People often catch me by surprise. Just before writing this I had one of my personal training clients pop in and didn’t recognize her while she was dressed in regular clothes and wearing glasses. Not that surprising since Henry Cavill wore glasses and a Superman shirt while standing under a billboard promoting a Superman movie with him in the leading role and no one recognized him either.

apparently not even wearing glasses

And yesterday I was taken by surprise…though I shouldn’t have been.

You see when she popped in, pretty much the first thing she said was “You may soon be training all the moms on our son’s baseball team.”

“Huh?”

It shouldn’t have taken me by surprise but it did. You see I’ve been training her for a while. She got her very first lifetime chin up with me and had gotten great results. Prior to me training her, I was training her sister in law which was how she found out about me. She knew she wanted to get stronger and develop muscle but was nervous about my methodology until she learned that all of it centers around progressing upon things you can do.

She referred one of her friends that she met at baseball to me.

Her friend had worked with another trainer and had….I’ll just say not a great experience. She wanted to improve the way she looked and wanted to make sure I’m not some kind of creep. That and she hadn’t gotten the results that she was looking for. With me she got results. The table below shows the difference that happened in her first 12 weeks of working with me.

Note, the calculated max is from the start of the program. The “training max” are 12 weeks later…and are calculated from her sub maximal training weights which means she’s actually stronger than what’s shown.

And if my calculations are correct, her hip thrusts will be around 540lbs for sub maximal volume before her beach vacation in August. She’s quit looking at the scale and is happy with the way she looks, and she’s just going to get better.

The two of them encouraged another one of the moms to give me a chance. She knew she wanted to do something but was initially very nervous that she wouldn’t be able to do it. She hears how big the weights are and that can be scary when you see the end result not realizing what the path entailed. But like I said, everything I do is progressing upon stuff you can do until you can do what you couldn’t do before.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s training sessions were brutal, and had a focused mind where he would push himself past what he was capable of. He forced himself to push past the limits…and had “pharmaceutical help”.

I’m not going to say it didn’t work…he’s considered the greatest of all time and a massive inspiration to me. I equated at a young age that if I was strong and muscular, I would be “the man”

It worked for him, and his biological son from an extra-marital affair seemed to do good with it too considering he just won his first natural tested bodybuilding competition.

But they also have 1 in a million genetics. What about the rest of us?

The rest of us need a more methodical approach than “no pain no gain”. My approach is very tightly restrained. I embraced ideas I got from Paul McIllroy’s “comfort zone expansion method” to incredible success, particularly in the glutes.

I’m not good at fixing things, but I am good at building shelves, and it seems to be the success in building firm, perky, rounded glutes (ie the shelf) was the topic of conversation among the moms on that baseball team. Summer is here and they want to feel good about the way they look.

And the kicker is you don’t have to train like a maniac. Everything I ask my personal training clients to do is doable. If it’s not doable, I don’t look at it like it’s their fault. I view it as I didn’t configure the program as optimally as I should have…or just something that was outside of our control happened (such as life). It happens.

If you want fast results and are nervous about what it takes to get there…good news is I have a free trial. During the trial you’ll see for yourself how I operate and that everything is both doable, produces quick results as well as sustainably moves you forward over the long term. All you have to do is send me a text at 973 476 5328 to get started.
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Eric Moss is a personal trainer in Boonton and moonlights as a world-record-holding modern-day professional performing strongman, author, and motivational speaker. In the tradition of the strength performers more common during the turn of the century, he performs feats of strength such as bending steel and breaking chains as part of a live show and travels across the country doing presentations on goal achievement for conferences, corporations, associations, nonprofits, and government entities as well as for schools and universities. His personal training studio is located on Main Street in Boonton New Jersey and is close to Mountain Lakes, Denville, Montville, Kinnelon, Pine Brook, Butler, and Parsippany New Jersey.