will get old, but your will to achieve a goal must never grow old.   Happily, my gym clients who have been visiting the gym for a long time never pretend.  They know that pretention will not help their pursuits.

Recently, a young man wanted to join my gym.    His father accompanied him to enroll him in the gym.  However, before joining my gym the young man naively asked me, “What are the list of things which are necessary for me to join?”    I was utterly lost and annoyed, so I asked him to clarify by what he meant.  He gave me a list of things, which he thought were necessary for joining a gym:

Sports shoes

Gym kit

Gym attire

Gym towel

Lifting gloves

Water bottle

Protein shaker

Lifting belt

Etc.

I was dumbfounded! Never, had I encountered a similar situation in my 13 years of managing the gym. I always sincerely thought that one just needed the will to endure in a gym.  Of course, you must pay your fees.  You also cannot come to the gym wearing jeans.  You will understandably wear a sport’s T-shirt, track pants and carry a towel for wiping off sweat. But here I stumbled upon a person who was thinking flimsily.  I arrogantly replied to his father that his son was bragging about unnecessary things.  I also said to his father that his son might do better in one of those glamour and glitz gyms.  I said to his father that I was sorry, for I couldn’t cater to his son’s cosmetic needs.  At Ironcult we have only assisted the serious-minded. We have never assisted shallow individuals.

So, think about what really matters.  Don’t go for the showy, the glamorous and the glitzy.  In gym parlance,   I believe applying chalk is more important to lift weights than adorning new clothes.