Do Athletes Make Boring Clients?
Takeaway Points:
In personal experience, athletes - especially hobbyist or aspiring athletes - require little in terms of unique training methods, but are demanding and impatient in their relationship expectations with their trainer(s).
“General population” clients have a huge range of limitations and needs, which makes their programs more tailored and specific, giving the trainer an opportunity to learn more about a wide range of fitness options.
Of course some athletes can be great and interesting to work with, and general clients can be frustrating or boring. Every person is different and it’s important that as a trainer, you are open to learning many styles and continuously improving your knowledge of health and fitness.
Athletes make boring clients.
I know this is likely to ruffle some feathers, but of course I want to give you some context for why I feel that way.
When I was a personal trainer just starting out, I had an obsession with wanting to work with athletes and serious trainees. This is, I think, a very common sentiment in certain circles. Many personal trainers get into the fitness industry because they themselves are very interested in fitness, and I was no different.
The problem was, I rarely got to train anyone “seriously”. I was putting a ton of effort into learning everything I could about lifting weights so that I could advance my own training - being a better powerlifter, a better bodybuilder, and a better all-around athlete. I wanted to hone my skills so that I could both become more athletic, and train others to achieve the same.
What I found, however, was that in the common gym setting, that’s basically nobody. Most of the people who are coming in for personal training, are people who are not in great shape, and either want to get active or (more likely) lose weight - even if that’s not actually a good goal for their circumstances.
There are, of course, jobs that are far more conducive to working with athletes. If you work as a strength and conditioning coach for a university, for example, you’ll be able to work with athletes all day long. However, these jobs generally have higher requirements, and I didn’t really meet those as a student fresh out of college with an English/Philosophy degree and a personal training certification.
So, I was in a position where, for many years, I thought that things would be a lot easier if I was able to work with, well, generally more athletic clients. I was pretty wrong about that.
Later on as I developed my online coaching business, I was able to work with a much wider range of clients from all over the world, including quite a few folks who started off in a much more athletic place. This is when I discovered that, at the end of the day, they’re not nearly as interesting to coach as I thought.
This is partly because athletes can adhere more easily to a more “ideal” program - they generally don’t have a ton of major injuries or medical conditions, and their training looks a bit more similar because they’re all generally able to handle what you throw at them. It may be exciting to pull out all the tricks and really push someone to their limits more fully, but it’s also way more same-ey. You just pull out the program and point them in the right direction, and they do it.
In comparison, non-athletes (or what we personal trainers call “general population”), are usually MUCH more different from each other. Each has their own injuries, medical conditions, and unique relationship with exercise. Some may be very consistent, and some less so. Some may be very enthusiastic, and some less so. The much more diverse nature of general population clients means that you have to learn a lot more, and adapt a lot more, in order to be able to work with such a wide range of folks.
Worse, athletes tend to be, for lack of a better word, needy. They tend to be a bit more impatient, and want things faster. If you don’t show them lots of bells and whistles, fast, they can get bored and decide to move on. They don’t make for good clients because they need more attention despite fundamentally not needing very different programming.
This also certainly isn’t the case for every athlete. I find that it tends to plague the “aspiring” athlete much more than the actual athlete - the concept of the hobbyist athlete is much bigger in disorganized sports like powerlifting and bodybuilding, and so while there are plenty of folks who desire to be competitive athletes in these sports, often they’re aspiring athletes moreso than actual athletes. These aspiring athletes can be hard to coach because often they don’t want to accept their limitations, and have consumed a lot of the social media hype that implies that anyone can be jacked with enough hard work.
I’ve also met and worked with plenty of athletes who were far more patient, and better at managing their expectations and growing over time, so this rule is not perfect. I also imagine that it’s very different when working with popular field sports, as compared to the hobbyist sport athletes I’ve tended to work with.
All in all, however, I was surprised as I developed more as a personal trainer, to realize just how much of my personal growth as a coach resulted not from those athletes, but from those general population clients who really pushed me to expand my boundaries and learn a lot more about how to train.
In particular, this last year and a half has also been a very interesting phase. Coming from a place of bodybuilding and powerlifting training in a gym, I had to learn from scratch how to get into bodyweight exercise - and as a result, how to get into gymnastics and calisthenics. From there, I also had to learn how to do the same kind of work with my clients, and have as a result coached many clients over the past year with little to no equipment. This has, I would say, easily been the most difficult year for me as a coach, but also the one in which I had to learn and adapt the most.
And this didn’t come from working with athletes, who would still have had barbells and racks to work out with - this came from working with average, general population clients. Folks looking to improve their fitness and quality of movement, keep up with their active kids, and so on.
So, maybe this is just me. Maybe I simply haven’t worked with the right kinds of athletes to enjoy it more - but all in all, so far, I’ve learned a lot more from working with my general population clients.
About Adam Fisher
Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.
During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.
Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.
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