If you are reading this you have recently, and likely repeatedly, been banished from the personal training area of my gym. I can imagine that you feel slighted, diminished, and that you are being denied a service to which you are entitled. During our brief exchange you received a cursory “Unless you have a trainer you need to leave”, as I was busy doing the job for which I am paid and couldn’t engage in a drawn out discussion.

In the interest of mending fences lets explore the issue further Q&A style

Why did I throw you out of the Personal Training area at my gym?

I paid for a membership to the gym, shouldn’t I be allowed to use all of the equipment no matter where it is?

By that standard once you order something from a restaurant you should be able to sit at any table and eat from any plate, even though you purchased a club sandwich and tipped 5%. That is not how capitalism works. The people in the PT area paid for steak so they get steak; your sudden meal envy doesn’t entitle you to sit on their lap and lick the juices from their jowls while decrying the fairness of a free market economy.

I use this area all of the time and the other trainers never throw me out?

You had the good fortune to encounter trainers too weak and conflict-averse to defend their territory. Celebrate the victory and move on with your life. If I jimmy open your back window a couple of times a week so I can try on your wife’s clothes and read your kid a story, I don’t suddenly become the legal tenant just because your child refuses to turn states evidence.

But I can’t do the thing I want to do downstairs. Don’t you care about the quality of my workout?

Not in the least, no. At this point, you are more situation than person and my only concern is that you are elsewhere. I would rather you serve five years in prison under false charges than have you take up another moment of my clients’ time; you not being able to bail repeatedly on ill advised box jumps isn’t going to ruin my day.

What if I’m just doing mobility work, surely that doesn’t count?

The issue is not what you are doing, but where you are doing it. By this point in the conversation I am planning to stay a couple hours after my last client just to make sure you don’t stretch quietly while I am gone.

Why are you being so unfair?

I am not a fairness distributor, I am a personal trainer. If you are seeking justice from the universe cast your gaze upwards at the brutal and thoughtless god that set the world in motion; I just make people lift stuff.

You let that hot girl workout in here and she doesn’t have a trainer?

Yeah, that is a legitimate contradiction on my part. She’s even doing dumb things with the kettlebells and taking selfies in the mirror. It’s just…I was going to lift some heavy stuff in a bit and if she looks over approvingly it will untangle some complicated high school shit. I cede the moral high ground on this one, I feel a little bad about it. You still need to leave though.