Easy come, easy go

I’ve learned the hard way not to always trust fast results. I get it: you want everything and you want it NOW. I’ve felt that pressure the entire time I’ve been a trainer. I’ve always known that I have about two weeks for someone to start seeing some results and that’s really difficult for some folks that have many bodily issues and an entire lifetime of zero activity behind them. Rome wasn’t built in a day and that’s incredibly unpopular in our day and age.

So I designed my programs in the beginning to get the fastest results I knew how to get. And luckily, they worked. That was sometimes a bad thing. One example: I had a woman come to me with a significant “muffin top” who obviously wanted to lose fat. I put her on my fat loss program and she lost a significant amount of fat in a very short time. Because of the way she dressed, everyone notice the obvious fat loss and I must have picked up a good 5-6 extra clients from that one success alone.
Here’s the catch: it didn’t last.

This client was very happy with the obvious results but we had gotten them so quickly that the habit of fitness and nutrition had not set in. So she stopped coming regularly then stopped coming at all and gained all the fat back and then some. She tried to restart the process again later but the effort wasn’t there so no results.

The main problem was that fast results left her without the need to make serious, long-term changes. She got what she wanted but easy come, easy go. And they went. I often wished I had not gotten her such fast results, as weird as that must sound, because in the long run it didn’t work well for her. But what is a personal trainer supposed to do? If you tell people that they need to work hard over a long period of time, you will lose them to infomercials and the quick-fix fitness gurus. My trick of using fast results to sell them on the methods so they’ll stick with it long term didn’t always work.

So when you’re eyeing P90X, Insanity, or whatever quick-fix fitness program is out now, think of whether or not you’re in it for the long haul or are you looking to get a quick fix that will disappear as easily as it came. Might your money not be spent better elsewhere?
Food for thought.