August 18, 2012 Damon Hayhow

Why Most PT Clients Want To Fail & How PT’s Oblige

After Coaching clients for just a few years I came to a demoralising realisation: the majority of PT clients WANT to fail!

Subconsciously, the majority of Personal Training clients want validation that they are a victim; that their sub-par body is something unfixable that happened TO them by an unbeatable external force. They NEED to fail in order to say to themselves and the World: “My fatness is no fault of my own and it is not due to my actions. It’s my genetics/God/hormones/[your excuse here]. I am powerless to fix it. I have no choice but to continue being lazy and eating rubbish because it makes no difference. I tried. I did everything I could. I even paid a Personal Trainer!”

To diet and train effectively would only prove that their fat, decrepit body was their own fault and that they do have the power to fix it. It would also prove that the reason they got out of shape was because of the diet and lifestyle they really do not want to give up.

In all things, people tend to put in the effort concomitant to the success they want and/or expect. And when you plan to fail you certainly won’t put forth the effort required for success! So most clients treat their PT as an outsourcing of their conscience. They want someone else to blame and take responsibility for their own bad choices; as evidenced by the defiant (or guilty) way they admit to eating knowingly fattening foods. Their PT is the perfect target.

And most PT’s disingenuously pander to this ‘business opportunity’ by pretending to sell motivation. This has never ceased to amaze and disgust me! Motivation is: “the desire or willingness to do something”. It is self evident that you cannot buy the desire or willingness to do something you have no desire or willingness to do! It is exactly as ridiculous as thinking you can buy unconditional love or everlasting happiness. And any PT pretending to sell ‘motivation’ is either incapable of rational thought… or just a lying snake-oil salesman!?

Motivation is: “the desire or willingness to do something”. It is self evident that you cannot buy the desire or willingness to do something you have no desire or willingness to do!

Of course, selling motivation to unmotivated people leads to a horribly demoralising and dissatisfying situation for the PT as well. In a referral based business like PTing, the business you take becomes the business you get more of. So when PT’s start taking on vampiric clients who only want to bleed them of their mental and emotional energy, they set themselves up for getting more vampiric clients. And nobody in any industry wants to wake up everyday to work with unmotivated clients who don’t respect or desire their service but want to bleed them dry of their energy. The only people who can withstand that are vampiric parasites themselves. Hmmmm…

The Recomp Difference
11 years ago I began a business – Biologic Labs – with a very different goal: to see if SOME people actually DID want a proper, uncompromising body recomposition service? If nobody wanted it and I went broke, I didnt care. At least I would have the answer to that question for myself! I also didn’t care about the continued, persistent ‘recommendations’ of short-sighted people who just cannot seem to see past copying the bad job everybody else is doing. I refused to compromise my product to cater to people who didn’t want it.

Clients who don’t want to do what is required to succeed are going to fail regardless! Compromising a good product to sell them the failure they want is not good business!

Biologic Labs succeeded more than I ever planned or imagined and gave birth to everything I have now branded ‘Recomp‘. The basis of Recomp (and professional body recomposition) is that everything is measured and preplanned and presented up front so there are no surprises. If a prospective client doesn’t like the way we do things at Recomp, thats fine; we don’t take their business. If they don’t want to work that hard or have to follow the diet we set, thats fine; we don’t take their business. If they don’t want to give up drinking alcohol, thats fine; we don’t take their business. Its really simple – if a person doesn’t want the quality product we offer, we don’t sell it to them!

Clients who don’t want to do what is required to succeed are going to fail regardless! Compromising our successful product to sell them the failure they want is not good business! The client who fails is disgruntled even when failure was what they wanted. Even worse, before they are disgruntled they refer their friends who want to fail. So the business becomes a place for failures. That then impacts on staff morale and the quality of work staff do. Staff start to expect failure and so they become good at delivering it.

By staying true to our business we ensure we get to focus on doing good work with committed clients who DO want our product. Success breeds success, as they say. It feeds upon itself, just like failure does. The choice for Trainers and clients is which they really want?

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Damon Hayhow

Damon Hayhow has been in the body recomposition (Recomp) and bodybuilding industry for 30 years as a coach, competitor, gym owner, teacher, sponsor, show promoter, judge and MC. He has won National competitions in both powerlifting and bodybuilding, set world records, and coached others to the same success in strength sport and physique competition.

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Body recomposition diet and training concepts based on logic and reason; not scientism