28 The Psychology of the Trainer/Client Relationship

Inform Fitness Founder, Adam Zickerman, welcomes Clinical Psychologist and InForm Fitness Strength Training Instructor, Joshua Cagney to discuss the varied psychological and emotional aspects encountered by both clients and trainers and how high-intensity strength training can be a cathartic experience.

We want to reward you for listening to the InForm Fitness Podcast by offering a free training session at an InForm Fitness location nearest you plus an opportunity to qualify for an InForm Fitness Prize Pack.

Earn one FREE SESSION when you leave a review for InForm Fitness in iTunes, Yelp, Google+, Facebook,  & Amazon! Simply write a review and send a screenshot to [email protected] - that's it!  For each review you leave, you will receive and entry for the GRAND PRIZE!

One lucky listener will receive a personally autographed copy of Adam Zickerman's book,  Power of 10: The Once-a-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution. That listener will also get decked out in InForm Fitness apparel including an InForm Fitness T-shirt, hat, and a hoody jacket. And we’ll top off the prize pack with an Amazon Echo! Click here to see the Amazon Echo in action:http://bit.ly/2InFormFItnessGrandPrize

Contest ends May 31st, 2017.  Listen for more details!

To find an Inform Fitness location nearest you visit www.InformFitness.com

If you'd like to ask Adam, Mike or Sheila a question or have a comment regarding the Power of 10. Send us an email or record a voice memo on your phone and send it to [email protected]. 

Join Inform Nation and call the show with a comment or question.  The number is 888-983-5020, Ext. 3. 

To purchase Adam's book, Power of 10: The Once-a-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution click this link to visit Amazon: http://bit.ly/ThePowerofTen

28 The Psychology of the Trainer/Client Relationship

Josh: The truth is that if we’re doing our jobs effectively as instructors, that’s entirely placing the clients’ needs ahead of our own. We each have an innate need to want to sympathize, to want to offer our sympathies whenever someone suffers a loss or a stressful period of time emotionally, but the longterm consequence of that is we blur those lines. The goal is making sure that you know the client well enough to understand what is going to be most conducive to getting her through a really productive workout. That’s when an instructor is really showing his or her metal, when they’re able to put the clients’ needs ahead of their own.

Tim: Hey InForm Nation, can you believe it? We are already at episode 28 of the InForm Fitness Podcast: Twenty Minutes with New York Times bestselling author, Adam Zickerman and friends. I’m Tim Edwards with the InBound Podcasting Network and I’m a client of InForm Fitness, and in just a moment, we’ll hear from the founder of InForm Fitness, Adam Zickerman. Sheila Melody, the co-owner of the Toluca Lake location is back with us, and still on vacation is Mike Rogers. Looking forward to having Mike back with us next week, as we interview one of his clients from the Manhattan location, Gretchen Rubin. Next week’s episode is bound to be one of our most popular episodes, and I’ll explain that at the end of this one. Also at the end of the show, I will remind you of our May 2017, exclusively for InForm Nation. We have a really cool prize pack, valued at over two hundred bucks, but let’s not get ahead of yourselves. Remember that voice you heard at the top of the show? That was InForm Fitness trainer/instructor, Joshua Cagney from the Restin, Virginia location. Joshua also happens to be a clinical psychologist, which is why Adam invited him to join us here on The Psychology of the Trainer/Client 

Relationship. Sometimes after a period of time, those who are being trained become so comfortable with their trainers, they might start to share some intimate details of their life, and the trainer, in essence, becomes their therapist. So where do we draw the line? Can this type of relationship actually help, or hurt the progress of your strength training? Let’s join the conversation with Joshua Cagney, Adam Zickerman, Sheila Melody, and myself, with The Psychology of the Trainer/Client Relationship.

Adam: So first of all, I’ve had this conversation with Josh in person, a resident clinical psychologist/exercise instructor. I was talking about — I was there giving a certification course, and many times when I’m talking with trainers, we talk about how to motivate, how to inspire, how to keep people on track. How to make them feel that, I know this is hard but you can do it anyway and stick with it. During that conversation, we were talking about the relationships that develop over time and that there is a definitely a psychology involved in maintaining these relationships and motivating your client. Then lines start getting blurred, and I hear very often, it’s kind of a pet peeve of mind, and maybe it’s a pet peeve of mine because I’ve been doing this for twenty years now and I’ve seen the damage, I guess. The pet peeve is when I hear that you’re more like my therapist, the client would say. I come here and it’s like a therapy session, or the trainer would say, I feel like I’m a therapist sometimes or I act like a therapist. People come to me, they talk about their problems, they lay it all on me, they can tell me things that they can’t tell anybody else, and I get all that, but when I hear that, the hair on the back of my neck goes up a little bit. Maybe because it’s my twenty years experience, and the reason that the hair goes up on my neck is just because there’s a psychology involved in motivating and working with your clients, doesn’t mean that we’re psychologists, and that’s when Josh said, unless you are a psychologist. I realized that Josh is not only an exercise instructor, which was what I was talking to him as, but I then realized that he’s actually a clinical psychologist. So I guess that doesn’t apply to him, he is a psychologist when he’s dealing with psychology of training clients, and we have to be careful, both as clients and trainer, to make sure we’re not blurring those lines, and the instructor doesn’t get all full of himself or herself, thinking that they can actually solve these people’s problems. I think that the client themselves needs to know what their boundaries are as well, and as much as you connect with your trainer, as much as you appreciate your trainer, as much as this trainer builds you up, not just physically but mentally, as much as all of that happens, they’re not their therapist. The reason this is important to me and the reason the hair goes up on the back of my neck is because we end up, both client and instructor, we end up not doing our jobs. What we find happens during the exercise session is a lot of chit-chat going on, there’s a lot of wasted time, and the workout suffered. It’s a twenty-minute workout, and there’s no way you can be a therapist and a trainer in twenty minutes. So then you lose a client, and this is where my twenty years experience comes in. What ends up happening is one day, the client wakes up and says, what the hell am I going there for. I’m getting bored, I’m not feeling the results, I’m feeling a plateau. It’s becoming a chore to go there. Maybe the time before that, the quote unquote therapist trainer said something they didn’t like, the way therapists sometimes do, and then you’ve got your patient not wanting to come back anymore, when they weren’t your patient in the first place. They were your client, the person you were supposed to train, and now that th...