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Kaiser Serajuddin: Hey. What’s up? This is Kaiser. You’re of course listening to me on Super-Trainer and today I got a wild guest. I don’t know how to describe him. You could call him an adventurer, a journalist, an author, an entrepreneur or depending on who you ask, you might call him an alcoholic and a womanizer. I’m talking to Nate Green. What’s up, man?

Nate Green: I like the alcoholic and womanizer part and you said wild and now I’m thinking I need to like stand up and jump up and down or something but I’m just going to sit. So I’m sorry if I’m not too wild for the phone call.

Kaiser Serajuddin: No. You know how they say it. It’s the quiet type you got to worry about so I think that’s the type of wild man that you are. So yeah, I mean how would you describe yourself? What is it that you do exactly? It’s kind of hard to keep up.

Nate Green: I thought you did a pretty damn good job, man. I don’t know. In particular, I guess I would say I’m more of a journalist than anything and a journalist in a sense that I like to kind of delve in situations and kind of immerse myself in different situations and experience it, write about it, try to connect with people about what it was like and then move on to the next one. So author works too. That’s newly appointed but I know I’m pretty excited about that.

Kaiser Serajuddin: All right. That’s cool. I mean the way you got started though on this whole path was as a personal trainer. I understand that you don’t do it anymore and you have some feelings about the subject, about your transition. Can you talk about that, on your experience as a trainer, and you’re a studio owner too and a how and why you got out?

Nate Green: Yeah, no problem. Well, I first got on the business maybe six years ago when I wanted to be a personal trainer. I was really into working out. I wanted to train other people and make them feel what I felt. I thought you could conquer the world, like I could do anything, and I had a really big physical transformation where I actually gained about 45 pounds of muscle over a four, five-year period. So I really wanted to try to transfer that and help some other people out.

So I started working at the gym just as a fitness assistant. I think it was my original title. Nate Green had to clean up other people’s shit and I like walked around and I wiped off machines and that was fun.

Kaiser Serajuddin: Yeah.

Nate Green: After that I transitioned to becoming a personal trainer. I got the lowest level certification I could find and just so I could get it done with, which in retrospect, I would actually like to go back and get more of the credited associations or certification from like the NSCA or something like that. But I thought that my knowledge was sufficient enough. I wasn’t going to try to train a bunch of professional athletes. I wasn’t going to try to be a strength conditioning coach. I just wanted to help out regular people and I figured that if I could be better than 99 percent of personal trainers out there, that I would be successful.

So fast forward, about a year after working in the gym, I just didn’t like the environment and I wanted to create my own place. So I partnered up with another trainer friend of mine and him and I took out about $20,000 worth of loans and found a spot and there’s a downtown spot that’s a really, really nice cost, about maybe $1300 or $1400 a month for rent. Depending on where you are in the country, depending on [0:03:27] [Indiscernible] that’s not a lot but if you’re in Montana where we’re at, then that is huge.

Kaiser Serajuddin: Oh, yeah.

Nate Green: So our overhead was really high from the start and so I was working, getting up at 5:00, 6:00 AM, working eight, nine, ten-hour days training clients. We got really busy. We’re doing really well, making a lot of money from it and after about two years, I just burned out. I couldn’t do it anymore. I just didn’t want to wake up at 5:00 AM. My own workout sucked. I didn’t have any passion for it anymore.

I wasn’t giving everything to my clients that I should have been and I felt that and instead of just trying to kind of push through it, I started looking for other options. So I’ve always been into writing and I’ve contributed to T-Nation and to Men’s Health and Men’s Fitness and all these other fitness publications for the last few years but it has never really been a main focus. It’s more of just a freelance.

So I started looking at that, taking it more seriously and I think July of last year, I was offered a fulltime position with T-Nation which I jumped on. So that tripled my income and now I get to wake up at like – I woke up today at 9:00 AM. I went and worked out and now I’m talking to you and it has been great so far but if I had to go back, I don’t think I would go back on [0:04:51] [Indiscernible] different field. It’s not something I’m into anymore.

The book Built for Show focuses on building muscle and losing fat and looking good enough to hook up or whatever you want to call it. So I’m still training people I guess in that sense and my article still deals with working out, in fitness and I still have to connect with the reader but as far as the one-on-one training or small group training, I’m just over that whole concept.

Kaiser Serajuddin: Yeah.

Nate Green: I’m so glad I switched. I’m just a lot happier and I can actually have more of a passion for my own workouts and that was just great, which is the whole reason I got into it [Indiscernible].

Kaiser Serajuddin: Yeah, yeah. There’s nothing to explain about that because that’s one of the great things about personal training. It really gives you a way to get into the fitness industry and you can kind of get a feel for where your passion is and how you want to really explore it and grow. So I think a lot more trainers can learn from your example because personal training just in itself isn’t going to be the career path for everyone. So it’s better to just move on rather than just completely burn out and ruin your life doing it.

Nate Green: Well, I meant to point out too that there are some people – I’m guessing some people know of Alwyn Cosgrove, major mentor of mine, a really good friend.

Kaiser Serajuddin: Yeah, absolutely.

Nate Green: He and I thought about this quite a bit actually is when I got out, I got out I feel for the right reasons. If I would have stayed in there and just wouldn’t have given my clients as much of my attention as I should have, I would be doing them a huge disservice.

So what gets me is the personal trainers that are in the industry know they don’t really want to be in the industry and yet they stay in anyway because that’s not doing anyone any good. We get a bad name as a personal trainer or whatever and our clients get a bad experience and we’re like – I forget how you worded it. It used to be that the actors [0:06:48] [Indiscernible] personal trainer. It’s like they’re waiting for something bigger to happen and so this is going to be good until that happens and that’s not the way we have to approach it.

Like you said, I think it’s a good way to kind of see what you’re interested in and what path you want to take, whether it’s writing, whether it’s making an ebook or a product but I think there’s a basic level of confidence that definitely comes with the job.

Kaiser Serajuddin: Yeah. No, absolutely. Yes, you mentioned that now primarily your fulltime job is as a journalist. Now I’ve been following some of your articles over there on T-Nation. It looks like you really have the chance to meet a lot of interesting people. What’s really the most interesting interview that you had so far?

Nate Green: A couple of years ago, I interviewed a porn star. That was pretty interesting, so a face-to-face interview. I met her in a bar actually.

Kaiser Serajuddin: Yeah, face to face, I bet.

Nate Green: It was a good face-to-face interview.

Kaiser Serajuddin: Yeah.

Nate Green: No way I can go any further than that right now.

Kaiser Serajuddin: All right.

Nate Green: So that was cool and really just being able to talk to Alwyn Cosgrove, John Berardi, all these huge guys I’ve looked up to especially when I first got into the industry and then I met in conferences and I can now call friends. I mean I got them on speed dial. I can just call them up if I have a question and that has been huge for me, the whole networking aspect and I think that’s another step that a lot of people are neglecting too. They’re just hanging out at home, punching on the keyboard and if they go to seminars, they’re not really talking to anybody.

Kaiser Serajuddin: Yeah, yeah. What I also find really interesting is the fitness industry, the people in it, in general are really cool. Until you go out and you go to the conferences and meet the people, you don’t realize this but every one that has made it, they did it basically through the help of others. So everyone is just down to help you out if you go and you look for it.

Nate Green: That’s the biggest thing. I mean going back really quickly again to what Cosgrove told me, Alwyn Cosgrove, he just basically said – he [0:08:44] [Indiscernible] a few things and I asked him if there was anything I could do for him. He said, “No man. Just pay it forward. Just do for other …

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