by Corey Wiegand
(editorials@boulderweekly.com)

As a personal trainer, I work with all kinds of people. In an average day I see competing athletes, housewives, college students, business people, teens, alcoholics, drug addicts, compulsive eaters, bulimics, anorexics and the elderly. With this high degree of diversity, one might be tempted to say that there are no commonalities among my clients. However, that would be absolutely false. As a matter of fact, there are two common threads that I notice with all my clients. One thread is that we are all citizens of Planet Earth, and the other is that we are all physically judged in the public eye.

When I started personal training in 2000, I had the common misconception that my job was to teach proper form and technique to individuals who sought to increase their fitness level. Simply put... I was wrong! In fact, just six years later I am performing a much more expansive job with a completely different set of criteria. Now days, in addition to teaching my clients about their health, I am also coaching them on their self-esteem. In the past when I took on a new client, I'd evaluate them physically, set up a fitness program that targeted their problem areas and motivate my clients to sweat until their goals were achieved. But now, I use an entirely different philosophical approach, a holistic team approach, and the results are much more satisfying.

In the past, I'd try to do everything myself. I taught nutrition, weights, cardio, flexibility, boxing, yoga, tai chi, plyometrics, dance and posture. Now days, I don't teach as many pieces of the wellness puzzle. Instead, I refer my clients out to other practitioners so they can get the help they need. In essence, where I used to be a one-stop wellness shop, I am now a personal wellness consultant, expediting my clients' wellness process. I've learned that by creating a strong network of experienced wellness professionals I can help change people's lives, rather than simply helping them to drop a few pounds before a wedding. Where "pounds lost" used to be the most dynamic indicator of my clients success, today I use a more subjective indicator—that being "Esteem and Smiles Gained."

After all, as our forefathers saw it, one of our inalienable rights is "the pursuit of happiness," and these days, this is probably the hardest thing one can attempt to do for one's self. With the media pumping in a constant stream of stressors, we have become a rather solemn bunch. In an average day, anxiety and depression will arise in all of us for countless reasons including: work, school, the war in Iraq, the A-bomb in Korea and Iran, how we look compared to swimsuit models, how much money we don't have, cancer, free-radicals, AIDS, global warming, and, of course, natural disasters like Hurricane Karina. Yet our species lives on, and as Darwin said, only the strong survive.

And Darwin was right... Right? Wrong! We have out grown Darwin's theories. The physical traits that drive sexual attraction are not the intellectual traits that will save our planet from ultimate destruction. Today, I'd like to suggest a new theory: "Only the smart survive."

We human beings are at the forefront of our collapse, and only we can stop it from happening. We are in denial, and we are addicted to all the wrong things. I'm not alone in seeing this; everyone feels it. Why do you think we are all so interested in movies and television shows that openly display our apocalypse? Isn't it time we change ourselves to save ourselves?

You might wonder what this has to do with physical fitness. After all, I'm writing this column as a fitness professional. But just like you, I have a right to speak out on our fate and to try to do something about it. You and I both know that our lives and our society are in jeopardy.

So where do we start to change the situation? My answer is quite simple, really. We change how we think. One way we can change our lives and our planet's future is by changing the way we objectify one another, emphasizing physical appearance over all other qualities.

Rather than making physical traits our main focus in judging others and selecting a mate, we ought to use intellectual and health-based traits. Not only does this change our relationship with our own bodies, leading to greater overall health, but it has the potential to change our evolutionary process by emphasizing key traits needed to solve out problems.

Martin Luther King Jr. asked people to judge others "on the content of their character" and not the color of their skin. But I have a similar dream, one in which we stop judging each other based on our physical attributes and instead judge people based on the expanding values they bring to our planet. In my dream, my clients come to me because they need help improving their health and fitness, not because they need help improving the way they look. After all, tight gluteus maximus muscles won't save the world. And even though there is no proof that the brain will, I'd bet on an enlarged cerebral cortex over enlarged mammary glands any day.

Corey Wiegand is a former Golden Glove boxer and a personal trainer at Mountain's Edge Fitness Center.

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