When you sign up at a brand-new gym, they always offer a training session with one of their trainers. Most of the time they choose for you, but sometimes they let you decide who you would like to work with. Obviously, you don’t know much about these coaches, so you unfortunately base your pick on what you see. Most likely, you’ll choose the leaner, more muscular coach as opposed to the less-toned and slightly larger one.
One of the biggest arguments in the personal training community is: Does a trainer need to be super-fit to be successful? Do you need to be shredded and run marathons? What does success look like for a personal trainer?
When you picture a female personal trainer, what do you think of? Big muscles and a small frame? Six-pack abs? A lululemon sports bra and painted-on leggings?
Do you picture Jillian Michaels? A simple Google search says it all.
I can tell you that most personal trainers don’t look like that. I don’t look like that, my female coworkers don’t look like that, and, to be honest, we don’t even want to look like that. However, we still struggle with that idea of looking like that.
Both male and female personal trainers feel the pressure of looking a certain way. If you are lean and muscular, people will assume you know what you’re doing. And we all know that people will hire a coach based on how they look. So in many ways, our careers thrive on what we look like. But what if we don’t look the way society assumes we should look?
This topic goes so much further. There’s way too much emphasis and pressure on our physical self in so many different aspects of our lives. I had clients come to me telling me they need to lose weight for their dating profile! These women and girls are beautiful, elegant, and super-slim. We need to get people to understand that “thin” is not an adjective we should be using. Being skinny is not something we need to be teaching our children. We need to explain the stigma of those words and replace them with “healthy” and “strong,” because those are the words that can be a part of a lifestyle forever, not just for a quick picture.
I had a chance to speak with a super-amazing Instagram blogger recently. She’s an incredible, powerful woman in the community who makes people laugh with her realness and who shows the world the availability of modest clothing. At a size 2, she’s gorgeous in everything she puts on as she models at most clothing stores in our neighborhood. We started discussing the importance of normalizing a more relevant, average clothing size for women. We reminisced about how when we were teenagers, a size 8 was the norm, whereas in this day and age, size 6 is fat. Being a size zero is not her fault; genetics play a huge role and G-d gifted her with this amazing body she can use as a successful fashion icon. Kol ha’kavod!
So I am reaching out to all the local retail shopping store owners. We cannot bring up our amazing daughters in a world like this. We cannot continue to shop in stores where a size medium shirt can’t even fit half an arm in it. And we definitely cannot have only size 2 women modeling the beautiful clothes. Yes, in a world like this, “skinny” sells, but if this continues, and women need to sweat like beasts to perfect their dating picture and starve for days to get the right job, we are causing severe emotional disorders in our children.
We are living in a generation where there’s so much talk about being skinny that we make ourselves believe that the reason is to be healthy, clean, and just “feel better.” Who are you fooling? Stop convincing yourself that that’s why you want to be thin. You want it because there’s no other way of thinking, as it has now become the social norm: If we are not skinny, we won’t be desired anymore. We won’t be noticed anymore. We won’t be accepted anymore. From generation to generation the social norm does its thing and our children conform at an early age. It’s up to us as parents, educators, and just regular people to push more size 8 models, to completely ban the word “skinny” from our vocabulary, and to focus on “fit” and “strong.” Those words hold a lot more meaning and are a lot broader, making people happier and more confident with their results.
It’s up to us to create a happy lifestyle for our families by not basing who we train with or who we hang out with on how skinny they look. Let us teach them that seeing someone goes way past our line of vision. Continue to push more love, sincerity, and confidence to create the new social norm.
Remember—be you, only stronger.
Peace out,
@SWS
Shana Katz is a personal trainer and founder of Sweat with Shana. To contact her, WhatsApp 718-614-8589 or e-mail katzshana999@gmail.com.
