First rule of sales: never judge

A trainer once told me she didn't think she was a good fit for a particular client, because "she isn't in shape enough for my workouts." I remember thinking: isn't meeting a client where they actually are the entire point of the job? That's what an assessment session exists for — establishing baseline ability, goals, and whatever's standing in the way.

That trainer didn't last long in the industry; she was one of those trainers who relied on their looks instead of their actual talent.

We all start somewhere.

In my early 20s, I ran an enrollment-based group called Total Transformation. Twelve weeks, twice a week in person, three homework workouts a week, $300 for the whole thing. You could not beat that value. My clients were mostly office workers from an insurance company upstairs — younger moms trying to get their bodies back, middle-aged weekend warriors, and one former military gal who, on assessment day, couldn't perform a single sit-up. She remembered boot camp. She was mortified. That's fine.

The program was scalable by design. I never told anyone what weight to lift — that was theirs to decide — but I structured the intensity to build slowly, like boiling a frog. That's the endurance athlete in me, sneaking up on your metabolism instead of shocking it.

One woman joining that cohort — pale, late 20s, worked at a shop down the street rather than the insurance company upstairs — made me genuinely wonder if she was going to make it through the program at all. First rule of sales: never judge. I've made plenty of mistakes over 20 years, and the first one I kept repeating early on was assuming the training volume I was used to as an elite rower was somehow "normal."

Young trainers do this constantly — they take their own ability for granted and can't adjust mid-session when a client genuinely cannot do what's being asked, not even begin to. It's part of why I tell my seniors to look for trainers over 40. There's something you only learn from your own process of aging as a coach.

Anyway — back to the pale girl. She was lined up with five other participants, each at their own station, hammering out intervals. Her face had that look of complete overwhelm. She got paler. Partway through, she slipped out of the studio and disappeared for about ten minutes. I called out to check she was okay — I still had five other people to run and a workout to keep moving, but I considered having to leave the group to go check the locker room myself.

She came back about ten minutes later, and resumed her station with something close to Hulk energy. Something had unlocked in her, and it wasn't calm. She destroyed her previous numbers and negative-splitted the rest of the workout — meaning she got faster each round, not slower, which is nearly the opposite of how fatigue works in most people.

At the end of the session, she told me what actually happened in those ten minutes. She'd felt weak, overwhelmed, and helpless compared to everyone else in the room — embarrassed enough that she'd gone to the locker room and vomited. CNS overload. When she realized she was actually okay, that embarrassment turned into anger, and came back to destroy the workout.

A quick caveat here, because I don't want anyone reading this to take the wrong lesson home: vomiting during exercise isn't a badge of honor, and pushing through it isn't something I'd recommend as a strategy. It can be a sign you've genuinely overexerted yourself, and in some cases a sign of something that needs medical attention (like a heart attack, or hypoglycemia), not just mindset. What I'm telling this story for is the mental shift that happened in her — anger replacing shame as fuel — not the specific physical circumstance around it. If you ever feel that unwell during a workout, the right move is almost always to stop and check in with your body and communicate your symptoms.

Mindset, friends. This was the person nobody in that room would have picked to dominate. She had nothing to prove to anyone else — the only thing she was proving anything to was herself, in that locker room, alone. She finished all 24 sessions and signed up for the next program, T2.

Talk soon,
Dr. Stevens

General health information only — not a diagnosis, not treatment, and not a substitute for care from your own physician. Talk to your doctor before changing your exercise, diet, or medication routine, especially if you have an existing condition.