March 2018

It is more and more difficult for me to integrate being a psychotherapist and personal trainer. These two worlds seem to drastically slide apart, each in its own direction. While in the former we seek to bring some truth to light from the unconscious, the latter seems to go the other way. Last weekend I was at a fitness industry conference in Warsaw. It was a deeply moving experience for me. And not, as I naively expected, due to the content and quality of the speeches. Apart from a few valuable lectures on nutrition, the rest made me very sad. Sadness and disappointment, I guess I felt that for the most part. The audience itself caused my consternation. The audience were largely personal trainers and non-business enthusiasts of spending time at the gym. On this occasion, personal trainers decided to present the latest collection of denim shorts and even shorter tops, but the longest nails. Well, March and the lectures I thought came at least in a shirt. Personal trainers, like those torn out of the cast of “Robin Hood: Men in Tights”, were focused mainly on their own and others’ muscles. It is a strange world, I thought, where speakers with serious overweight bordering on obesity lecture on the principles of healthy eating and talk about the most effective forms of training. Where during the break of the speeches you can “quickly” connect to the drips with vitamins. Where a well-known celebrity emphasizing that she is primarily a trainer, presenting a “case study” of her charges, only says that they are friendly and confuses optimism with positivism, and everyone applauds and commenting on the speech, they claim that she is the best motivator. I have an association with the fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, although in this case I should have more to Eliza Orzeszkowa and grassroots work. Because the king is naked and that’s the truth. The truth is that you don’t always want to smile and “energy”, contrary to what most personal trainers’ Instagram profiles claim. A trainer is also a human being and must experience anger, envy, despair, fear and frustration. Often the coaches don’t feel like it, really. This is the only truth that probably does not exist in the fitness world today. This is a world where the number of followers and the percentage of body fat are the measure of success. Coaches forget about general condition and basic fitness, as well as basic decency in having qualifications for the profession, but they do not forget to upload photos in underwear. A world where mass denial reigns, and the obsessive creation of a perfect body is to soothe the fear of mortality. And I do not have consent to this world, although I do not know what to do with it yet … There is no consent to uncertainty either, so I will at least go jogging to cover my ambivalence with my actions.