Those of you who are just starting as trainers, and those who are thinking of going independent, as well as the many and various lifters out there, may be interested in how we came to start our little double garage gym. And those thinking about coming here may want to know how and why it came about. It's because: lifters first, always.
As a globogym trainer, to get and keep clients you have to demonstrate competence, establish trust and build rapport. In practice this means being on the gym floor a lot, chatting to new and regular members about life and training, and keeping the place clean. If you do this well, then you get personal training clients, the bad side of it is that your own workout is constantly interrupted. So I'd got a rack, a bar and some plates to work out at home in my garage.
I'd been almost four years in the job and was doing well. Our style of training doesn't work great in the traditional one-on-one personal training 2x30' sessions a week - it's just not long enough. So I'd put people together in small groups, I had 6 or so coming for 3x90' a week, which worked much better.
I was reasonably happy in the globogym. They more or less tolerated our barbell training and I was able to help lots of people, not just my own clients but regular gym members. I occasionally had nosey staff or gym members make uninformed comments, and managers didn't get what I was doing, either with the barbells or the semi-private mode of training, but nobody was stopping me, at least.
Of course, I had Rippetoe in my ear saying, "push the button, Kyle," but I just laughed and set the alarm for 5am. I'm a believer that you go ahead and make changes in your life if you need to, but ideally you should be running towards something, not just running away from something. May 2014 gave me both.
One day a client Tess was doing some 55kg cleans and dropping them from hip height after each rep. A guy came off his swiss ball and started having a go at her for dropping weights.
"Sorry Albert, this is what bumper plates are for. And this is what you do in weightlifting."
"This isn't a weightlifting gym."
"You don't think we should lift weights in the gym?"
"Yes but not weightlifting."
"I have to drop from my hips," said Tess, "otherwise it jolts my elbows too much and will injure me."
"Then just don't lift such heavy weights."
Now, he may not have intended it that way, but aside from the absurdity of telling people not to try to lift heavier weights, telling a young woman "don't lift such heavy weights" will be taken by her as, "get back in the kitchen, bitch!" Especially since he was doing so very aggressively. So she started crying, and he took this as his cue to start abusing her. As you might expect, everyone put in complaints about him, and... management backed him.
They followed this up with a formal Occupational Health & Safety assessment of the safety of bumper plates and the quick lifts, obviously hoping to be able to get rid of them. Being politic they included me, and when they had a draft assessment showing the danger was high, I said, "So what about the dumbbells and iron plates?"
"This isn't about those, we are assessing the bumper plates today."
"Oh no I meant, okay you talk about the safety of the barbell press, well we've been doing dumbbell presses here for years, obviously you have previously assessed these as safe, what solutions did you adopt for them? Perhaps we could adopt a similar solution for the barbells. Unless of course you never assessed the dumbbells, in which case we'd have to. And it may be that for example 17.5kg dumbbells are safe, but 20kg dumbbells are not. To be sure, we'd have to do different assessments for each pair of dumbbells in the gym. And those kettlebells. And the machines. More assessments. For safety, boss."
He then decided to assess the risk of bumper plates as lower. I was in the Army, I know bureaucracy. You want to do paperwork? I can do paperwork. You want to spend every day for the next six weeks in the gym assessing every last piece of equipment? I can do that, I'll take the work hours.
We kept the bumpers, but I knew I'd only repulsed the first attack. More would come. I could repulse the attacks indefinitely, but was this the best environment for my lifters, really? Would they get the best results they possibly could in that place? Or could we do something better?
That was the "push" factor. At a globogym, effective training will only ever be tolerated, not supported.
In the same month, a young couple who had seen my blatherings online contacted me asking to be trained using the Starting Strength method. I joked, "Well you can come to the nice airconditioned gym in Kew in the mornings, or my dusty garage in the evenings." To my surprise the guy replied, "We don't want to come to Kew." And so they started coming along three times a week, and I bought a bit more gear.
One day I had a missed call, I googled up the number and it was a high school in Werribee across town. "What the hell is a high school in Werribee calling me for?" I wondered, and while I was wondering an email arrived. "Hi I am a 64yo woman with arthritis and my rheumatologist said I should start strength training, he said he's sent many of his patients to you before and they got good results." And I thought, "Um... who?" because I didn't know any rheumatologists and none of my clients went to one.
So I arranged to see her, found out the doctor's name and contacted him. It turned out he'd also read my online blatherings and liked them. I was what he called a "medically aware trainer". Not medically-trained, but medically-aware. There are plenty of solid barbell trainers out there, and there are plenty of people who won't hurt the beat-up, old and sickly, they'll just mess them about on bosu balls. But there are not many in the middle, who'll give those beat-up, old and sickly some serious training - without hurting them. "I've sent about ten people to you before, is she the first to come?" he asked. She was.
Lastly, Rippetoe published an article of mine on the Starting Strength website. People were interested in what I had to say? What? Okay.
And that was the "pull" factor. A PT can just buy a bunch of gear and open up in park or garage on day one - but will anyone come? That's why we start out at globogyms - "Well, here are 3,000 people who are already interested in fitness, at least." So when you're thinking about opening your own business, you want to know there's a demand. I figured that if people I'd never heard of were coming to me, and people I'd never heard of were *telling* people to come to me, then I could make a good go of it.
The globogym, like all community gyms, was a good place to start as a trainer, because they had 3,000 people already interested in fitness. Every day for four years I taught someone to squat or deadlift, every day I spoke to someone new, and after talking to or teaching a squat or deadlift to over 1,000 people, I figured some things out. Working at a globogym let me build my skills both personal and training, and establish my reputation and let my niche choose me. What a globogym is to training a public library is to learning; not everyone wants a university structured course with a beginning, middle and end and a firm plan, some people just want some casual leisure activity or reading. And that's fine, but I'm not working with them now.
So I started moving my clients over to the garage, the ones who didn't want to come I transferred to other trainers, I got a few more people besides them in the garage, I gave my notice at the globogym and did my last shift there November 2014. As new clients came, I could both afford and needed more gear, and built it up. And ten years later here we are still. I make more money in less hours than I did at the Y, I'm at home with my children in the day, and nobody abuses anyone for dropping the bar. Unfortunately the reviews do not mention my genius as a trainer, they just talk about the community and results. Ah well.
Over the years, seven of the people I've trained have gone on to become successful trainers in their own right, and several other would-be trainers have come through and learned. And last year, Merkava was promoted assistant coach.
Anyone can come once for free and we teach them to squat, press and deadlift, all for 3 sets of 6, and we give them a workout journal with their next 5 workouts written in. If they sign up and come a second time, they squat for 3 sets of 6 with a little more weight than before, and generally better technique. And it progresses from there, and those who show up regularly find that their first three months of progressive resistance training using barbells creates a more dramatic and profound change in how they look, feel and perform than anything else they've done in the gym before.
People bring snacks, and many of them are friends outside the gym. Four years at the globogym I never had any guys bench 100+kg, but 6 months in the garage and 6 of us did it. And over half the people have been here more than three years. Environment matters.
And we go on.
Oh, and Tess? Who I quit the globogym for? She never came to the garage. But hey, lots of other people did, so it worked out fine. We cure your iron deficiency, and give you strength in numbers. Lifters first, always.