Horsham-based female personal trainer, Becky, works at an independent gym. She trains clients of a variety of abilities on a one to one basis, and enjoys finding what works best for them and their goals. Today, she addresses the broadly held belief that a person has to achieve a certain standard of fitness before being ready to go to the gym.
There are two reasons I know that believing you have to meet a certain standard of fitness in order to be eligible to go to the gym is a problem: it’s something that prospective clients regularly tell me that they’re worried about; and I was concerned about it myself when I first got started. Let’s talk about where this fear potentially comes from, and how to work past it.
Being fit enough to exercise
There are some people who aren’t fit to train. I say this very carefully – there are a minority of people at any given time who will have received medical advice not to train, or only to train in a certain manner. Unless you’ve been told that you fall into that category, you are probably safe to go to the gym or participate in an exercise class. Speaking of which…
All personal trainers and fitness instructors (including yoga teachers etc.) should be conducting a basic health screening with new participants. We are trained to do this. We are not trained to assess anyone’s health or make a diagnosis, but we should be aware of how to train our participants safely and help them to make adaptations as necessary.
There are all sorts of things we need to be aware of, from whether a person is pregnant or has recently been through pregnancy, to whether they have cancer, or a heart condition. There are many other health conditions that we need to know about, so if you are at all unsure, please tell your instructor – they should give you a safe environment to do so and may ask questions.
If you have no health concerns and merely believe that you are “not fit enough”, let me continue…
You are capable of participating in exercise
Time to point out what should be straightforward: for the majority of people, the entire point of participating in exercise is to improve their fitness. Therefore, there is no minimum standard when you begin. Read those sentences again.
I understand that you might be concerned about being in a space where you think that everyone else is better than you, and I think there are two main causes of this problem: the fitness industry’s atrocious marketing of itself; experiences of PE being about performance ability. We’re going to break those things down.
The fitness industry has an image problem
Just because the adverts you see about classes, gyms, and activewear tend to involved slim, younger people, doesn’t mean that those are the only people those spaces are for. I promise.
I’ve worked at two gyms, and spent time at two other ones whilst I was qualifying as a PT, and all of them have broader memberships than you’d expect. I’ve seen people in their 80s regularly training. I’ve seen people who use mobility aids and have a variety of physical disabilities. I can promise you that there will also have been people present who have hidden disabilities.
There is very little that I, as a straight-sized woman in her 30s can do as an individual, other than keep telling you that this marketing is false and calling for brands to make meaningful change. I invite anyone to come and join me on a look around my gym to learn more, without obligation. I hope I live to see change.
PE isn’t fitness
This one is slightly more complex than that glib statement. I grew up thinking that PE was what exercise is. I knew that I wasn’t good at PE, and I therefore assumed that exercise itself wasn’t for me. And for a long time, I was comfortable with that.
As I approached 30, my feelings changed, and I recognised that I needed to care for my body differently. So I took several deep breaths and made a start… only to discover that the gym is nothing like the PE lessons I had, and I also wasn’t bad at it (following a lot of practice). And that’s what I mean when I say that PE is not fitness.
Getting started when you feel unfit
I make the above case regularly, and people still counter that they don’t think they can cope with an hour-long PT session. To which I ask what they expect it to be like.
Typically, they’ll say that they expect to be worked hard, and that tends to mean that they think “working hard” has a certain look – again, a fitness industry image problem. When you train with me, “working hard” is personal (the clue is in my job title) – I consider each client on their own terms, and everyone works at a level appropriate to themselves.
With me, you do the hour of exercise you’re capable of, rather than what anyone else can do. I haven’t yet had anyone not be able to complete a session, and that’s because we work at an appropriate pace.
So, with that in mind: do you think you’re ready to train?