Bite the Hand that Feeds.

I predict in 2012 the Sport and Exercise industry will have completely adopted the same employment models as the entertainment and nightclub scene. A trainer or coach’s entire employment will not be based on skills or qualifications. Rather, how many Facebook friends you have and how pretty they look on camera.

A little bit of Photoshop goes a long way

By the year 2015, 1 in 3 Australians will identify as a personal trainer and 1 in 5 of those will claim to specialize in strength and conditioning, while the rest will teach Zumba to the Macerena.

I then predict by the year 2020, the entire industry will collapse. Trainers will quit, gyms will close (if they’re not already) and the health burden of inactivity will triple.

Slow down, this is not global warming, back up the dooms day truck a bit.

Over the last 5 years the nightclub and festival scene has become a victim to its own success, venues have opened, punters have come out and the number of people identifying as DJ’s has sky rocketed. This sees an already competitive industry become cut throat, in a desperate attempt to bring heads through the door the industry came up with the employment model of ‘Promoter DJ’s’. What this means in theory is, DJ’s are expected to bring a certain amount of people to the venue each week from their own self promotion. That DJ who offered you cheap tickets to a festival or an exclusive door listing? He is on pay for play. 

So what we have now is rich kids buying their way to gigs, DJ’s spending more time spamming than mixing and perhaps the most concerning part is a division and competition between those who work in the same venue. However, it is all about the music… Right?

It is plane to see the artistic integrity of the DJ has been eroded.

So, how does this relate to the commercial fitness industry?

Quantifiable Results are irrelevant

In the same 5 years, the commercial fitness industry has seen the same progression; Fitness farms owned by the private equity firms fronted up from overseas. Industry accreditation companies started pumping out personal trainers at the rate of knots and the integrity of service declined.

Now, I personally have been through the ringer trying to find a job, and there are two common themes I hear, ‘we do not hire trainers, we lease you floor space’ and the next is ‘if we hire you how many people will you bring through the door?’

I am yet to be asked if I can produce quantifiable evidence of the effectiveness in my training systems.

So what you have now is rich kids inheriting industry qualifications, paying for pretty photo shoots, buying their way in to gym floors, fighting with other trainers for clients and spending more time on Facebook trying to obtain the holy grail of 5000 friends while legitimate coaches and trainers are left in pieces bleeding on the floor.

Taking the AVON business models is simply not acceptable in any industry. Relying on marketing and promotion, to build a gym is completely un-ethical and ultimately at the expense of best practice modelling. While the original framework of pay for play may have benefited a few, it has lead to a industry at civil war, and like any civil war, both sides end up dead. Now please excuse me, I have to go finish my sport science Degree

Quantifiable Training

I don’t know much about cycling, apart from Cadel Evens winning the Tour de France, and I did race BMX a bit when I was a kid. But, for the most part, when it comes to training for mountain bike racing. I am not your man. 

However, I do have a client who races at club level. The style of racing she is involved in, is off road endurance based, most races last around 90-120 minutes. Naturally a high volume of training is required. So I started researching pacing, and pumping and all kinds of sexual connotations found in cycling training. I then started asking about her training, she told me of some pretty big obstacles in the way, such as work and other commitments. We then further discussed the ‘style’ of the coming races, two, are technically challenging, while two, require more all round conditioning and less technical skill.

 I then asked the said client to show me her training logs, to which she replied “I don’t keep training logs, I just go on what feels like it is working”

‘Feels like’ is not exactly a quantifiable term. How does she know what is working and what are her key performance indicators, heart rate? Watts output? 5’km times? What? Furthermore, cyclist rely heavily on periodization of training, so how does she gauge her current performance on this time last year, or the last time the current block of training was in place?  And finally, If she has 5 blocks of training per week, how many and what sessions is she going to change week to week, to cater for the next races specific details? 

The 6th hot chick on this blog

So, overall, her training is made entirely of guess work with no real direction or goal, she can’t produce her training results to a coach or mentor and she can’t quantifiably identify weak points in her game. 

When I spoke to Australia’s strongest man Derek Boyer, he explained to me that he limits his training to 6 hours per week. This is even more important in an endurance based sport. Where, every minute of training should have value.

 Personally, I have tried many different ways to log my own training, and have found the most effective is the ol-skool diary, I log each set and what phase of training I am in. This is the simplest filing system I have found and gives clear structure to my training.

The point I am trying to get across here is, plan ahead, log your entire training, make it quantifiable and set key performance indicators. Give yourself clear goals that are based on results not ‘feels like’ fiction. Map your progress and watch your performance output improve.