In my new article on Return of Kings, I discuss the pros and cons of my career in personal training.

…“After all,” you may think to yourself, “the trainers that train movie stars make millions, and even if you’re not getting actors ready for some superhero movie, you’ll still be in a field where you actually get respect from your clients (a non-physical but tangible fruit of labor) and hey, the lonely housewives in yoga pants are a nice fringe benefit, eh what?”

This is largely what my thought process was when my career in academia as a literati hit a downturn, and thus I decided to get into personal training. I studied and passed the test in about three weeks of hard studying; apparently my fellow trainers needed several months to do the same. As useless as college ultimately was for me, I must admit that it did teach me how to knuckle down and focus on one task, and after a brief job hunt, I found employment in this field. So what downsides could there possibly be?

Let’s make something quite clear: the typical gym job you’re going to get, especially if you don’t have a specialty such as a Crossfit certification, is a lot less “voluptuous, sex deprived housewives in yoga pants” and a lot more “glorified janitorial work”. The majority of your time will NOT be teaching classes, banging cougars, or even training clients—no, you’re probably going to be dusting ceiling fans, re-racking weights, tightening this or that nut or bolt, and repairing jammed machines. And in case you’re wondering, I’ve only had three man-hungry females explicitly throw themselves at me, two of whom were elderly and the other a pre-pubescent, neither category of female being one that I’m attracted to.

You can read the article here