Herry
Six buff, eager men stood in a small circle around Herry, listening intently. They were all tuning out the various sounds of the gym: weights dropping, people huffing, little puffs as people sprayed and wiped down their equipment. None of it mattered when their trainer, Herry, was talking.
"The single most important factor predicting injury is consistency of training. Take out stress, sleep, even competition or change in footwear or equipment - none of it has the same impact as change in load."
The clients all nodded intently at Herry.
"Change in load is most critical in the context of your four week average. That's why I track load and average it over that time frame. Training follows principles of progressive overload, but do it wrong, and you'll get zero gains and lose time to injury. Every fourth week is a light week or rest week, to allow the body to recuperate. If you don't take these lightly enough, you'll definitely get injured. That's my first principle: light means light." Herry finished firmly.
"What about the risk of under training though? What if we feel like we can do more?" A client asked. He was a short, stocky guy, and he rolled onto the balls of his feet as he spoke. Clearly eager.
But Herry shook his head.
"10% under trained is better than 1% over trained. Injury ruins you far more than any light day of training."
The guy nodded. Perhaps it was Herry's calm, deep voice, or the fact that he could lift more than twice his own body weight on certain key lifts, but he had the respect of everyone around him. His clients today were navy seals - well, expectant ones. Herry had been working as a trainer for the military for a while now. The original plan was to join the army itself, but Herry had realised one thing a little too quickly: he was far too kind, and too much of a pacifist, to ever join the army and participate in active warfare.
That, and perhaps Atlanta's anti authoritarian, anti-war, anti-capitalism politics had finally gotten through to Herry a little. He didn't consider himself a political guy, but everything Atlanta said made it exceedingly hard to see it as a morally okay thing to do to get behind a gun and shoot civilians.
So here Herry was: physical trainer instead.
The guys he was assigned to today were your usual gung-ho, tough-it-out hopefuls. Herry saw a lot of them. They were some of his least favourite clients, largely because they had a pretty strong sense of exactly how they wanted to train. You saw a lot of them: guys who'd spent the past 10 years lifting weights in the gym and whom considered themselves experts because they were good at flexing their biceps in the mirror. It usually took a few weeks, or a few show-off deadlifts from Herry, before they took his advice seriously. But that was what Herry loved about his job - there was a logic, a science to training, that made sense to him the way astrophysics made sense to Odie. It was Herry's language, and he taught it exceptionally well.
His favourite clients were almost always women, strangely. Not all women, of course. You got your fair share of "yes women", those who were perhaps a bit too keen to seem masculine and liked to chug beers as if to prove they were "one of the boys", and who couldn't help but complain about "girly girls" in the dorms. His grandmother had taught Herry that: any woman who tears down other women for liking feminine things is no feminist. Teach men to respect women, but teach women to respect women too. Herry still rang his grandmother most days for advice on difficult clients.
No, Herry's favourite clients were the women who were all too used to saying no to those around them. Herry had been lucky in his ascent in the fitness world; he had always been a big guy with amazing natural strength and an eye for technique. That, and he was male. The fitness world worked in currency of big muscles and impressive maximum lifts, and by pure luck, Herry was born rich in this sense. He'd never truly had to earn his place nor the respect of those around him. As Herry had made his way ever further into the world of training though, he had quickly realised this was not true for most of the women he worked with. Perhaps by virtue of his grandmother, Herry had never seen the women around him as any less knowledgeable or capable than himself; but this was not true for most men in the gym.
He first noticed it when he saw the way bulky men loved to wander over to women who were lifting - as Herry noted, often with better technique than most guys around them - and "offer advice". He noticed it again when he would hear women discussing training plans or goals, only for male counterparts to not-so-kindly offer criticisms and critiques. It was driven home hardest one particular day when Herry was busy cleaning a machine and overheard a conversation between a regular female client and a particularly steroid-heavy male one.
Your squatting technique is great, Miss, but why are you using a band? He had asked, while the woman was quite literally in the middle of squatting.
Because I'm trying to engage my hip adductors and external rotators more. I think it'll improve my form when running. She huffed, staring straight ahead.
Ah, righto. You know, a good way to do that is lunges, actually.
The woman had paused, and finally turned to look the man in the eye. Yes, I did those earlier today.
Oh, good work. You know, you can try banded clam shells too, they're good for those muscles. Or pistol squats, but you'd need to work up to those. But they help engage the muscles that help your knees out a bit, you know? I'm Gary, by the way.
The woman, having heard ever more unsolicited advice, had finally sighed deeply and put her bar back on the rack, abandoning squatting altogether.
Yes, Gary, I know what I'm doing. I'm actually an orthopaedic surgeon, and my knowledge of anatomy is fairly strong.
Herry had had to hide his grin at the time, snorting into his gym towel. The woman's eyes glanced over to him, and they'd shared a quiet smile behind the guy's back as he tried to explain himself. Later that day, when Herry had the grace to apologise on the man's behalf, he'd found out her name was Erica. Erica had soon become one of Herry's first long term clients, and possibly his favourite. Even now, Herry found himself forever learning from Erica, even as her personal trainer.
"Oi, Herry…" One of his clients, a tall, lanky one, called him over, and breaking Herry out of his reverie. "You any good with injuries?"
"Try me." Herry offered.
The guy shrugged. "Got this mad hip pain. It's worse when I run, like long distances. Only kicks in after about 5 kilometres."
"Here?" Herry asked, pointing to a spot on his hip. "Sharp, kinda radiates across your butt? Hurts when you weight bear on that side?"
"Yup."
Herry smiled.
"Heard of your abductors or external rotators of your hip?"
The guy shook his head.
"They pull your knee out, or help counter balance you when you run, basically. Plenty of us have slightly weak ones. It's also tied in with your IT band."
"Yeah, okay. So what do I do, stop running?"
"Nah, definitely not." Herry answered. "Best thing to do is stretch and strengthen them. We'll get a spiky ball and I'll show you some stretches for them, and I might add some exercises for those small hip muscles into your program."
The man looked at him in awe. "You know your stuff. Thanks, man."
Herry smiled. He didn't say it, but he recited it in his head: gluteus medius and minimus. Piriformis. Gemellus superior and inferior. Obturator internus and externus. Quadratus femoris. He could name every single one of them. Herry had consistently failed in high school to recite facts and figures, and forever watched words swirl on the page in English like a foreign language. Smart was never a word used to describe Herry. But here, in the gym? For the first time, Herry had learned what it felt like to be considered intelligent.
I've always loved Herry - he reminds me a lot of someone I know. I think of him as this big, cuddly teddy bear. A bit like one of those massive dogs who look like they could hunt horses but are total softies and love cuddles. And I feel like Herry would 1 million percent be a feminist. He wouldn't even question it.
Herry also gets to channel a lot of my own training knowledge. Although I've never been big on lifting heavy (I'm a distance runner, so I have more emphasis on reps than weight), I always enjoyed the chance to write some of my own training experiences into Herry's stories. He and Atlanta are both good for that. It's particularly helpful given that I don't think he and I have much else in common, making him a bit of a challenge for me to write for sometimes. But should I ever meet him in real life, I think he'd earn my respect instantly.
