You have six months or you fail

[KyleAaron]

Any healthy woman under 50 can for work weights squat 60, bench 40 and deadlift 80kg within 6 months of beginning a programme of physical training. For a man it's 100/80/120. If you do not help them achieve this, then you have failed as a trainer.

It doesn't matter what their goals are.

"My back hurts."
"This jiggly bit, what's this?"
"I want to run faster."
"I want to play with my kids."
"I have bad knees."
"I'm tired all the time."
"I have bad posture."
"I keep getting injured in netball."

Physical strength will help them all and more quickly than anything else you can do with them in the gym.

They may not need to squat 200kg, but they certainly need to be able to squat, and the 60/100 for women and men is a reasonable number for 6 months. If they have a background in some other training and have not starved themselves to skinnyfat cardiomaniac oblivion they can generally do it in 6-12 weeks. But I am generous and allow for client unreliability due to illness, injury, holiday and laziness, so let's give it 6 months.

If you don't know how to get them there, find out. Go to a seminar. Hey, maybe even lift seriously yourself. Hire a competent trainer. Lives are changed with barbells, not with burpees and bosus.

Make them stronger. You have six months or you fail.

[PeteratCastle]

But I like my bosuball...especially for 20 year olds who are looking to tone up and gain lean muscle I find they are an invaluable tool.

[SerpentHearted]

define "healthy"

[KyleAaron]

define "healthy"

Well, I had one guy in his 30s recovering from skin lymphatic cancer, he took 9 months post-lymphadenectomy to get 100/80/120 or thereabouts, and for the first 2-3 months he was getting chemotherapy and for 6 months taking Interferon and other stuff.

I had one guy who was 3 months post a double knee reconstruction (after having had a bad motorcycle accident), he couldn't squat below parallel, but he did end up benching 125 and deadlifting 180. Let's say his knees weren't healthy but the rest of him was.

So my definition of "healthy" is pretty broad.

[WoofieNugget]

The problem with your criteria is that is assumes that everyone should do the same thing, which is totally false. Also, your numbers are totally based on your experience and some results you have gotten for your clients - good for you, but definitely not the case for many of my people. If you said even that their fundamental movements should increase by x amount of % in that time, I'd probably agree with you more.

Physical strength will help them all and more quickly than anything else you can do with them in the gym.

This part I totally agree with - I just don't agree with your limited definition of strength. There are many ways to make someone stronger in many different modalities without ever making them squat, bench press or deadlift at all.

[foodandfitness]

Lol. Thanks for the message. I'll be sure to spread this among the rest of the kingdom so thy word may become law.

If you honestly believe yourself in your OP, you've obviously not worked with a broad variety of clients or maybe you just have the luxury that all your clients consistently show up for 3x week training sessions with you for a 1 on 1 appointment.

[Simmo0508]

It doesn't matter what their goals are.

lol C'mon Kyle, you're a lot smarter than that.

Not every client that steps through the door to train has goals of doing strong bench/squat/dead numbers. And whilst 60kg/40kg/80kg can be relatively easy and achievable for some clients (because I do have guys and girls hitting good numbers on the big 3), for others it's totally out of the question and not even a priority. Injuries and style of session (whether a 1on1 or semi private session) totally affect the ability to even do those movements in the first place at times.

And there's nothing wrong with that. Keep it specific, measured, and progressed over time. It's personal training for them, not us.

And nor is their strength or lack their of, a reflection on the professionalism and knowledge of the trainers out their in the industry. Overall client results and client satisfaction and client retention/growth are more the markers that businesses coaches look for.

Keep movement relevant to what the goal is, and relevant to their sport or job or lifestyle etc. Asking ourselves "how does this movement improve this person's daily life?" primarily. Spend time during a session with what's important to them. Not every client is to be treated the same with a cookie cutter push/pull/push/pull/legs/core mindset. Sometimes you do have to branch away for example, and do a bit extra here, bit extra there, work the conditions of the gym at the time as well, is it busy or is it empty, work the conditions of the client's mood and body etc. You don't just sit by a power rack for 10hrs+ a day at work lol

[KyleAaron]

The problem with your criteria is that is assumes that everyone should do the same thing, which is totally false.

The equivalent is fine. If a person's doing something like goblet squats with 25kg and a bunch of chinups, they'd be able to do the barbell numbers without more than a few weeks of effort, basically just learning the lifts. It's simply that the barbell is a standard everyone can understand, even if they'd rather not.

Lol. Thanks for the message. I'll be sure to spread this among the rest of the kingdom so thy word may become law.

In other words, you've never helped anyone achieve these numbers in any amount of time?

If you honestly believe yourself in your OP, you've obviously not worked with a broad variety of clients or maybe you just have the luxury that all your clients consistently show up for 3x week training sessions with you for a 1 on 1 appointment.

I guess you missed the bit where I've talked about training a guy recovering from lymphatic cancer.

[Simmo0508]

Ok now this is starting to sound like a wank session. Everything ok bud? Come get a hug

[rdferguson]

Since I have both a bronze and gold medal in powerlifting and so should have an implicit hard-on for anything strength related, I feel extra qualified to call BS. I certainly shouldn't need my hard-earned medals to say so, but since being able to hit certain strength standards is right up my alley and what I really love helping others achieve, and I've got every biased reason to endorse your message here, Kyle, I'm hoping that my position that this is BS says something that might otherwise go overlooked. Granted, all things being equal it would be better and more useful to be stronger. But setting it as an absolute that any PT who isn't making their clients stronger is failing as a PT is missing the mark. Likewise, setting certain strength standards as a requirement is missing the mark. I'll openly admit that if someone is not in a position to be focused on getting stronger, they're not the client for me and I'm not the trainer for them. But that doesn't mean that there isn't another mode of training that would be appropriate for them which another trainer specialises in. And even when getting stronger is on the table, it's still not necessarily something that ought to be a priority. Take the "I want to run faster" client for example. Will making them stronger help? Yes, of course. But do you know what would help even more? Teaching them how to run. Now let's say you've got 30min/wk with them and the most important thing for them is getting faster. Hypothetically, you've got a race track, you've got sleds, you've got prowlers, you've got parachutes and any other likeness of speed-oriented equipment. Are you really going to take them inside and have them lifting, when you could have them outside sprinting, alternating through workouts of unloaded sprints, sled sprints, prowler runs and parachute runs?

[KyleAaron]

If you honestly believe yourself in your OP, you've obviously not worked with a broad variety of clients or maybe you just have the luxury that all your clients consistently show up for 3x week training sessions with you for a 1 on 1 appointment.

Oh, and it doesn't take 3 sessions a week, nor perfect consistency. I assume you expect an hour too. Most of my clients are 2x30' a week, and just do cardio on their own, no weights.

1 session a week won't do it unless the person does workouts on their own, and only maybe 1 in 10 people will do it consistently. Plus once a week they always reschedule, miss a week, and then it's two weeks since their last weights workout, they're just spinning their wheels really.

2 a week is fine. On average 1 in 6 sessions doesn't happen for whatever reason. As most of us know, this isn't spread evenly, you get the fanatics who come in with their arm in a sling while they've got a fever, and then there's those who wake up farting slightly more than usual and skive off five minutes before the session. But if they make 3 out of 4 sessions every 2 weeks, they can generally get progress.

Let's just take squats as an example. You get someone who's really weak from desk work and can't squat below parallel, or rather they can get down but can't get back up. You stick them on the leg press, 3 sets of 10. Start with 5kg, be really conservative and add 5kg a time. In 12 sessions they've hit 60kg 10x3.

Now you get them doing goblet squats, at this point they can do them with 10kg. First session 8 reps for 3 sets, second session 10x3, third session 12x3. Now go to the 12.5kg dumbbell, and repeat, and then the 15kg. So that's 9 sessions goblet squatting. 21 in all so far.

They can now without doubt squat the empty bar for 5x3, plus 2.5kg to make them feel good. They add 2.5kg every time. It's 4 sessions to 30, 8 sessions to 40. That's 29 sessions so far.

Once they hit 40 you get scared because no-one's lifted this much in front of you before, so you just add 2.5kg every second session. It's 8 more to 50, and 16 more to 60. That's 45 sessions.

In six months of 2/week you have a possible 46 sessions. Let's say they miss 1 in 4, so long as it's not 6 in a row or something, they can still progress at the above rate without drama, you just as if the session was never missed.

It really is not that ambitious.

setting certain strength standards as a requirement is missing the mark.

You really feel that our industry has an excess of standards? People are demanding too much of their clients, and clients demanding too much of their trainers?

[foodandfitness]

Kyle, I've been doing this for 9 years and I've helped many clients achieve those goals you've stated in a fraction of the time. I'm certified in USA Powerlifting and Weightlifting and I've competed myself and have some decent strength for a natural lifter. I'm definitely a fan of the barbell. Like you said, they are not difficult numbers to reach. However, not every client can or wants to be able to do that. I have clients for a number of reasons can't hit those numbers because...

1. They prefer not to train those lifts for whatever reason, which is fine by me.

2. They work with small groups for 30 minute sessions in a beginner group where everyone has very different back grounds. I don't have time in a 30 minute workout to teach a 45 year old obese sedentary woman how to barbell back squat while I'm still supervising and teaching the others. But I can teach a step up or a goblet squat in 10 seconds- so I go with easier movements in that setting.

3. I have clients like pilots or executive business men and women that travel for sometimes a month at a time and can only make it in for infrequent training.

4. Clients who I feel that for whatever reason, would focus on a different mode of exercise.

Seriously your initial premise works for a majority of people. But I've had clients who've started with me where it was just a success getting them to lift 10 pound weights and step up on a box for 15 minutes without getting dizzy or sick. So when you define "healthy" a lot rides on where your client is starting off at.

[rdferguson]

You really feel that our industry has an excess of standards? People are demanding too much of their clients, and clients demanding too much of their trainers?

My point was that while these numbers can be broadly used, it's inappropriate to use them as a rule to judge trainers by. Let's say there's a trainer who specialises in long-distance running, and their business is built around 8 weekly running groups -- 4x/wk with experienced runners and 4x/wk of introductory running activities. Where do strength numbers fit into their job description? Let's say there's a trainer who specialises in mobility, and instead of giving 5min of assisted stretches at the end of a workout like a lot of trainers do, everything they do is for the explicit purpose of building stupid amounts of flexibility. While their clients could certainly benefit from being stronger (especially considering that it will help with joint stability, which they'll be headed towards a low level of otherwise), a trainer whose business is all about getting people stupidly flexible -- not as a side show but as the main act -- is simply not going to be concerned with how much his/her clients can lift.

All that is to say that you're judging all trainers, regardless of specialisation, from your position as a strength-focused gym-oriented trainer. I'll grant you that within that field, the standards that you've stated, or equivalent standards in other lifts/rep ranges, are valid in the majority of circumstances, and this rings true even for the "general" personal trainer. If you're going to be training the majority of your clients with strength exercises, then you should be able to coach the movements safely and effectively, and you should be able to progress them. If you specialise in strength, then a general inability to get your clients meeting some conservative strength numbers such as these within a certain time period is a sign of incompetence. However, not every trainer and not every client falls within that scope. You're not accounting for specialisation; you're only partially accounting for exercise intent; you're not accounting for outliers; you're prescribing a single pill for all ailments, so to speak. Within your context, what you've written here is generally true, but your context is not the full gamut of the fitness industry.

[phoenixr2]

Any videos of your clients doing these things?

[ChessGuy]

Heck, I can get clients doing those numbers on a bosu ball.

[SerpentHearted]

honestly it never occurred to me to work to a time frame like that but here's a recommendation a client posted on my ******** a while back. I have a few more just like it.

This man has literally changed my entire life. I went from someone with multiple eating disorders, resigned to hating myself for the rest of my life, to someone who is well on her way to a very healthy lifestyle. The "flexible" diet seems counterintuitive at first, but I promise you it works wonders. I've lost 10 kg in two months much by accident, just by changing my goals. I would recommend this work to anyone. My outlook on food has completely changed.

i'll stick to my own definition of "success"

[TrendingUpward]

personalization is everything. you can not expect that anybody can achieve these goals or be happy with those results. Too many factors need to be considered.

[AshesRoyale]

Lives are changed with barbells, not with burpees and bosus.

I understand the hate for Bosu's & fad equipment/workouts, but that statement is fairly ridiculous. Personally, I love barbells, burpees and Bosu workouts and so do my clients. They like loading the next bigger plates, but also like the variety of doing burpees for a warmup or while traveling and they like ankle and knee stability and balance/reaction training. It all comes down to their goals and doing a variety of exercises that will continue to get results and keep them from getting bored.

I also think it is foolish to disregard a usable tool for any reason- especially if it is deemed "not cool" or whatever the case is. It would be like a mechanic saying, "Ratchets and hammers fix cars, not screwdrivers, wrenches and vice grips! Those are so overused and for losers!"

[KyleAaron]

Relevant article on the StartingStrength.com website.