Personal Trainer | San Diego

Your favorite professional athlete has a personal trainer. So does your favorite movie star, musician, model, and business executive that has a cult-like following that baffingly equates their net worth to their IQ.²On second thought, it’s not so perplexing. Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg all actively feed into you believing that they’re super geniuses and their wealth is a result of that genius so as not to shed light on the fact that the economic game is rigged in their favor, with their success not coming from something inherent but from the exploitation of workers and them paying next to nothing in taxes on the monopoly profits their enterprises have extracted. Given this list of people who have personal trainers, it may seem that a personal trainer is a luxury item only for the rich and famous but that’s anything but the case.

While there are a lot of variables that influence pay, the average cost of a personal trainer in San Diego is around the national average of $40 to $70 per session.³A trainer’s certifications and credentials, experience, location, type of facility, session length, and whether the session is with only yourself and the trainer or as part of a small group are among the factors that affect the cost of hiring a personal trainer. That’s why there’s a wide variance in price between trainers and why you shouldn’t compare trainers head-to-head by price without knowing the particulars of what their fee is based on. Compared to other regular services, such as hair styling, and that many trainers offer packages and ways to lower the expense even further, personal training is more than affordable for anyone who has health and fitness goals they’re open to receiving coaching about.

Personal training is for anyone, so long as you’re receptive to coaching. So before you hire someone to help you lose weight, build muscle, get stronger, or whatever else, you should make sure you’re ready to be coached. Why that quality is important is because a lot of times, people hire a trainer and then do everything but what their trainer tells them to do, which then defeats the purpose, results in little to no progress, and ends up being a waste of the client’s money and the trainer’s time.

People work with personal trainers for a lot of reasons. Some choose to hire a personal trainer for accountability, as having a standing appointment to meet someone at a regular time and place to work out helps ensure that they actually work out instead of coming up with a creative excuse for why they can’t. Others are in need of an educator and hire a personal trainer because they’re new to exercise and don’t know what they should do or why. Then there are those who already exercise on their own but seek out the help of a trainer because they aren’t seeing the results they want or are looking for more of a challenge. Another popular reason to hire a trainer is to get ready for a specific event, like a wedding or vacation.

By law, personal trainers in the state of California are allowed to provide their clients with structured guidance about food and food ingredients, including dietary supplements, in support of their weight loss or muscle building efforts. That right ends when it comes to diagnosing and/or giving advice about food and food ingredients to treat medical conditions. So if you’re looking for help to treat your diabetes, for example, Monster can legally share a list of foods that are slow digesting and high in fiber but can’t offer you a diet plan with the clear intention of managing your blood sugar. That service would be outside of Monster’s scope of practice and is something you’d have to consult with a registered physician or licensed dietitian for.

Not everyone wants to eat like a bodybuilder. I completely understand and feel your pain. You can only eat so much brown rice, broccoli, and chicken breast each and every meal before you feel like placing a rifle in your mouth and going Private Pyle on yourself. Wait, did I just spoil Full Metal Jacket for you? Oh well…pick another romantic film for your “Netflix and chill”.

With a busy job schedule, after school activities, evening commitments, family obligations, and other items on your agenda competing for your time, energy, and attention, the chances of you sticking with a fat loss or muscle building diet are much greater if your meals don’t feel like another chore and you’re able to eat the foods you actually enjoy.

For this reason, rather than supplying you with a meal plan telling you to eat what you more than likely DO NOT want to eat, Monster will furnish you with a basic understanding of how to count calories and macronutrients so you can have that bowl of Frosted Flakes — the best cereal ever — for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. If, however, you want more structure and less freedom from having to make your diet fit your day-to-day life, there’s also the option of telling Monster what you like and don’t like to eat, from which he’ll create a meal plan that you should be able to adhere to and gain or lose the weight you’re supposed to.

On average, clients train with Monster 4x per week. That said, there are some who only schedule two or three sessions per week. The number of times you should come into the gym to work with Monster will be dependent on several factors, such as your goal, budget, availability, and need for accountability. Those are particulars that are individual to you, from which you have to figure out what works with your given situation and won’t add strain to it.

It’s not uncommon for people to sign up for a week of personal training and then complain about no results. Those people are unrealistic. For the majority of goals that people have, a week isn’t going to suffice to even make a dent in things. The total body transformations and strength gains that most people want help with should have a timetable of months and months of work. So although Monster doesn’t determine the frequency of personal training for people, he does the duration of it by having first-time personal training clients commit to three months of training because that’s usually enough time for someone to notice changes in their appearance, strength, coordination, confidence, mood, energy level, etc. Once the initial three months are up and value has been attached to Monster’s instruction, it’s not uncommon for clients to continue personal training for a year or more to bring them even further toward their goal if it hasn’t already been reached.

How much is your time worth to you?

Monster’s time is worth a lot to him, which is why he charges what he does in order for him to surrender his time and devote it to you.

If your time is also valuable to you, then coaching is a bargain.

Here, let me explain…

This is the Information Age, a point in history where you can learn anything about everything with a search query.

So sure, you can save gobs of money by being directed to sites like this where you can read up on the subject of training and nutrition and then experiment on yourself, something that many have done before you and many are sure to do after you. But if your time is truly worth something to you, turning yourself into a human guinea pig as you try to figure out what is and isn’t effective for your certain body may not be the best thing to do because every second spent on that is time that could’ve been better spent curing cancer, finding a solution to global warming, or maximizing your fat loss and muscle building.

What Monster is selling is nothing more than a fast forward button, with you renting his years of knowledge and experience to avoid the lost opportunity cost that comes with learning what works and doesn’t.

That’s why coaching is more than affordable when you look at it from the perspective of saving yourself time, which is our most precious commodity.

Monster has been involved in fitness since he touched his first weight in 1996. During that course of time of weight training in countless gyms across the country — from New York to San Diego and everywhere else in between — what Monster has learned from casual observation is that men train with too much ego and women with not enough of one.

What’s meant by that is that men tend to use more weight than they can handle without their form breaking down and looking like they’re doing sexy time things to the weight…in the middle of the gym floor…in front of everybody and their mom to see. On the other hand, women do excessive cardio and/or don’t lift with enough intensity, as if they’re genetic descendants of Mt. Olympus gods and are going to magically transform into Schwarzenegger in drag if they even dare pick up a weight any other color than pink and heavier than 5 lbs.⁴Trust me, you won’t!

Regardless of the sex, these are the people who look the same year after year, despite their going to the gym and supposedly “working out”.

In addressing this, Monster likes to instill clients with one of two things. The first is that if the goal is to build muscle, then the primary objective isn’t to move the weight from point A to point B but to make the muscle work. The second lesson is that if trying to lose body fat, building calorie-burning muscle through intense weight training is superior to wasting it away on the treadmill, elliptical, stationary bike, or any other piece of cardio equipment.

All in all, it could be said that Monster’s approach is that of old-school bodybuilding.

Why that and not, let’s say, CrossFit?

Probably because the belief in progressive resistance weight training and principles of proper technique, connecting the mind to the muscle, and making every single second of a workout count are simple, time-honored concepts that have proven themselves effective for many people regardless of their physique goal. Considering that, why wouldn’t anyone subscribe to and want to impart them?

Monster learned everything he knows about weightlifting from the prison yard. If you don’t know, you have to be able to stand your ground in the penitentiary, where getting swole is right behind joining a gang as the best means to protect yourself from getting punked for your commissary or becoming another inmate’s fuck hole. Monster has never been able to work well with others as a team, so gang life was completely out of the question when he stepped off the bus and entered intake to begin life as prisoner #90210…

Wait, what?! You believed that?!?!

That’s probably because Monster’s Black…

…and you’re RACIST, you fucking racist!!!

…

Monster has recent book learning about nutrition, fitness, stress management, human physiology, and human anatomy from Moorpark College in California, as well as kinesiology from Marist College in New York as part of that school’s athletic training program. At this time, Monster is also certified as a fitness trainer under ISSA, or the International Sports Sciences Association.

While formal book smarts may qualify Monster in the eyes of some as knowing what he’s talking about, those credentials are nothing more than supplementary to his hands-on experience experimenting on himself and others for close to a decade before he even cracked open any textbook on the subject. Truthfully, at least in his opinion, there’s a world of difference between what’s learned in the classroom and what’s learned on the gym floor. There are a shitload of trainers with certifications on top of certifications, degrees on top of degrees, who, for instance, know chapter and verse about optimal squat movement pattern but can’t apply one iota of it to produce actual results — such as making their clients brutally strong, adding a few more inches to their outer quad sweep, or developing rounder glutes without increasing the size of the thighs.

What you’re impressed by — whether it be Monster’s technical or practical knowledge, or combination of both — is up to you.

There are certain people Monster will work with and certain people he won’t. Monster is not one of those trainers who has a policy of training any and everybody who walks through their door. Because you ultimately serve nobody when you do so, he doesn’t try to be all things to all people.

As such, Monster confines his practice to (1) amateurs totally new to fitness or without heaps of experience and (2) intermediates who have some exercise background but lack the knowledge to take their body to the next level. Moreover, these people aren’t weekend warriors or people seeking out a quick fix. Neither are they quitters. They’re individuals who are truly serious about improving their fitness and changing their lives. If you’re not willing to step outside of your comfort zone, be held accountable, and do everything you’re told to do inside and outside of the gym, MONSTER WILL FIRE YOU as a client!

In terms of specifics, Monster primarily works with lifestyle clients. While they come from all walks of life ranging from college students to professionals to soccer moms to people old enough to have soccer moms for daughters, the common thread between them all is the belief that they don’t have time to exercise or eat properly. Additionally, these aren’t bikini girls, competitive bodybuilders, or any kind of physique athlete who trains with the express intent of stepping onstage for the validation of others. Instead, they’re people who want to have an active lifestyle so they can play with their kids without running out of breath, fit again into the pair of jeans they used to wear in high school, be able to go out in public and feel confident about their appearance, look in the mirror and finally love the person looking back at them.

Depending on the results of weigh-ins, progress photos, and training sessions, Monster makes changes in the nutrition and exercise programs of all clients as needed.

At the outset, some clients are good right from the gate while others require constant adjustment until something is found that agrees with their metabolism, schedule, preference, whatever.

After then, modifications are made accordingly in order to promote continued results, even when clients themselves are not observant of them. That means that zero changes are made at times because they’re not necessary, even though the scale might not have budged for a number of weeks or they may have plateaued on a certain lift; other times it means small or large-scale revision of the nutritional plan, workout regimen, or both.

Many times, a doctor will recommend exercise for its myriad of health benefits but that depends on the exact ailment. Regardless, you should consult with a physician and inform them of your desire to change your activity and/or dietary habits to determine what your physical and/or nutritional restrictions are, if any. From there, you should inform your personal trainer of your condition so your workout plan, exercises, and nutritional advice can be modified accordingly to ensure your health and safety.

Monster’s pricing for personal training has been compared to that of a buffet. Because you can train as much as you want per month for a one-time fee, it’s basically all-you-can-eat.

Keeping in line with the buffet analogy, if you bite your tongue so badly during the first meal that you can’t continue eating and getting your money’s worth, the restaurant doesn’t reimburse you for that inconvenience. Monster’s policy is similar. Once payment is rendered for any given month, that’s it. You can train as much or as little as you like. That said, there is some wiggle room.

With the initial three-month agreement that the monthly fee for personal training is contingent on, your account can be frozen if extenuating circumstances present themselves. One example would be you providing a doctor’s note explaining that you’re physically unable to do X and need Y amount of time off. If agreement is reached to freeze your account and the agreed upon date comes for the account to be unfrozen, payment is required for the remaining month(s).⁵As an illustration, let’s say you paid for the month of December on the 1st,supposedly “injured” yourself on the 24th, and your strip mall “doctor” said you need at least 30 days of rest. If agreement is reached to freeze your account until February, that means payment cannot be returned for the month of December but you’re not obligated to surrender payment for January. However, once February comes, payment is owed whether you elect to train or not.

While other people’s results are certainly no guarantee of your own, there are dozens of clients who’ve achieved their goals under my guidance. Their results can be seen HERE through various charts and graphs showing their progress over numerous weeks. Give those charts and graphs a look over and see how others have benefited from working with me. Testimonials from clients can also help with that. Some are provided below. More accounts from people detailing their experiences and outcomes with my other products and services are available on the page dedicated to testimonials. Even more social proof can be found on Yelp and Google Reviews, both of which are linked on the testimonials page. The results of the many should give you an idea of what’s possible for yourself.