My original ambition when I started personal training was to make some easy money by showing people what I'd been doing my whole life. It seemed like a natural, easy way for me to spend time while the Big Acting Break was trying to find me.
It wasn't even my idea originally. My mother used to tell me all the time that I should be a trainer. I always entertained the idea as a fun day job, but I never really found the time or focus to do it.
Then one day I was working at a a video store in Hollywood when a the big break finally came. It wasn't a producer or an agent that was telling me how ready I was to be the Next Big Thing. It was a quiet, patient man named Doug. Doug had been a regular client at the store and we'd had pleasant easy conversation a few times. One day he came into the store like he was on a mission. He came directly up to me and told me he'd been thinking he'd like to hire a personal trainer, that he was sensing the need to be more active, more vital. We struck up a deal: I'd train him on the cheap as my first client and see how it goes.
Doug and I have been training for going on three years now. He would be the first to tell you that back on day one, he was tight, tense, and over all a bit disconnected from his body.
But Doug challenges himself! I saw it in the first week of our training. I would come up with some ridiculous combination of exercises (100 squats, then 50 pushups, then back to the squats) and he would finishing them. Often with lots of grunting and cursing my name, but he would do them. Doug pushes himself with an intensity I rarely see and it inspires me.
Douglas (a brilliant psychotherapist) has transformed into a man who can do 15 dead hang pullups, bench his own body weight and leg press more than double for 15 reps. He has gone from being disconnected from his body to needing the workout "fix" and the sensations it brings.
But above all, Dr. Doug has listened and encouraged as I drone on about the deep mental and phsyical rewards that hard training promotes. Together Doug and I have really started to chip away and prove something I have always felt in my guts:

Living a physically realized life is its own art form. The discipline to achieve your physical goals informs everything we do in our day to day lives! If we can all learn to be mindful of our inner life while we train, we can uncover many secrets, desires and truths about ourselves. We can find our own path.

By turning our mind inward while we train the limited, temporal self, we can expand into our unconcious and dig into a deeper new truth.

Shakespeare said "When the Mind is free the Body is Delicate." But these words come from King Lear as he is hangs by his last thread of sanity on the thunderstruck heath.

I find the opposite to be true: When the body is spent, the mind takes over.

That is my goal as a trainer. To help you find that place where you no longer think, just act. You no longer predict your own failure, but through your own willingness to fail, find success.

So here's your homework the next time you train yourself: Ask yourself why its too heavy, too far or too fast. Are you sure there is a good reason?

Start to allow yourself to drift inward and find the images, the fantasies that take over when you let them. When you challenge them, inform them and broaden them, you may be suprised at how much deeper you get into your muscle as well as your spirit.

Let me know what you think.....


M

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