How Failing Biology Made Me a Great Personal Trainer
I'm not sure what's worse: the shame of failing a class I was told was an "easy A" for everyone, or having to tell my mom that I failed. College was a lot different than high school. In high school, showing your mom a bad report card could result in being grounded, or worse: NOT getting free Krispy Kreme donuts. But in college, it could mean disappointing your mom, which is far worse. Little did I know, the lessons I learned from this failure would fundamentally shape how I learned to communicate fitness to my clients.
HCC, or Hillsborough Community College, is the local college most people went to after high school to get their basics done before moving onto a university in Riverview, Florida. I had lived here for a few months after moving from Mobile, Alabama with my parents. I had attended a year of school at University of South Alabama, and everything went fine, except for that one time I got arrested after a frat party, but that's a story for another day.
My mom wanted me to continue college, and told me to go to the school and sign up for classes. I had no idea where to go, or who to talk to. I showed up to the Brandon HCC campus, and found what looked like an Admissions Desk. I walk up to the long, wooden desk that had windows from the desk to the ceiling, and a small hole at the bottom to allow sound to pass through. The young lady working may have been a few years older than me.
Umm, hello. I need to enroll for next semester?
She asked endless questions that I didn't know the answer to. To this day, I still don't fully understand what a transcript is. But before I knew it, I was enrolled in Biology 101, Algebra 2, and another class I couldn't tell you the name of. Algebra 2 felt like a regression to me, as I took calculus in high school, and aced the class. Biology was a different story.
My biology teacher was an Indian American, and a total genius. Teaching was a part time gig for him. His full time job? Creating medicine at USF. I wish I could remember his name.
He was incredible at what he did; the type of guy whose mind moves too fast for people to keep up with. The only problem seemed to be that he was too smart for this class. When explaining the make up of a cell, he would speed through it because it was so basic. I vividly remember his face turning into the shade of a tomato when hands flew up to ask follow up questions.
He was frustrated with us for not understanding, and unfortunately for me, as well as a handful of my classmates, that never improved. In our textbook, we would see vibrant images of a cell. The Mitochondria was the shape of a bean, and the Nucleus was pretty purple. When we looked at a cell through the microscope, I couldn't see any of that.
When I decided to pursue personal training, I made the decision to drop out of school and focus on learning about business instead, but I spent a lot of time thinking about this class as I began taking on clients. I began my career at an Anytime Fitness, where I was recruited by one of the other trainers there. It was a nice space; everything was purple, which isn't a design choice I'd go with, but the facility was spacious, clean, and had tons of equipment to use.
I would mention linear periodization, and people would look at me the same way I looked at my professor: confused and bored. When I'd speak about macronutrients and the caloric breakdown of each, it gave my clients nothing to act on. Some of the topics felt as easy as English to me, but I realized that my clients, many of which had never stepped foot into a gym before, did not speak that language.
Coaching isn't about sounding smart, but being understood. I learned that to explain important topics to clients, I needed to use layman's terms so it was understandable, and more importantly, actionable. It was also important to omit information that isn't needed for a client's success.
The majority of my clients weren't coming to me to learn about mind to muscle connection or how to activate their glutes when squatting, but to learn how to build muscle and lose weight. They weren't concerned with why I pre-exhausted their chest muscles before moving to compound movements, but they were concerned with how their clothes fit.
I had to discover better ways to connect with them. If not, who could I help?
Instead of teaching a Romanian Deadlift by emphasizing the hinge in the hips, I would tell my clients to pretend they are a server holding a plate of food in each hand, and to use their hips to open a door. To demonstrate that muscle is heavier than fat, I bought a model (which still sits on my desk, to this day) of one pound of fat, and one pound of muscle. This helped people understand that the scale doesn't tell the full story of progress.
I learned to be patient, and to not get frustrated at questions I believed were "basic". When I was in that position in college, I felt dumb. I pledged to never make anyone feel that way, if I can help it.
So no, I never learned what a transcript was, and I couldn't find the nucleus under a microscope if you paid me to. But I can tell you that the powerhouse of a trainer isn't the mitochondria, but the ability to connect with people. My teacher knew everything one could about biology, but he couldn't make us care. In fitness, I learned to do the opposite: make people care, and the learning will follow, and that is what led to us becoming Valrico's Favorite Personal Training Gym.
Can anyone explain the comment section what a transcript is? I'd love to know! See you in the next post.
Connor Blackmon
Founder of Heroes Fitness
1528 Bloomingdale Ave., Valrico, FL