Why all fitness gadgets don’t work and why you’ll eventually hire a trainer.

Lululemon bought Mirror for $500M. Peloton has a $16B market cap. My Facebook feed is filled with ads for AI-powered fitness gadgets, devices, and apps. Unfortunately none of them will make you fit. This is why.

If real fitness is easy, everyone would be fit.

I’m an elite personal trainer and for 5+ years, I worked in the gym underneath the Twitter building in San Francisco. My clients were mostly Twitter and Uber engineers and executives. Invariably, when they started training with me, they all said the same thing: I only need a few sessions, just show me how to do these things and I’ll train myself.

Personal training is expensive. The gym I worked at charged at least $125 an hour for private training. Training 2–3 times a week adds up really fast. In a month, my clients typically spend over $1000 for private training alone. It’s difficult to wrap your head around this if you’re not used to it and if you haven’t experienced the value first-hand.

To these new clients I would smile and say, “okay.”

Yet every one of them trained with me for years, only leaving when they changed jobs or when I left. Every single one.