Personal Trainers at the Glitter Gym

I really don't understand the logic of the Glitter Gym trainers at 24 Hour Fitness. The real product a gym sells is not a lean muscular body and all that it brings. What you are buying when you purchase a membership is use of their equipment. Gym equipment is expensive and takes up lots of room. If everybody had an unlimited budget and an extra thousand square feet in their home, most people would not buy memberships. There are exceptions, such as those who travel for their job and of course the locker room perverts.

One of the other products sold by a gym is expertise. For $30-$50 a hour they will pair you up with some 20-year kid that just passed a certification class in fitness the week before. My personal opinion is that by just reading the Wikipedia page on weight training you will be on intellectually equal grounds with many of these Glitter Gym trainers.

The personal trainers there are not training their clients on the gym equipment. The trainers are teaching these newbies functional exercises. You know exercises like push-ups, sit-ups, body-weight lunges and even jogging in place. All those exercises don't require a gym membership. They don't require any equipment. They don't require 24 Hour Fitness. What if it sinks in to the client that to achieve basic functional strength and have a lean physique they don't need a gym membership at all? Hell there was an entire book written on this topic.

Good business would tell us that the Glitter Gym trainers should be training people on their own equipment. You want to get healthy, then use our stuff!

Some of you may be asking why this bothers me. After all, if these people start using weights, then won't the gym get more crowded? Sure. The problem is 24 Hour Fitness trainers are training these newbies on the weight room floor. Sunday a trainer had a 50+ year lady attempting to do a pistol (1-legged squat with a forward leg). Not only was this a dangerous move for a beginner, they were blocking the cage where I wanted to do deadlifts. Get these trainers and their clients off the floor of the weight room. They aren't using the weights, they need to get out of the weight room.

Tags: goals gyms weightlifting