You Have to Have a Goal

To my great annoyance, this was said to me by a personal trainer who was assigned to give me my “complimentary introduction” to the gym. In his eyes, my desire “to be healthier” was not a sufficient goal. He wanted a quantifiable goal—how much weight did I want to lose; how many inches did I want to lose? He was firm that if I didn’t have a specific goal I was striving towards, then it would be a practical certainty that I would fail.

He seemed only slightly appeased by my 10-minute mile goal. (I won’t even get into how our American understanding of “health” is skewed in relationship to thinness, but if you ask, I’ll give you the reference to my friend’s recently completed dissertation on the subject!)

Oh, but that wasn’t the end of the fun! He laughed at me for showing a preference for lifting low weights and doing high repetitions in order to achieve a more toned musculature, off-handedly saying that unless I was taking testosterone, there was no risk of me bulking up by lifting heavy weights for as many (or few) repetitions as I could manage. Then, he proceeded to lecture me about my bad posture and rounded shoulders.

You would think that in a gym known for its gay clientele, the trainers might be a little more conscious, and practiced, at treating queer clients respectfully. I mean, if you were training a masculine gendered female bodied person with bad posture and prominent breasts, is it so hard to understand that the posture of that person wasn’t a sign of neglectful inattention to stand up straight, but rather a very carefully crafted posture meant to strategically convey one particular image over another?

Then again, just as so much history has shown us, there can be quite a distinction between people’s perceptions, understandings, and treatment of gay male and lesbian communities—let alone trans and queer communities! (More on trans, queers, and health in another post.)

Goals are certainly important to have, and I agree that there has to be some way in which to “measure” one’s progress, but I wholeheartedly reject the notion that there is only one way (quantitatively) to conduct such measurements and shape such goals, as well as the notion that unless we dangle a sufficient carrot in front of ourselves, we will not move forward. I understand that in our capitalist society, this is exactly how things have been thought to proceed. But, need I reiterate the evils to where capitalism has brought us?