TOO MUCH OF NOTHING Excerpt -- I too belong to the hopeful tribe of the personally trained, which I joined back in 2002, when I needed to lose some 50 pounds. So I can attest that what’s most remarkable of all is the sheer oddity of the personal-training ecosystem, which I’ve observed across a series of gyms and a sequence of my own trainers: Aaron and then Ari and now Andrew. I seem to put a lot of stock in the first letter of the alphabet. Andrew, last name Ginsburg, is also a stand-up comedian and does riffs, onstage and off, about the way the boom in personal training has permitted struggling actors, failed athletes and even ex-cons to repurpose themselves as trainers, with meaningless credentials from certificate mills. “If you have $400 and a pulse, you can be a trainer,” he told me during a recent session, referring to the licensing fee from one organization, which administers a multiple-choice test. “A chimp could pass it. The questions are like, ‘If a client complains of tightness in the chest, do you: A) chocolate, B) chocolate, C) chocolate, D) consult a physician?’ ”
Posted on: Sun, 28 Jul 2013 19:17:38 +0000
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