Cue the Sun

A conga line of arseholes

The random misfortunes aside, over the past weeks, I’ve had to deal with erratic housemates and an increasingly belligerent, money-hungry landlord, which has combined to have me evicted from my current apartment. In many ways, I’ll not be sorry to get out of the place, as it hasn’t exactly brought me good luck since I moved in, but nonetheless, the hassle of having to pack up and move again after only a few months is really not something I’m wanting to experience quite so soon.

So for this week I’ve been desperately trying to find a new place, trudging off to house inspections after work each evening, and then again across the weekend. Compounding the problem for me is that I cannot hire a car, due to my licence having been stolen, which subsequently limits the number of houses I can view over a weekend to perhaps four or five in a day, given Canberra’s generally decent public transport is a mere shadow of itself on Saturdays, and almost non-existent on Sundays.

Many of the people I met were pretty decent. Some were tools, but for the most part I found myself able to strike up a conversation with the majority. Yesterday, I was offered a room in a house that’s not too dissimilar to the one I lived in over in Campbell, except this new one is unrenovated, has no built in wardrobe, and is made of bricks (as opposed to the last being more of the timber/fibro variety). Whilst it’s definitely more to my taste than the numerous executive apartments I’ve looked at to date, I’ve found the stint in my current place has given me a bit of a taste for the higher end, and so yesterday I called about an apartment in central Canberra that sounded like it matched my needs perfectly.

The guy said he was very keen to meet me and told me to call him back after 11am this morning. Recent experiences have taught me to only bid for the ones you’re interested in, and accept the first offer that comes your way, so after waiting overnight, and worrying about the possibility of losing the offer I’d already received, I called him this morning. The story had changed of course. Now he had some people who were very eager to take the place and he was going to wait and see how things turned out with them. He’d made no mention of them the night before of course. First arsehole of the day. I hung up, and immediately called the house in Turner. Thankfully the guy at the Turner house was much nicer and was actually pleased I’d decided to join them.

This afternoon I had a training session at my gym. I joined Fitness First because they have some benefits to being a member, namely, they are everywhere here and in the UK, so moving between gyms is a relatively easy proposition for someone such as myself, who is prone to bursts of frequent relocation. I’ve now been an active member at my gym for about two months, and the longer I stay there, the lower my opinion of the company becomes. After happily taking my membership fees, and money to pay for three “preliminary” training sessions, I had to chase them up constantly to get my first training session organised. The regular line was that the everyday gym staff members don’t have any contact with the trainers so they can’t get in contact with them. Bullshit. Every one of their gyms has a training co-ordinator, but it took a lot of pushing to find that out and get them to call me back.

The thing that really irks me about Fitness First, is that they live for the upsell. It’s impossible to get through a workout without being hit with at least one PA announcement about special offers if you spend more than $30. But it’s not just that. I found out that the company does not employ trainers, they use individual contractors, citing the reason for this as being that they get better performance from their trainers. The fact they don’t have to pay any insurance for those trainers, and probably no overtime, among a raft of other business costs they’ve successfully transferred to the trainers, probably also improves their bottom line as well, but I’m sure has nothing to do with their decision to structure the business in this way.

Compounding this, is the fact that their training staff refuse to provide any advice to members about training regimes. There are no programmes or evaluations unless you pay for them. Their reason—again a dubious one—is that in the past too many members have been injured doing programmes. The only way you get their attention is by purchasing some more training sessions. It’s a bit of an irony therefore, that their trainers come to the job with no real knowledge of the human body, nor an understanding of the impacts of strenuous physical exercise, subsequently resulting in the risk of personal training clients experiencing significant injury.

I’m not fit by any standards. I was fit before I left Melbourne, but when I quit smoking 18 months ago I stacked on the weight and have not been able to shed it, despite extensive running since moving up here. My hope is, that by returning to the gym I can chip away at the bulge and fit into more than a couple of pairs of pants again, and that when I do up the button on my work pants, I’m not afraid of it popping off in my hand or frisbeeing across the room like a ninja star. So my weight and fitness, and general lack of strength at the moment, are things I’m already aware of.

Enter my Fitness First trainer. He’s obviously been brainwashed by the FF ethos of sell! Sell! SELL! That wouldn’t be hard though, as anyone who thinks that a man weighing 89kgs who states he wants to lose 10kgs means he wants to weigh 70kgs, isn’t exactly an intellectual heavy weight. He started playing mind games as soon as we met, attempting to make me feel self-conscious about my body image and erode my self-confidence, so that FF could come along and help me through a number of personalised training sessions at a special price if I buy ten or more sessions at once.

It was a fairly simple strategy he was using—push me so hard I was close to passing out, feeling a little bit humiliated and embarrassed by my dismal performance, and then comment that my fitness wasn’t good enough and I really needed to start doing targeted exercise. For that, I would need a personal trainer. No advice on what exercise I should be doing to improve my fitness. I just have to pay for some more training sessions.

At the end of the session he tried for the final humiliation—push ups. I’ve never been good at them, and I seriously doubt I ever will be. I just don’t have any power in my shoulders or upper body, and so squeezing out barely half a dozen was a real challenge (even when I WAS fit, getting more than 15 in a set was hard going). He finished the session by stating that I “need help because there’s something wrong there”. I was on the verge of turning around and saying “and you need help with your interpersonal skills because yours are fucked”.

At the gym I went to in Melbourne, the trainers were not especially well paid, but they were knowledgeable about what they were doing and they actually cared about the well being of the members. Many of them were studying some element of medicine, particularly sports medicine (usually physios or medical students). They understood how the human body worked. They knew there was a risk, for instance, that when a person has identified on their membership form that high blood pressure has been an issue in the past, and that a family history of cardio vascular problems is common, that over exertion in the early stages of restarting exercise is a bad idea. I know this first hand after suffering a blackout in my first months at the Melbourne gym when I pushed myself too hard and woke up on the floor of my kitchen, where I’d been lying unconscious for ten minutes.

I would expect a trainer who is concerned for the well being of their clients to be aware of something like that. This guy was only interested in showing me up as unfit (I could’ve saved us the hour and TOLD him that beforehand), so he could upsell me to a bunch of new training sessions and get his commission. In a conga line of arseholes, this guy is probably right near the front, telling the other arseholes following him that they need to lift their game, and buy more training sessions.