Mickey Z

Cool Observer

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Sunday, April 01, 2007

"Hey…was that your tit?"

Training clients involves a fair amount of hands-on work: stretching, positioning, pointing out what muscles are working, and the like. Inevitably, a male trainer working with female clients will touch something he wasn’t aiming for. Let’s say I’ve got a woman on her back on a mat with my hands pushing down on her knees—which are bent up by her chest. She’s in gym shorts and a tank top so this is already a skin on skin situation. I slowly rotate her legs—still bent—to one side to stretch her back when my left hand slides off her sweaty thigh and brushes her right breast.

For barely a millisecond, we’re both frozen. Then it’s recovery time. I’m not likely to ask: “Hey…what that your tit?” So, like typical humans, we’ll just pretend it didn’t happen. The palm of a virtual stranger has touched a woman’s barely covered breast in public…but we just keep talking about the importance of flexibility or planning our next session. (However, if I’ve known the woman a long time, I might flash my dimples and just say “whoops.”)

During my early days as a trainer at the anything-goes 1980s Vertical Club, I might’ve said something like:

"Don’t worry, I’ll squeeze your left one when we stretch the other way.”
OR
“I’m gonna have to charge you extra for that.”
OR
“This is a full body workout."

P.S. The word “gym” is derived from the Greek gymnos, which means “naked.” The Greek word gymnasium actually means: “place to be naked.”

The End