Recently I’ve seen a ton of crazy hard workouts trainers have given their clients that they themselves could NEVER finish.

And it always irks me.

Because for one, I believe you should never ask someone to do something you can’t do and two, it gives people the perception that if they aren’t absolutely completely destroyed at the end of the workout it wasn’t hard enough (even if that isn’t how the trainer trains him or herself).

I’ve also overheard a lot of people recently preaching different healthy eating strategies when they, themselves, don’t eat clean and follow their own advice.

STOP IT PEOPLE!

Practice what you preach!!!

Especially as trainers we need to practice what we preach.

And that doesn’t mean you have to look a certain way or lift a certain amount to be a good trainer. But it does mean that we shouldn’t ask our clients to do things we can’t and have never done before ourselves.

If you don’t make time for working out with your busy schedule, how can you ask your clients to?

If you don’t make time for meal prep and have never logged your food in a fitness app, how can you ask your clients to?

You can’t. Because you don’t know how difficult it is to do those things or how to overcome the excuses.

You don’t know what it truly takes so how can you help them stay motivated and moving forward.

Sure…You can say the things you’ve read, but you’ve never experienced what they are going through.

Same goes for the workouts we write up.

Yes, we know what muscles are being worked by an exercise. Yes we know reps and sets and rest periods and how they all technically affect us.

But have you ever realized that while certain exercises seem like a good idea together, they end up being complete murder…Even though TECHNICALLY they fit the “mold” or design?

And you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t try them together.

No…You may not be able to try every workout you write up (although it wouldn’t be a bad idea to run through as many as you can), but you should have experienced and experimented enough with different exercises and designs that any routine you throw someones way you know you could complete…Complete at the toughest possible variation.

Ok. So some of you right now may be thinking, but I have some clients that can lift more than me/do more pull ups or push ups.

And I’m not saying that you can’t have them do more challenging variations or lift more weight.

But I do ask you to have challenged yourself as much as they will have to. And to have tried the variations (or even modifications of them) to know how they will affect the person.

We need to practice what we preach.

Because how can you ask someone to do something you wouldn’t or couldn’t do?