Wheels turning, stomach churning

This past week has been largely devoted to getting the business facet of my personal training operation up and running. I got my official trainer certification; registered myself as an LLC; got a federal tax ID number; lined up an accountant to handle my taxes and answer any accounting questions I might have; met with one of my designer friends to discuss logos, business cards, letterhead, advertising, web presence, etc.; got a quote for liability insurance; created my QuickBooks company file; set up file folders for all my paper filing; registered a domain name and set up web hosting for it; and probably half a dozen other things I don’t recall off the top of my head.

I’m excited that my liability insurance will cover outdoor training. Many people I’ve talked with have expressed a desire to exercise outdoors, so it’ll be nice to have that as an option for those folks. My coverage will be a bit more than some of the other estimates I’ve heard, but it’s still extremely reasonable. I just need to run through the fine print of the coverage to make sure there aren’t any gotchas.

The past week has been an emotional roller coaster for me. What lies ahead is the big unknown, and it’s in our nature to fear the unknown. That fear has really hit me hard the past few days and I’ve had at least a few total freak-outs. This is my first time setting up a “real” business, and there’s a lot I’m learning for the first time. This is lending itself to a real “I don’t know what I’ve gotten myself into here” feeling.

It also wasn’t helping that due to some health issues (nothing major, fortunately), I’ve had to ease off my own exercise for a bit until things get better. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but being a personal trainer, that really cuts to the core of what you do. I feel really weird having people do exercises that I myself can’t (or at least shouldn’t) do right now. My reduced exercise (or on many days, no exercise) sort of creates a feedback loop and I just feel lazier in general, less concerned about my diet, more depressed, etc.

I’ve been pulling myself around the past couple of days. I had a doctor appointment yesterday and we were able to confirm that the main problem I’m having now is relatively minor and isn’t indicative of anything serious, which helped eliminate at least one of the unknowns in my life. This morning I resumed my own workouts, albeit at a slightly-decreased volume and intensity. I also have to eliminate/replace many of the exercises I do, at least for the time being. The problem I’m having is GI related, so I don’t want to gross you out with the gory details, but in a nutshell I have to lay off of any exercises involving isometric contraction in the abs. It’s kind of frustrating, because those are some of the best exercises in existence, but such is life. On the plus side, I at least now know what accommodations need to be made when working with clients with similar problems.

I’m doing better so far today. I’m (mostly) back on track with my diet, I’m (mostly) back on track with my exercise, I’m keeping myself busy plowing through my todo list, and I’m trying to focus on those things I can control rather than on worrying about those things that I can’t. I’ve been starting to think about back-up plans in case I don’t bring in enough clients right away. One option I’ve been pondering is taking a part-time job somewhere to help fill in the gaps. This may sound a bit odd, but one job that sounds really appealing to me right now is working as a package handler at UPS or FedEx. I kind of like the idea of a job that involves non-stop physical labor. I keep wanting to find excuses to move around more and do more physical stuff, whatever it may be.

Ok, back to my todo list…

Takin’ care of business

I passed my exam last week; I’m just waiting for the certification paperwork to complete. Once that’s done, I can get insured and then I can start doing the whole personal trainer thing for real.

In the meantime, I met with a lawyer last week to get some advice on the business and liability fronts. I’ll most likely be forming an LLC for my personal training activities, which I’ll be looking into later this week. I also have to take care of some other business details like opening up a dedicated bank account and all that fun stuff. And there there’s business cards, letterhead, advertising, etc.

It’s so weird that this is all actually happening. I’m simultaneously excited and scared. I’ve learned so much already, but I’m quite humbled by the vast landscape of things yet to be learned. The next big thing for me on the learning front is getting my fitness nutrition certification. My brain is a bit full right now with everything else going on, but I hope to start studying for that within the next few weeks. I’m also picking up bits and pieces of biomechanics knowledge as time permits.

I definitely like working with people and doing what I can to push them to be better, healthier, stronger, and more confident. I love sharing knowledge with people and helping them better understand their own bodies. There are definitely a lot of very tangible rewards in this profession.

The biggest hurdle for me right now is confidence. I’m always a harsh critic of myself and that can make things difficult when so much of your ability to market yourself to a potential client or to motivate a client relies on your ability to exude confidence as a personal trainer. I’m slowly getting better and I know with time this will be less of an issue, but it’s something I’m very self-conscious about right now.

How did I ever enjoy doing this stuff?

Personal training results in a ton of paperwork, between contracts, health appraisals, fitness evaluations, workout sheets, client notes, and all sorts of other data. I’m finding things like processing of fitness evaluations to be a rather tedious manual process involving looking up numbers in all sorts of tables and stuff.

The obvious solution would be to computerize all this data. I haven’t been terribly impressed with the personal trainer software currently on the market, so I figured I’d whip up some stuff of my own to do what I want. I wanted to keep it really quick and simple, so I decided to put together an Access database along with some forms and reports. About an hour into this process I was overcome with the feeling of immense hatred and frustration at the process of software development, even on the smallest of scales. It felt downright painful just to put a few forms on top of some tables. I don’t know how I managed to do this stuff for so many years. I hate thinking about interfaces, edge cases, error trapping, all of that stuff. I don’t know why that is, exactly. Perhaps because it all feels so far removed from tangible reality or something. Anyway, I’m going to give it one or two more tries to see if my opinion changes, but that’s it. Worst case, some friends of mine are working on some personal trainer software of their own so I may just see about piggybacking off of what they’re doing.

In other news, I’m finally registered and scheduled for my exam. It’ll be this coming Tuesday. Woohoo! I’m feeling fairly confident at this point, although I need to do some more brushing up on how to deal with certain special populations and better commit various tables of numbers to memory.

Almost ready to take the exam

I feel very close now. I did my third practice exam this weekend. Didn’t score as well as I should have, but at least I know what I did wrong. I was rushing a bit and didn’t read things as closely as I should have. I got 3-4 questions wrong for that reason and that reason alone. They’re good about hitting you with some very nuanced questions that you really have to read closely and think about for a bit.

There are a few areas where I’m still a bit weak, and that’s what I’m working on now. I’m still rusty with biomechanics and with the nitty-gritty details of muscles. This is stuff they don’t really cover in the training materials but still expect you to know. Fortunately I have another book devoted to skeletal muscle, so I’ve been spending a lot of time studying that to make sure I know where the rectus femoris originates and inserts and stuff like that.

Aside from that, I need to keep brushing up on plyometric exercises, techniques for aerobic exercises I don’t normally do myself, and gym construction/equipment layout stuff. Of all the stuff in the book, these are the things I don’t really encounter at all, so I don’t have much intuition to fall back on. I keep getting tripped up by questions about swimming technique and things like that.

I really want to get a better foundation in biomechanics, so I’m going to be studying that more after I do my certification. It’s a lot of fun being able to deconstruct an exercise and figure out exactly what parts of what muscles are involved and how. It’s proving really useful during my own workouts, too. The more I learn, the more I feel connected to what’s going on under my skin.

I can’t seem to escape gearlust

When you’re working in computers, you always want to buy expensive computer toys. When you’re working in music, you always want to buy even more expensive music toys. Having spent way more cash than I care to admit on my recording studio, I’ve been really looking forward to personal training as a way of doing a job without all that asset overhead. I mean, what do you need? Just some weights, maybe a few balance balls and medicine balls, some mats and benches, right?

Well, I’ve been trying to find ways to get more meaningful aerobic fitness data when doing my fitness evaluations. The test I’m doing right now (YMCA step box test) is very rudimentary and doesn’t really provide a whole lot of info. I could use a slightly different version of that test in order to estimate VO₂max, the metric I really need, but VO₂max estimates based off of step box tests have at best a high SEE and at worst have low validity, period. It’s also not the best of tests to use for deconditioned individuals.

There are better tests for determining VO₂max if you have an exercise bike and can use it to dial up specific tension values required by the protocol. I figured hey, no big deal, I’ll just pick up a portable exercise bike and use that for my tests. Unfortunately, almost all of those have unlabelled tension knobs, so you can’t dial up a specific power settings. I found only one cycle that can do this, and it costs about $900, which is about 4x more expensive than the next cheapest portable cycle I found.

I was also really getting into the idea of being able to measure oxygen consumption directly with a breathing mask attached to a metabolic cart. This can also be used to calculate things like basal metabolic rate. Really slick, really useful stuff. Unfortunately, the cheapest portable metabolic cart that actually works well is around $4k. The cheapest decent-quality BMR-only portable device I found was around $2.5k. But man, these things would be sooooooo cool to have.

I’m also starting to think about the idea of getting a tablet computer or something to take with me when training people. I’m only working with a few clients right now, but I’m already generating a lot of paperwork and a lot of “remember to do this particular thing with this particular person at the start of the session” types of notes to keep track of. I’m sort of liking the idea of persisting all this data in software. I’ve been looking at a few personal trainer software packages out there, but haven’t been terribly impressed with what I’ve seen so far. I’ve been toying around the idea of writing my own software, but I’m not sure I want to get sucked down that path again.

Part of me would like to think that there are only a few big-ticket items I’d have to worry about getting, and then I’d be set for a while. But the other part of me knows it’s a slippery slope. Fancy toys have a habit of getting very lonely and needing other fancy friends to play with.

Everyone’s different

One thing I’m finding really fascinating about working in personal training is the chance to appreciate how different everyone is. I’ve been talking with several people training-related things lately and every story is different. Some people just want to get the body moving more. Some people want to lose a little bit of weight to feel more confident. Some people want to lose a lot of weight to deal with health problems. Some people care about the short term. Some people are more concerned about getting good habits in place now to make sure they’re in good shape when they get up there in years. Some people have medical conditions, other people…well, actually, it seems that everyone I’ve talked to has at least some sort of medical problem, it’s just a question of what kind of problem and what the severity is.

Some people are very self-motivated and just need some guidance on what exercises are best to do. Some people hate exercise and the challenge is to find a way to make it interesting for them. Some people know exactly what to do but are just lacking the discipline to stick with it and need someone to hold them accountable. I really like the process of meeting people, learning their story, and finding out how best to help them and tailor something to them specifically rather than just giving some sort of cookie-cutter solution.

In the midst of all these differences, there is one similarity. Nearly everyone I’ve talked with has expressed a preference for exercising outdoors. This is something I hadn’t really thought about much before I started working with people, but now I’m starting to think more about ways to do outdoor workouts for those who are interested. The two biggest hurdles for me are in equipment/safety logistics and in getting adequately insured for outdoor training. From the little bit of research I’ve done thus far, it sounds like most boilerplate liability insurance plans for trainers do not cover outdoor training.

Same terms, different meaning

I find it somewhat amusing how I keep encountering terms that mean one thing in computers and something completely different in personal training. Here are some terms I have encountered in both fields:

Term	Computer Meaning	Personal Training Meaning
ACL	Access Control List	Anterior Cruciate Ligament
MVC	Model-View-Controller	Maximum Voluntary Contraction
CAD	Computer Aided Design	Coronary Artery Disease
ROM	Read-Only Memory	Range of Motion
Java	Programming language	Energy drink company
Set	Collection of distinct objects	Group of repetitions
Flex	SDK from Adobe	Hey baby, check out my guns!
Recovery	Something you have to perform when something bad happens	Normal physiological state following a workout
Traps	Synchronous interrupts in a user processes, usually caused by exceptional conditions	Trapezius muscle
Row	A single, implicitly structured data item in a table	A type of exercise working the back muscles
Curl	Command-line tool to access web resources	A type of exercise working biceps, hamstrings or forearms
Hack	Reconfiguring or reprogramming a system to function in ways not facilitated by the owner, administrator, or designer	A type of squat exercise
Cycle	Time period during which a computer processes a machine language instruction	A pedal-driven, human-powered vehicle
Ripped	Audio/video content copied from removal media to a hard drive	Possessing well-defined musculature
Superset	Set containing all elements of another set	Performing two or more exercises with similar motions with no rest period in between
Core	Independent processor on a processor chip	Body minus legs and arms

And that’s pretty much where the similarities end.

Updates

I’ve been so wrapped up in filling my brain with personal training knowledge I keep forgetting to post updates. Here’s a quick up-to-speed….

I’ve been spending most of my time studying for my personal trainer certification (putting the nutrition certification on the back burner for now). There’s a fairly wide spectrum of things you need to know–general cellular/biological stuff, psychology of exercise, proper techniques for exercises, dealing with clients with special needs (children, elderly, pregnant women, eating disorders, diabetics, etc.), requirements for proper layout of equipment at a gym, legal issues, etc., etc. The main thing I’m struggling with is that there are a lot of details and numbers and stuff you have to memorize. I’ve been doing lots of flash cards to help me practice that. In terms of the concepts, I think I have most of that down now and I’m doing fairly well with the practice exam questions. I still have at least a couple more weeks’ worth of studying to do though before I’d be ready to take the exam.

One thing I’m doing to help me better commit some of the details to memory is I’m using some friends as guinea pigs so I can do initial consults, fitness evaluations, etc., with them. That experience of actually doing these things is 10x more useful than just reading how to do it in the book.

I was initially feeling like this new career would be a clean break from my old one and that there wouldn’t really be any transferable skills, but I’m now discovering otherwise. Doing initial consults with potential clients to establish their goals and whatever parameters and constraints and stuff they might have is a lot like doing a requirements document. There’s a lot of getting at the core of what people really want and a lot of re-stating things back to the client to make sure you adequately understand what they are telling you.

Another thing that has really come in handy has been my history of constantly having to shift gears and wear different hats and think about things from all sorts of different directions. As fatiguing as that got after a while, it has prepared my brain to be able to think outside the box easily and be able to shift gears as needed. I’m finding this useful when working with people who simply don’t like the idea of exercise. I have to try and meet them where they are and find exercises they’ll like doing rather than trying to force them to like the exercises I’d prefer to have them do. I think that flexibility will be a very important trait as I continue down this career path.

I’m also very primed to anticipate edge cases, because so much of what programming is about revolves around that. In personal training, you have to keep those edge cases in mind when assessing someone’s health status or dealing with any legal things or just communication in general. There are lots of types of interactions where words have to be chosen very carefully. For example, I can tell a client about the potential benefits of the exercise program I’ve devised for them, but I can’t tell them that this program will help lower their blood pressure.

My calendar is beginning to reflect my new life. Next week I have a CPR class, a thyroid lecture to attend, and various meetings with guinea pig clients. I also have a bunch of random odds and ends en route to me so that I can start doing in-home fitness evals and workouts with people. I can’t wait to try out the adjustable dumbbells when they get here tomorrow.

Transitioning from mathematical systems to biochemical systems

Getting involved in diet/exercise stuff professionally means I need to venture further into biochemistry land. This requires me to confront a harsh reality: I’ve managed to not have any biology courses since 7th grade. I squeaked through high school without ever having to take a bio class. In college, I started taking a bio class but that was during the semester from hell and I ended up having to drop it due to the rest of my life crushing me.

So here I am learning all this cellular stuff and everything essentially from scratch, and it’s painful. Not because I’m not interested in this stuff–I’m actually extremely interested in anything that furthers my understanding of how the human body works–but because the way biology is taught runs very counter to my learning style. In the CS classes I took, it was all about concepts. Concepts which can be applied regardless of the details of the particular system you’re working on. My body is very well tuned to learning concepts at the expense of not being so well-tuned in detail-land. Who cares about details? If I need the details, I’ll just look them up .

This is where I do very poorly with biology learning materials, at least the introductory materials. I have several books I’m reading and I’ve also been listening to several podcast lectures, and they all have the same problem: you have to learn 800 billion terms about all the different components of a cell and all that stuff, but the actual concepts behind how they work do not come to much, much later. This is the worst possible learning environment for me, as I have nothing to latch onto and I have to resort to rote memorization, something I do very horribly. In order to pass the required learning unit quizzes for my nutritional certification, I have to memorize things like the fact that lipids include things like fats, waxes, sterols, vitamins, etc. What the hell is a sterol? They’ll explain that later. What the hell is a lipid? What is the common feature of all these things that group them together? They’ll explain that later. Every other sentence in biology books contains a phrase along the lines of “the reasons for this will be explained later in this chapter.”

I’ve been making note cards out the wazoo to help me keep track of all these terms. Because there is a buttload of terms I have to learn. And unless I spend time investigating each and every one of these terms until I have a satisfactory internal representation of them, all I’m doing is reciting definitions that mean very little to me. When dealing with literally hundreds of terms, this research could take me forever.

As I go through this ordeal, I found myself appreciating how the computer world deals with details. So many details are specific to one system and/or are ephemeral, so in that field there is more of a need to optimize the transfer of details. This is why things like javadocs and other API documentation are so incredibly useful at transmitting a great deal of useful information very efficiently. I keep finding myself wishing I had javadocs for biology. That would make certain details very easy for me to process, like the fact that saturated fat is a subclass of fat, which is generally a subclass of triglyceride, which in turn is a subclass of lipid, which among other things implements the hydrophobic interface. That’s how my brain wants to process things. What are the superclasses and subclasses of this thing I’m looking at? What are its inputs? Where do those inputs come from? What are its outputs? What consumes them?

So yeah, this is all a bit jarring, especially combined with the fact that my brain isn’t quite as spongy as it was the last time I took any classes. But on the other hand, I’m really enjoying learning more about how the human body works. Every new piece of information I get gives me a deeper understanding of what’s going on inside of me. It’s weird how this vessel you inhabit every day of your life can remain mysterious and only superficially understood even after years and years.

Dispatches from elsewhere

Early this morning I was walking down the street. About 40 ft. in front of me was an elderly lady with a walker. It started to get a bit windy out, and the wind knocked her hat off of her walker. It started blowing back my way and then into the street, a pretty major thoroughfare with a good bit of traffic. I quickly assessed wind, hat, and traffic trajectories and was able to dart into the street and retrieve it without any harm to me or to the hat. She was very grateful and we ended up walking and talking for a bit. She asked if I was in school, and I explained that no, I was 35, which surprised her (for some reason lots of people lately have been telling me I look much younger than I am. Go figure.). But then I explained how I was thinking about going back to school for something like physical therapy. She proceeded to tell me about how she’s been doing PT for a while now. Originally she did it to help treat some vertigo problems she was having, but since it had the nice side effect of improving her bone density and cholesterol, she keeps doing it as part of a general wellness program even though her vertigo problems have long since subsided.  Hearing stuff like that makes me very happy and all the more glad that I’m looking to pursue careers that really help make positive changes in people’s lives.

Remember how a while back  I was saying that if you quit your job to find yourself, you don’t really need to do any travelling to do so? Well, maybe I was the slightest bit wrong. I’m in Philly right  now. I’ve been spending much of the past few weeks at home, and it started making me stir crazy. I’ve never paid this city a proper visit, so it’s nice throwing myself in unfamiliar territory for a few days for a change of pace.

I went to the Mütter Museum this morning. Aside from the regular exhibits of skulls with bullet holes in them, Siamese twin fetuses in formaldehyde, and other medical curiosities, they have an exhibit of artwork at the moment that explores the “psychology of our biological existence,” as they say. One of the more interesting things I found at the exhibit was that each of the different areas had a sign with a quote from a writer about our bodies. There were lots of great quotes, but one that really stood out for me was:

“Our bodies are our gardens – our wills are our gardeners.” ~William Shakespeare

This one really resonated with me as it perfectly captures how I’ve been feeling about my own body over the past year, and it touches upon much of what I’ll need to be thinking about when I start training clients and find myself trying to help them get past those tricky hurdles of motivation, self-doubt, etc.

Complete non sequitur: I’m staying this totally adorable art deco hotel that reminds me of several video games I’ve played over the years and the people who work here are insanely friendly and…whoa even the lamps are art deco. I didn’t pick up on that until just now. Oh my god, I just want to hug this hotel.

I’ve had a lot of time to think over the past couple of days and it’s been a wonderful opportunity to continue recalibrating/realigning my life. No major changes or anything, but a great chance to tie up loose ends inside my head and stuff like that. I see now how transplanting to a different location, even if only for a couple of days, is a great way to get one’s mind to think outside its default path.