Lessons from Clients, Vol. 1
Thirty years of training people will humble you. You walk in thinking your job is to teach - and it is. But somewhere along the way, your clients start teaching you things you didn't know you needed to learn. This is the first in an occasional series where I share some of those lessons. The details are kept private, but the people - and what they gave me - are very real.
She showed up anyway.
A few years ago, I had a client going through one of those stretches of life where everything seems to be unravelling at once. A difficult personal situation, the kind that consumes your headspace completely. Most people would have put their sessions on hold. She didn't.
She came in twice a week, almost without fail. Some days she was quiet. Some days she'd talk. But she moved - and that seemed to matter deeply to her.
One day I asked her how she managed to come in when she had so much else going on. She said, “This is the only time when my mind focuses only on my body. Everything else waits outside."
I've thought about that many times since. We talk a lot about fitness as a habit, a discipline, a goal-oriented pursuit. But for her, it was something more fundamental - a refuge. A place where the noise of life couldn't follow her in.
I learned to never underestimate what a session means to someone beyond the physical. Sometimes showing up is the work.
He stopped watching the number.
He came with years of gym history and a complicated relationship with the weighing scale. Weighed himself every morning, tracked every calorie, measured success in kilograms. He'd made real progress over the years by sheer discipline - but he was also exhausted by it. Constantly chasing a target that kept moving.
My program with him focused not only on the physical but also the mental aspects. It started with slowly encouraging him to step away from the daily weigh-in. It wasn't easy for him. The scale had been his report card for so long that without it, he felt unmoored.
But something interesting happened over the following months. He started noticing other things - that he was sleeping better, that his lower back had stopped aching, that he could move in ways he couldn't before. He looked forward to his sessions instead of dreading the accountability they represented.
Over time, his body found its natural rhythm - and yes, the weight shifted too. But the more meaningful change was in how he related to himself. He moved from fighting his body to partnering with it. From measuring his worth in kilograms to measuring it in energy, ease, and how good he felt walking out of a session.
This is something I've believed for a long time: numbers on a scale are, at best, one small piece of a much larger picture. Strength, sleep, mobility, mood, confidence - these are the real markers of progress. And they don't show up on a weighing scale.
She taught me what patience really means.
I've worked with clients managing chronic pain for much of my career. But one particular client - who had lived with daily discomfort for years - genuinely recalibrated how I think about progress.
In Pilates, we already measure success differently: in the quality of movement, in precision, in mindful execution. But with her, even those markers had to be set aside. Some days, a good session was simply moving without flaring things up. Some days it was just being there, doing gentle work, feeling a little more in control of her body than when she walked in.
She taught me to slow down. That good training isn't always about doing more. Sometimes it's about paying closer attention. I found myself asking questions - How does that feel? Where do you notice it? What's different today? - and discovering that listening was as important as any exercise I could program.
She never stopped coming. And over time, slowly, things did improve.
But the bigger gift she gave me was this: progress is not always visible or measurable. Sometimes it lives in the small, quiet moments - a little less pain today, a little more ease. Learning to value that changed how I work with everyone.
He reminded me that movement should feel like joy.
He was fifteen, came in reluctantly, and made it abundantly clear in the first session that he was not a fitness person. He did it for his parents, he said. And, that was reason enough to start.
But teenagers are honest in ways adults aren't - they don't fake enthusiasm. So, I watched what made him engage and what made him shut down. I adjusted. I made things more playful, more exploratory. Less “this is good for your posture" and more “try this and tell me what you feel."
A few weeks in, something shifted. He started asking questions. Trying things on his own. And one day he said, almost surprised by himself, "I feel strong. I think I could do this every day."
Decades of working with people across all ages and stages means most clients come with a history - old injuries, past frustrations, a complicated relationship with exercise. Watching someone encounter movement with none of that, just openness and the simple thrill of feeling strong, is a rare and lovely thing.
It was a good reminder. Fitness doesn't have to be serious to be effective. Joy is not a distraction from the work. Sometimes it is the work.
She taught me to trust the process - by doing it herself.
Prenatal training is some of the most careful, considered work I do. Every session is a balance between keeping an expecting mother strong and healthy, and being deeply respectful of what her body is already doing.
One client, in her second trimester, was someone who was used to being in control - of her schedule, her workouts, her world. Pregnancy, as many women discover, has other ideas.
There were sessions where she felt strong and capable. Others where her body felt entirely unfamiliar. There were moments mid-session where I could see the question on her face - is this still doing anything? Is it worth it?
I told her to keep going - that we were building a foundation she'd feel the benefits of later, even when she couldn't see it now.
And she did. Her postpartum recovery was strong. Her energy levels surprised her. She'd put in the work during a time when the results were invisible, and the results came - just on their own timeline.
She taught me something I now carry into every prenatal session: the work happening in those quiet, unremarkable weeks is often the most important work of all. The results just arrive on their own terms.