S02 E03 - Problem Clients

This is the one where Niko gets kicked in the nuts, someone splits Jay's nose open and a client gets FIRED!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to the PT Chronicles podcast. This is season two, episode three, problem clients. Now, usually the PT Chronicles is done in chronological order because it is a story from start to finish of my personal training career. But so many things happened in the three years that we ran the small studio equilibrium that I thought I'd start grouping it into subjects. And today we're talking about the clients that caused me and Jay so many problems, so many laughs, so many tears, sometimes even blood. The first one, I'm gonna call her Betty, and this is about rudeness. Now, if you're a personal trainer out there listening to this podcast, you know that sometimes you just get the most entitled, annoying, selfish, rude clients that think that because they're paying for you, that they own you and they can speak to you anywhere they want to, and of course, that's not the truth. They're supposed to respect you, supposed to be on the same level. In fact, they're supposed to be listening to your directions and your guidance and your expertise because, of course, you are the expert trying to get them from point A to point B safely. Now, I can't remember what day it was, but Jay was training this client maybe two times a week, and she was doing 12 noon every day. So on this one particular day, by 12.30, I'm like, Jay, where's Betty? And he's like, Honestly, I don't know. She hasn't messaged me. Um, I've messaged her three times, she hasn't even replied. I'm like, well, just cancel it and move on. So he's prepping for his next client and having a bit of a cup of tea, making me a cup of tea while I train my client down the bottom end of the studio. Great. Now, 12 45 comes, Betty walks through the door, and Jay just looks at her and just goes, What the fuck? Like, for fuck's sake, what are you doing? And she's like, What? He goes, You're 45 minutes late. And her response was, and I will never forget the look on Jay's face, and well, and the reaction in my body as well, when she said, It's okay, you still get paid. What if I could do the face for you now through Spotify, through the podcast, guys, I would, and maybe I'll do a video of it later for you. But it was just sheer, oh my god, she's going to die. Jay's going to kill her. And I was pissed off as well because that's just not the way you speak to your personal trainer. It's all about turning up on time, getting your built mobility warm-up done, getting your strength training done, and getting the most out of you, the money that you're paying from the expert that you've employed. So Jay looks at me, and I look at him, and Jay's like, give Nico your bank details. We're going to transfer all your money back to you because she'd bought a pack of 10. You're done. And she's like, You're joking, right? I was like, nope, you're not. Give us your bank details right now. So I took the bank details off. We sent her, I think, £1,000 back to her, and she was absolutely done. Here's another client who we're going to call Elizabeth. Um, on the same theme of kind of rudeness and and basically entitlement. And this client who I love, by the way, but still, now she would be on time mostly every session. And whenever she would turn up late, when we first started, before I put her in her place, she used to say this line to me, because when you pay for an hour with a personal trainer, right, I can't get that hour back. And neither can you, because if you're late, I need to block book to maximize as much money as I can make in a day. So if I block book four hours in a row and you're the second hour, but you turn up late and you're 13 minutes late, then you're only going to get seven 47 minutes because that's your problem that you were late. Now, uh, this client turned up 15 minutes late one day, and her this is a very short story, and her reply to me was it's okay, don't worry, we can still do the full hour. No, darling, we can't. And we didn't, but it was a very funny little moment that I love. It's just these little little tidbits of entitlement and rudeness and a little bit of I own you when in fact you don't. And we're gonna put this next one under the heading of pain. Now that's pain caused to me or Jay. And there's a couple of funny stories here, and I need to go back in time just to set this next story up. So when I was back in university, I was playing football one day and was uh just playing a little role in goal as a goalkeeper for a second. Someone kicked the ball at me, I went to catch it, it hit the top of my little finger on my left hand, and it dislocated my finger, like it really turned it almost 90 degrees. And like my dislocated shoulder a few years later, I clicked that finger back into place myself and I made a right mess of it. If you see me these days, you'll see I've got a lumpy left digit. So um, we're in equilibrium one day, and we're gonna call this one Karen. Karen comes in, and uh, well, I'm taking her through a kickboxing session, so I'm taking her on the kick pads, but I'm using I'm being lazy that day because we're doing boxing and kicking. Now, what I was doing was trying to show her how to do a roundhouse kick and how to actually turn the bottom foot so that she can rotate her hip to create power on the roundhouse kick. Now, she'd never done that before. So, what I wanted to do, like um my father taught me, or my stepfather Graham taught me in kickboxing, you would hold someone's leg on your rib cage with your arm just to tell them, like, this is how you rotate the hip and you catch it. So I said to Karen, pass me your leg, and she kicked me and I didn't have a pad on. And guess which finger she kicked? Yep, she kicked the little finger from about 10 years ago and dislocated it straight out to the side, 90 degrees again. So I had to click my finger back into place, sat on the floor because I was gonna pass out, managed to get up and then go through the session. I was absolutely fuming. I've got another little story of Jay's. Um this was in equilibrium and he wanted to create resistance for a knee tuck on the TRX. Now, if you're listening to this and you don't know what a knee tuck on TRX is, if you know what the TRX suspension trainer is, your feet are in the cradles, you are in a plank, you are lifting your bum, and you are drawing your knees in, like a jackknife on a Swiss ball, for instance. Now, Jay was kind of we were innovating at this time and creating loads and loads of different moves to try and capture people's minds and sell equilibrium to the West London crowd, and it was working. So Jay was innovating that day, and what he thought he would do was wrap a resistance band around the TRX, but there was nowhere to anchor it to. So Jay stood behind this client, put his legs, put the band around his legs to anchor her to the resistance band. Now, you might think, uh oh, this is going to go wrong. Well, where you think it's about to go wrong isn't. Where the TRX attaches to itself to the suspension anchor on the bar above you, there is a metal clasp that hooks into the suspension anchor. Now, Jay, unaware that this was about to happen or about the client was about to do this, it was working beautifully. The resistance was pulling in, she was really struggling, and she was pushing, pulling against the resistance and working really hard, and we were all like observing and it was great. But because it was so difficult and she was in so much pain and it was burning so hard, she jumped her feet out of the cradles at the same time. Obviously, the resistance band flicked the TRX back towards Jay, and the metal clasp hit him on the bridge of his nose and split his nose open, blood dripping down his face. If any of you know my brother Jay, the reaction wasn't great. The final story ends up with me being in pain again. It's calamitous. So it's back to the punching and kicking, and I had a client, actually, I'm gonna give her a name here, Mabel, who I love more than anything. Um, me and Mabel used to spend Tuesdays and Thursdays nights kicking and punching because she loved like training using combat sports and a little bit of TRX. Now, on this one particular occasion, uh we were doing kicking, so we were using the actual thick kick pad. And I was teaching Mabel the front push kick. This is where you lift your knee up and you push your foot flat into either someone's stomach or chest to push them away from you and cause them to be winded. Now, Mabel was just sort of tiptoeing around me and just tapping the pad. And of course, being a personal trainer who's enthusiastic and wants to motivate the client and get the best technique out of them, I was like, come on, Mabel, just kick me. You're not doing it right. You need to push and you need to kick through me. That's how you do it. You kick through the person, kick through the tree, kick through the wall. So she took this on board, and you could see her like and as she goes, she kicked me, but she tried so hard to kick through me, but then stepped through me at the same time, kicking me straight in the nuts and straight down the inner thigh of my right leg. So she kicked me in the nuts, scratched me down my right inner thigh, and put me firmly on the floor in absolute agony. In keeping with the tradition of this podcast, I'm gonna try and keep it under 10 minutes, but we've got loads more funny stories from the Equilibrium days, and hopefully I'm gonna get Jay to pitch in and tell a couple over the next couple of episodes. But for now, I'm gonna leave you with we're gonna go back to the chronological order of what happened at Equilibrium. So after the celebrities, after the slight rise, everything starts to really take off, and I'll talk about it on the next episode.