The end of working out –

The workout is over. That was a prophecy I made seven years ago with the launch of a video series called “The End of Workout”. However, this is the first time I’ve addressed this outside of my channels. And as improbable as one could imagine, fate wanted it to be here. At Good shape, once known as the most relevant space in what I call “workout”. I know you must be confused asking yourself: “what do you mean the workout is going to end? You are crazy. The care with health they only increase, we have never had so much information and concern and you come to tell me that it will end?” Yes, and it is exactly for all of this and a few more reasons that I will mention throughout the text that I will explain to you why it will end, and the fact that you are reading this in this vehicle, only reinforces my thesis. But, before you decide that I’m talking nonsense, come with me and let me show you my way of thinking and it’s possible that you agree with me and not even know it.

Before starting, we need to contextualize what I call Workout. And for that, I’m going to tell you some stories that I experienced and that brought me here. In 2006, I was hired to manage one of the most traditional gyms in Itaim, an upper-class neighborhood in São Paulo. In my hiring speech, the owner of the gym, a personality from the fitness world, told me that he wanted to bring new concepts to that space. I, who had been thinking about leaving the area for a long time because I didn’t identify with it, found the proposal very challenging and faced this task.

However, what I understood of value was not exactly what he thought. He wanted the labor to be as cheap as possible (at the time, a trained teacher received BRL 5.00 an hour/class) and for my focus to be on equipment and perfumery. Nothing new under the sun. My task, then, was to motivate a work team that was clearly seen as replaceable. Until one day, my boss hired a famous fitness consultant. We went to the meeting and he said that we shouldn’t focus on quality of work, nor on student retention, because Itaim is a commercial district. The overwhelming majority of people do not live there, but work there. So, even if they love your space, if they change jobs, which is likely in everyone’s life, they will no longer frequent your space because as much as they love it, they still love your space more. convenience in to train close to home or work. Therefore, no matter how good your work is, you will not be able to retain that student, which makes spending on retention a waste of money.

His option for this equation would be to charge a very cheap annual subscription fee, a very high cancellation fee, and a beautiful place. Thus, the person would be attracted by a beautiful place, would do the annual contract because the difference in values ​​was considerable and everything was fine until you started training. Now, she depended on a teacher who was poorly paid, unmotivated, when he graduated. In this context, it made no sense for this professor to improve, because he would not receive more for that, because he was never contemplated in the “business plan”. From a financial point of view, it worked for a while, but today, that gym no longer exists. The 21st century ended that. I didn’t stay long either, maybe six months at the most. I tried to change that mindset in my boss’s head. Show that the essence of this area is not the best treadmills, because you can do an exceptional job without ever getting on one of them or even on an extension chair. Until, in one of our meetings, he looked me in the eye and said that the day I had my own gym I would see that the account would not close and I would think the same way as him. The next day, I resigned.

You might think this was an isolated model, but maybe you didn’t wonder why he could give up having quality teachers. And the answer is that in that training model, they are expendable. And why is that? To understand, let’s look at what the current model was. What existed were training isolated by muscle, the famous bodybuilding. And what is bodybuilding? A training that, taken to its extreme, will make you a bodybuilder. Especially because this training was created by them and exploded to the world in the late 70’s with the movie “Pumping Iron” which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Since that time, we assume that train physically it was train isolated. It doesn’t matter if you are a marathon runner, a swimmer, a pregnant woman or a 90 year old lady, your workout would be like a bodybuilder’s workout, but on a smaller scale. But, if you were “evolving” in your training to the maximum that that model could offer, you would do Arnold’s training, so, to a greater or lesser extent, everyone was following the same path. But, you don’t need to be a very accurate observer to realize that a marathon runner, a swimmer, a pregnant woman and a 90-year-old lady don’t have much to do with a bodybuilder and neither do they have the same goals.

Another important detail to note is that the bodybuilding is the sport with less movement. She is static. So, this training model does not need to contemplate your ability to move or produce power, so, although apparently very strong, that strength is not transferred to situations that need movement like all others in real life. The biggest proof of this is that when you watch the Olympics or Cirque du Soleil you don’t see a single giant full of muscles. Because movement is much more complex than isolating half a dozen muscle groups and training them isolated in a body that moves in an integrated and 3-Dimensional way.

So, we can say that this training model does not perfect the movement, something that the marathon runner and my grandmother, like everyone else, need a lot. By reducing the infinite complexity of an authentic, functional, unique and 3-Dimensional movement, the training model also ends up being simple. Want to see? I don’t know who’s reading this text, but if you’ve come this far and already done weight training, I bet your trajectory went something like this: you started with a series of one exercise per muscle group, mostly on equipment for adaptation. As you evolved, you separated into training A and B and, on that day, the groups that you trained in training A, you did not train in training B. Walked a little further and separated them into training A, B and C with a large muscle group and a small one until, over time, you were training one muscle group a day with lots of exercises for that group, little repetition and lots of weight.

There were some variations like pyramids, bi-set, tri-set, some others and that’s it. Here sums it all up. One of my biggest mantras to explain the complexity of the human body associated with the uniqueness of people is this: I don’t know who’s going to ring my bell, how can I know what I’m going to pass on to that person? This is true in 3D training, but if I worked with bodybuilding, the phrase would be different: it doesn’t matter who rings the bell, the training will be the same. And that’s why the owner of that gym could do without a specialized teacher, because that training model was easily understood by anyone, so the super specialized teacher, who talked about mitochondria, at the end of the day gave the same series as the first-year college intern. And to make matters worse, the 21st century brought yet another element that would make this teacher even more superfluous: YouTube and apps.

Here, we already have two elements of our discussion, the training that does not match the needs of most people (except bodybuilders), applied in a way that anyone can do it, so teachers became unnecessary. To make matters worse for the teachers, they were stereotyped on television in three moments. The first was the Paulo Cintura, Caricatured character who conveys an image that the important thing was to have a fit body and that his intellectual side didn’t matter. You could be dumb if you had the “shape” up to date. Another time that personal trainer appeared on television was in an advertisement for a fridge in which a mother hinted to her son that it was a bad idea for him to let his wife take classes with a personal trainer because he was at serious risk of getting horns. And finally to Workout. It was a children’s soap opera in which the plot took place in a gym. And from there, all this context mentioned above received a name: workout.

You might think this is not relevant, but the name Workout does not suggest something pleasurable. It is literally a negative name and relating your field to something negative cannot be good. No other profession allows it to be related to something negative, even as a joke. Think of a gynecologist making fun of his profession. Try it and see what answer you find. But, personal is superfluous, we can do everything with them. all personal already felt disrespected in your profession. He has already received a “prescription” from a doctor about how he should work, even though the doctor has never seen him in his life, does not know his training and competence, but understands that it is natural, even if he is from another area, to teach the staff that, when contrary to him, it’s in the area of ​​training, how he should train someone. All this context above, I baptized it as working out.

And there’s still one last pillar. Where did this training take place? In the big gyms. There would be the place where we would promote health. So, an obese person could lose weight, a person with reduced mobility could develop more autonomy, a stressed person could relieve their energy, a more depressed person could have an improved emotional health, but when they arrive at the gym, what do they find? One hostile environment. Have you ever imagined how “welcoming” a 16-year-old, obese and shy teenager would be when arriving at a trendy gym?

I think cozy is the last word you could fit in here. And people in real life have real specific needs, and although the saleswoman at the gym counter sold you that “we have highly qualified teachers who will put together a workout according to your goals and needs”, the truth is that if you changed your sheet while taking turns with equipment, you would run the risk of not noticing it, especially if you didn’t observe your name on the sheet, because as we saw above, the training sessions were the same. How I know? The names of the workouts were Beginner 1, 2, Intermediate, and so on. Everyone doing the same thing. Another point that reinforces this is that if you visited a gym, the attendant would show you the state-of-the-art equipment, the sauna in the locker room, even the café, but she would not introduce any teacher highlighting his qualifications, which were even sponsored by the gym itself, because this one believes in the value of his work, like any company that has the intellectual capital of its employees as its greatest value.

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