Gym and trainer recommendation in Pattaya?

[TimBKK]

I have no recent experience in barbell training, but intend to start soon if all goes to plan.  I would like to follow the Starting Strength novice program (https://startingstrength.com/get-started/programs) but thought it would be a good idea to get an experienced trainer to focus on the basics of squats, deadlift, bench press etc.  Any recommendation for both a trainer and a gym in Pattaya?

[BigStar]

Seems no one has such a recommendation. 

 

Personally I wouldn't trust a local trainer, Thai or farang. The amateurish training I've seen in various gyms has reflected a superficial knowledge of form and none about what exercises best avoided, such as behind-the-neck pulldowns or upright rows. 

 

You could do much better just watching youtube vids. ATHLEAN-X is pretty good. Note what he says NOT to do. 

 

Obviously a youtube vid won't observe and critique your own form. Hence you're really serious, you can find a professional trainer online for a few workouts. Make an inquiry over on /r/fitness.

 

However, you didn't give the reason for a sudden obsession with barbell fitness. Even if you do the exercises correctly, traditional methods will eventually lead you to injuries one way or the other, notably thru repetitive motion stress. The goal for the long term should be fitness with health (the two are often conflated). Look into super slow training, timed static contractions, and isometrics for strength. Nor is a gym at all necessary for fitness. You can do just fine at home with resistance bands (including mini-bands), a pull-up bar, a TRX-style suspension trainer (can do pullups with that as well), and bodyweight. For the last, you might check out /r/bodyweightfitness. I find exercising at home with my music and vids most pleasant and less time-consuming. 

[TimBKK]

Thanks @BigStar, appreciate the advice!

[Walker88]

On 1/24/2021 at 6:06 AM, BigStar said:

Seems no one has such a recommendation. 

 

Personally I wouldn't trust a local trainer, Thai or farang. The amateurish training I've seen in various gyms has reflected a superficial knowledge of form and none about what exercises best avoided, such as behind-the-neck pulldowns or upright rows. 

 

 

Life-long, chemical-free gym rat here...formerly trained for team sports, now just out of habit. Your admonition re 'behind the neck pulldowns' and 'upright row' is spot on, as the first often leads to pinched nerves in a cervical vertebrae and the latter to rotator cuff damage, especially if one has a Type I or Type II acromion (speaking from experience; it isn't just too many curveballs that led to it).

 

Proper form is key, and that demands any trainer understand how the body works and where stress can be a problem. Many trainers do not have the knowledge or education. There's a lot of useless exercise, too, whose only benefit is being able to do that particular exercise, but has no use in any sport or activity.

 

Though I'm not an adherent, one could do worse than following the TB12 method (made famous by #12-wearing Tom Brady, a 43-year old NFL quarterback now heading to his 10th Superbowl), though his method is an entire lifestyle. Brady is also big on 'deep tissue massage', a painful style of massage that keeps muscles and ligaments pliable, ostensibly reducing the likelihood of injury.

 

Also, there's some interesting new research, funded mostly by billionaire Boomers who don't want to age, that suggests a lot of 'accepted wisdom' re exercise is simply wrong. Explosive movements like weight lifting not only prompt the body to strengthen bones, but it also prompts the body to release natural HGH (from studies at Harvard Med School and Stanford Med School), while lengthy cardio (like long distance running or treadmill) leads to over production of free radicals and may actually lead to faster aging by knocking telomeres off the ends of genes, which over time results in error-laden cell replacement, also known as 'aging'. The research is not conclusive, but it suggests a re-thinking of exercise methods.

[BigStar]

1 hour ago, Walker88 said:

Though I'm not an adherent, one could do worse than following the TB12 method (made famous by #12-wearing Tom Brady, a 43-year old NFL quarterback now heading to his 10th Superbowl), though his method is an entire lifestyle. Brady is also big on 'deep tissue massage', a painful style of massage that keeps muscles and ligaments pliable, ostensibly reducing the likelihood of injury.

I totally agreed with most of your post. However, I think it's a typical mistake, most commonly by young men dreaming of becoming Arnolds, to believe that they can safely do what the genetically gifted can do and even achieve remotely similar results. Doug McGuff in Body By Science mentions this:

 

The problem is that a large part of all success is based on a huge statistical variation that has nothing necessarily to do with a direct cause and effect.

 

That is why one can find “experts” offering contradictory advice on almost every subject, including health and fitness. In essence, what you have are two (or more) different trees sticking out of the canopy, and they have risen to such impressive heights not because of anything they did or did not do, but because of a statistical variation that gave them this advantage. In fact, what these two anomalies actually did may have been two entirely different things, but because they were both naturally predisposed to have success in this realm, they were likewise predisposed to make the same cognitive mistake of thinking, “What I did caused this to happen”—even if the techniques that these two people employed were diametrically opposed.

 

. . .

 

This is why you will hear people saying that you “ought to enroll in a Pilates class, so that you will develop a dancer’s body,” or you “ought to take dance aerobics classes, so that you will develop a dancer’s body,” or you “ought to take up swimming, because you want long, lean muscles, not big, bulky muscles.” Such statements are the result of misapplied observations and of assumed cause-and-effect relationships that are actually inverted: it wasn’t the activity that produced the body type; it was the body type that did well in that activity. It is the genetic endowment that produces the body type. Therefore, if one desires to have the body type of, say, a champion swimmer, the best course is to start by having the same parents as that champion swimmer—rather than his or her training methods.

 

Deep tissue massage I can get on board with, but I'll have to make do with foam rolling. I find that helpful.

Edited January 28, 2021 by BigStar

[Kelsall]

I agree with the above comments and would suggest the OP read Body By Science by Doug McGuff.  He's got some good (free) videos out there, too.

 

In my own case I started exercising after a 25 year layoff.  I, too, did not trust Thai or farang trainers and did what was suggested in BBS, and did not get a gym membership, just paid the daily rate at several local gyms until I found one I liked, then still paid the daily rate.  BBS recommends machines for several reasons, one of which is they are safer than free weights, especially for the beginner.

 

Now I do bodyweight exercises at home using a chinning bar and a home made suspension trainer as described by Drew Baye. I also do dips using two dressers spaced an appropriate distance apart.  Finally I use timed static contraction for my neck as described by Drew Baye.  All this can be found by using google.  I would suggest not laying out of lot of money because you may change your approach.  Ignore the gym membership specials.  IMO the whole gym, exercise thing can be a racket that seperates you from your cash quickly.

 

Above all, get clearance from your primary care physician and cardiologist if you have been sedentary for a long time.

 

I'll end with a quote from Arthur Jones, inventor of Nautilus.  He wrote this *after* he sold Nautilus for millions. 

 

"Apart from a rather limited number of hardcore bodybuilders who are misguided enough to believe that they have a
chance to compete against the outright genetic freaks that now dominate bodybuilding competition, just about anybody
else in this country can produce nearly all of the potential benefits of proper exercise without spending much if anything
in excess of about twenty dollars. You can build both a chinning bar and a pair of parallel dip bars for a total cost of
only a few dollars, and those two exercises, chins and dips, if properly performed, will stimulate muscular growth in
your upper body and arms that will eventually lead to muscular size and strength that is very close to your potential.
Adding full squats, eventually leading up to one-legged full squats, and one-legged calf raises, will do much the same thing for your legs and hips. Using this very simple routine, when you get strong enough to perform about ten repetitions
of one-armed chins with each arm, your arms will leave very little to be desired.
Or, instead, you can do what many thousands of others are now doing and <deleted> away thousands of dollars and years of
largely wasted effort while producing far less results. The choice is yours.
One of the best pair of arms that I ever saw on a man belonged to a guy that I knew about fifty years ago in New York,
and he never performed any sort of exercise apart from chins and dips, and damned few of them."

 

HTH.  Good luck.

Edited January 31, 2021 by Kelsall

[BigStar]

15 hours ago, Kelsall said:

I agree with the above comments and would suggest the OP read Body By Science by Doug McGuff.  He's got some good (free) videos out there, too.

 

In my own case I started exercising after a 25 year layoff.  I, too, did not trust Thai or farang trainers and did what was suggested in BBS, and did not get a gym membership, just paid the daily rate at several local gyms until I found one I liked, then still paid the daily rate.  BBS recommends machines for several reasons, one of which is they are safer than free weights, especially for the beginner.

 

Now I do bodyweight exercises at home using a chinning bar and a home made suspension trainer as described by Drew Baye. I also do dips using two dressers spaced an appropriate distance apart.  Finally I use timed static contraction for my neck as described by Drew Baye.  All this can be found by using google.  I would suggest not laying out of lot of money because you may change your approach.  Ignore the gym membership specials.  IMO the whole gym, exercise thing can be a racket that seperates you from your cash quickly.

 

Above all, get clearance from your primary care physician and cardiologist if you have been sedentary for a long time.

 

I'll end with a quote from Arthur Jones, inventor of Nautilus.  He wrote this *after* he sold Nautilus for millions. 

 

"Apart from a rather limited number of hardcore bodybuilders who are misguided enough to believe that they have a
chance to compete against the outright genetic freaks that now dominate bodybuilding competition, just about anybody
else in this country can produce nearly all of the potential benefits of proper exercise without spending much if anything
in excess of about twenty dollars. You can build both a chinning bar and a pair of parallel dip bars for a total cost of
only a few dollars, and those two exercises, chins and dips, if properly performed, will stimulate muscular growth in
your upper body and arms that will eventually lead to muscular size and strength that is very close to your potential.
Adding full squats, eventually leading up to one-legged full squats, and one-legged calf raises, will do much the same thing for your legs and hips. Using this very simple routine, when you get strong enough to perform about ten repetitions
of one-armed chins with each arm, your arms will leave very little to be desired.
Or, instead, you can do what many thousands of others are now doing and <deleted> away thousands of dollars and years of
largely wasted effort while producing far less results. The choice is yours.
One of the best pair of arms that I ever saw on a man belonged to a guy that I knew about fifty years ago in New York,
and he never performed any sort of exercise apart from chins and dips, and damned few of them."

 

HTH.  Good luck.

Spot on! Excellent.

[BigStar]

22 hours ago, Kelsall said:

I also do dips using two dressers spaced an appropriate distance apart.

Noobs should be aware that dips can be problematic for shoulders. Here's something on correct form:

 

https://www.stack.com/a/dips

 

Eventually, protecting one's rotator cuffs becomes paramount.

[eezergood]

On 1/19/2021 at 4:58 PM, TimBKK said:

I have no recent experience in barbell training, but intend to start soon if all goes to plan.  I would like to follow the Starting Strength novice program (https://startingstrength.com/get-started/programs) but thought it would be a good idea to get an experienced trainer to focus on the basics of squats, deadlift, bench press etc.  Any recommendation for both a trainer and a gym in Pattaya?

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