Bragging, procrastinating, and closeted

When your trainer knows you’re full of shit

Mama’s boy for life

In the summer of 2020 my wife and I moved from Jersey City to Miami to take care of my mom who was dying of cancer and my dad who my mom took care of. After my mom passed, we stuck around another month so we could get my dad situated with my half-siblings before they liquidated his house and threw him into a retirement home. My wife and I moved to Texas for a fresh start in an economy that was much more open and amenable to able-bodied people who wanted to work. She’s a nurse and I’m a gym guy but in The North, pear-shaped matryoshka understand public health and economics in ways such sneaker-wearing LHC as ourselves never could and that’s who runs it.

After a month, sick of holding out for a management title and tired of loafing around, I took a personal training gig where I met many clients I still train today, five years in the future. At this point, I have a pretty charmed life as someone who has to work but doesn’t have to bust their ass and so I get a bit of a choice in what I do with my time, choosing to shoot my mouth off while I work people out. I have an extremely diverse and small crew of dedicated people who come visit me throughout the day and pay me even though they do most of the work.

While I’ve trained many gay guys over the years, only one of them has chosen to stay closeted this whole time. While I can’t be 100% sure, there are a host of indicators in his mannerisms and media consumption, his occasional asides that he happened across the image of his own buttocks in the mirror and decided it was particularly striking, casual comments made about other guy’s physiques being impressive that come off more libidinal than laudatory. Additionally, it isn’t uncommon for him to warn me of impending traffic when someone like Beyoncé Knowles is in town or tell me who the fuck Benson Boone is.

This over the backdrop of being a very Catholic 40-something year-old mama’s boy whose sisters are both married and already making babies. This guy has never told me about going on a single date in his life but has offered a handful of stories in which he thought a woman was flirting with him, all occurring during retail/hospitality/F&B transactions where they are paid to flirt with you as part of their job. Sometimes it feels like he’s booting up heterosexualstory.exe mid-conversation as if he wants to bro out but doesn’t quite know how to, talking about something he doesn’t even like to someone who is more accomplished at it. I’m not trying to be mean here. I’m just trying to explain why it feels stilted.

Olá

He showed up after a protracted hiatus from the gym. It turned out he had already been working with another trainer at the same gym who was a loud 6’2” Brazilian woman largely lacking in the knowhow and demeanor you want if safety and results are your thing. When he rejoined, he probably wasn’t in the mood to try out any trainer at all but a sales guy I was always friendly with convinced him to take a free session with me since he was unhappy with his physique but scared to death of dealing with this old, messy bitch from Sao Paulo who got super tight about the fact that her client ditched her for me. After sitting on his ass for most of lockdown, he was ready for change. Still, he came to me shy, about 5’10, skinny-fat with a gut and terrified to touch metal.

Sweat, screams, explosions: Across the world’s longest montage sequence I was able to get him pretty fit. To be clear he hasn’t gotten as fit or done so as fast as my other clients but my job is to get him as good as he can be, not as good as someone else. There are still middle school boys and female collegiate athletes who can kill him with their bare hands BUT he’s a million times better than he was. Whereas he was previously about 160 lbs skinny fat, now he’s about 180 lbs, still no abs, but his back is carved from stone, his chest and shoulders are broad, tapering into a 32” waist, and his quads are sharp from rep after rep of nice, controlled sissy squats. He couldn’t do a single chin-up when I met him but now his arms bust through his polo.

Best of all his upper back was severely rounded from years of slouching at a mind-numbing spreadsheet job and, through a combination of corrective exercises, good olf-fashioned deadlifts, and many hours of medieval torture accumulated on various yoga wheels, he’s now 6’ tall with no hunchback. While he’s still a reserved person, he literally stands proud now, occasionally remarking how he’ll run into people who knew him when he was younger who are utterly shocked at how much of a mensch he’s become. Not all men are created equal but many talented men never seek to develop theirs further. It’s hard to overstate: People will give you props if you work so hard you look like a different person.

Having said that, all clinicians have certain occupational hazards that require patience. In addition to needing to toggle between being someone’s spotter, bartender, rabbi/priest and psychiatrist, having to deal with everything from trauma dumping to small talk about intra-office dynamics or pop music and Saturday Night Live episodes, some people will have ticks or palsies that work your nerves. While this client is one of my favorites, even he can get to me. I’m not immune to anyone.

Some people have a preternatural ability to elongate the time between exercises. Coping takes time and if you want to give yourself time before doing a task you don’t want to do, coping about its severity is a good way to procrastinate. The harder you make it seem, the easier it is to push off. I push people but as a general rule, I know they would have just joined the military if they wanted me to yell at them. In fact, I am so aware of my ability to scare the shit out of people when I keep it real with them, I try to correct in the other direction by being patient. I know it sounds like I’m being a pussy but it’s more about me making other people think I don’t think they’re a pussy. If someone is scared to get calluses, you really have to sell it.

We usually spend most of our effort controlling the movement and adding range of motion where possible. Sometimes we spend months using the same loads until he looks like a super-stud , at which point we’ll add 5-10 more pounds and his form falls apart so we start the process again, not quite from the beginning but with more care than most clients require. He’ll give me a little editorial about how heavy the weight is, sometimes asking if I’m sure this is really the move.

It’s 6:00 am and your client begins making a show

He asks you how much weight is on the bar even though he knows the answer. He’s lifted this exact amount every week for the last three or four weeks and yet he paces, exhales nervously, shakes his head a few times, and tells you he’s going to try his best, as though heading into a suicide mission to Mars, when it’s the same walk in the park he’s completed 27 times without issue.

• He knows how much weight is on the bar.

• He knows he can lift it because he’s lifted it many times before.

• He has not lost a limb or suffered a stroke since you last saw him.

Yet he is making a subtle physical and verbal protestation that this time the outcome is unclear.

So what gives?

Everyone wants credit and validation.

Driving into that lake

When he’s telling me that it sure is a lot of weight on the bar and how he’s not sure this Herculean task could possibly get accomplished, least of all by Junior Varsity basketball players whose nuts haven’t dropped yet, he’s ripping a whole in spacetime and finding an extremely circumlocutious way not just to delay the exercise but to brag about his strength. If the weight is so heavy and impossible to move and yet he’s able to move it, it must mean he’s such a big boy. He’s trying to get me to acknowledge his achievement because complaining is actually a form of bragging.

mf heavy asl.

Similarly, when I see women, some of them my friends, complaining about how hard it is to raise kids I just think about them pacing around the squat rack, shaking their head, taking deep breaths, and pointing to the bar. They’ve moved it two or three times a week every week for months or years. They’ve hit this exact weight dozens of times and know they are probably not going to end up a pile of bones at the bottom of it, in the same way they are probably not going to drive their toddlers into a lake with them. But they need to gesticulate and make a little noise about it, update their status, kvetch, make a post, take a selfie. You can run up in their mentions and tell them, “You got this bro,” or, “Looking sickk.”

They want credit and validation. They want to hear what big girls they are, playing house at such a high level, in the same way the risk management guy with the drinking problem will complain to me about how expensive dating is to make sure I know he’s an eligible bachelor raking in $250,000 per year. A guy who can afford two houses, an ex-wife, and hundreds of drinks across dozens of dates with gold-diggers the city over.

I have my own complaints. They’re probably not all that interesting but when I think about it, I try to see myself walking around a barbell, putting on a show, and asking people to indulge in my fantasy, gas me the fuck up. It’s how I get people to tell me how impressive I am, how I get credit for things I’m not naturally good at. It’s hard work but someone’s got to do it.