I got a notification from the gym last month: I had enough loyalty points for a free personal training session. I made an appointment with the scheduler, saying explicitly that I wanted to address an asymmetry in my barbell squat.
"Hop on the InBody scale," the scheduler said as soon as we arrived in his office, "so I can get a sense of what your goals might be."
"My goal is to fix my squat form," I said in my polite-but-immovable voice, "and I don't think the numbers from your scale are going to be helpful to me."
He blinked in surprise but didn't push it.
The front desk staff asked me on Sunday afternoon about the training session. "Oh, you're working with Hannah," one of them exclaimed while the other one nodded. "She'll do such a great job helping you with your body composition goals." I didn't say anything to them about it, but isn't it weird to assume that a person has body composition goals? Is it just a safe bet that every woman in the gym wants to modify her diet to get smaller? Even the person who was LITERALLY JUST TELLING YOU about hitting a deadlift PR? (185 pounds, look at me scooching along toward 200!) (This is relevant because after the early stages of lifting it works much better to focus on one of the two: either seeking new PRs or attempting to lose fat -- it gets harder to combine them.)
I have been super-explicit with Hannah over email -- as direct as I can possibly be -- that my goal is to fix a specific issue with my left hip that arises in heavy barbell squats.
Is she going to try to talk to me about fat loss? What's your guess?
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