Paul Landini A personal trainer and health educator in Kitchener, Ontario.
I occupy a unique area in the world of personal training. The majority of my clients are adults like me, who value the value of exercise, but who are generally at odds with fitness culture. Like me, they tried to stay open in the face of apparently ridiculous ideologies (“no pain, no profit”? Really?). They spent hours in the gym each week, hoping to get out all the time. In short, they sipped Kool-Aid mixed with steroids until it became too sour in the stomach, and then went looking for a more palatable option.
The approach I use when dealing with these brave souls is the same one I use to keep my training / life demons away. Our focus is on being very achievable, which I call a “reasonably fit”, rather than chasing big and bold fitness goals, which usually consume a lot of time and emotional energy. It’s about achieving the same challenging standards.
The “moderately fit” spirit is in stark contrast to the typical hardcore training attitude. Prioritize the quality of movement over the number of people and sets. Our performance standards are based on what our real body can do in the real world we live in. So if you’re a middle-aged office worker, you probably don’t need to train a £ 600 squat. For most people in that demographic, being able to get up from the floor with a single fluid movement is a more productive and achievable goal.
It’s been a long way to lead me to this niche. As far as I can remember, I’ve been immersed in the world of fitness. Physical education classes in elementary school led to weight training in high school, from which I jumped into boxing and martial arts. And although I wasn’t very good at these movement efforts, they laid the foundation for my fast-growing masculine identity. Jim has become my home away from home. Men’s Health, Muscle & Fitness, Flex- These shiny magazines provided the filters that I started seeing the world.
I remember feeling a disconnect between my true self and this character I made. Aggressive and prisoner-free attitude. Egocentric attitude; false thoughts about what it means to be a man – well, so I felt it was all fake. However, real men are not interested in staring at this kind of navel. Real men lift weights. That’s what I’ve been doing.
Isn’t it strange that my twenties were so confused?
Thankfully, after 10 years of being lost in the fake airbrush wilderness endemic to this particular subculture, I began to see the light. My “Ahaha Moment” came when I was paying attention to the shoulder pain that plagued me for God. It was a smashing, existential guts punch that not only made me squeeze and embarrassed, but also bold.
My relationship with fitness, and my body, turned out to be toxic and dysfunctional, to say the least. I never asked what exactly I was aiming for when working on my 8-week training plan. I had never thought about the performance or aesthetic standards I was pursuing, or who set these standards in the first place. Nodding with the other members of Jim Brothers, he hit the next set.
But you can’t see the light. My faith was shaking and the questions continued. Why am I so worried about muscle mass and body fat? Is it because you value your health and vitality so much that you crush your hips on a regular basis? Or is it because of a deep-seated inferiority complex that manifests itself in a constant desperate quest for approval from others?
These are the kind of questions that the Fitness Industrial Complex didn’t think of. Because these are the kind of questions that lead people to cancel their gym membership. But I know they are being asked by them. Because, in addition to speaking to themselves, as a trainer, I always hear them from the people I work with.
Wanting a good fit is not a compromise or crackdown. You still need to work hard, but still need to appear regularly and work hard. It simply means that there are other aspects of life that are more important than benching twice your own weight. Leave hours of training to the so-called Alpha. For people who are reasonably healthy for us, we train to live, not the other way around.
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