Spotlight Trainer of the Month August 2002 International Sports Science Association Article reproduced from protraineronline.com

By David Gluhareff

I remember lying face down on my bed crying when I was young. My mother was there scratching my back like she did every night. She was listening to me tell of being turned down by a girl that I liked so much from elementary school. I was crying my eyes out not onl because the girl “just wanted to be friends,” but because I felt that me being overweight was the reason she only wanted to be friends. During my weeping / venting session my mom heard me explain what it was like to be fat. I would be the butt of jokes all the time. I could not wear the usual sizes of clothing the other kids my age were wearing. I was embarrassed to walk into crowded areas. Never did I like eating in front of people. I was usually too large to ride on the bikes of my friends. My shirt always stayed on when I played sports because I was scared people would make fun of my fat body. I did everything I could to get out of swimming in front of strangers or even people who were not my close friends or family. Mom was very understanding and tried to ease my pain with her positive motherly comments. The problem was, I knew she knew I had a big problem. That problem only got worse. By the time I was sixteen years of age I had ballooned-up to three hundred and five pounds. At that time I was at my biggest. I was a six foot two inch junior in high school at that time and had just gotten my license and a vehicle. That was supposed to be one of the high times of my life. The only problem was I was fat. I was very athletic and I had a good head on my shoulders, but I was fat. I was so fat I could not even wrestle for my high school. The weight limit was two hundred and seventy five pounds. When lunch time came around I would dread walking through the cafeteria. I tried to blend in with my friends, but that was like a five hundred pound gorilla trying to blend in with a flock of flamingos. What made things even worse was the fact that I did not even eat breakfast in the mornings. At 6 am I was never hungry. Lunch came around 11:30 am and I would still not be hungry. Usually I would get home at 4:45 p.m. from school and get a snack like a honeybun and a soda. Then I would go play a sport for a few hours. Dinner would be around 7 p.m. and I would eat three or four helpings. After dinner I would watch TV and finally go to bed. To me eating only one meal and one snack a day was not a lot. With that in mind I was confused as to why I was so fat. Again, I was very athletic. The football coaches wanted me as a tackle, defensive goal, and fullback. My speed and strength along with my size impressed the coaches at football camp/tryouts when I was fifteen. I was all over the field during that week long camp. When they wanted us to run I would and I would give it my all. I was pretty fast for a three hundred pounder. I could keep up with eighty five percent of the guys there. Why was I so fat when I was not a lazy lump eating mounds of junk food all day? Why me? Why was I so fat that the girl only wanted to be my friend. Why was I so fat that I was embarrassed by my body. My elementary and middle to high school times were so tuff. Kids and teenagers could be so mean and offensive. It was like they only wanted me to feel bad. To me I felt out of place with the world. I felt as though the world was full of skinny people and I did not fit. My mom changed my life forever. She started getting up earlier than usual to make me breakfast. I believe she read somewhere that breakfast jump-started the metabolism. A month later I had lost about fifteen pounds. I soon started cutting back on my evening meals. That cut-back led to another fifteen the next month. My next big change was going for a walk in the evenings. After my weight had dropped even more I attempted jogging. The longest distance I ever jogged was seven and eight tenths of a mile. That long jog was at two hundred and fifty pounds. Over the next year I had dropped down to two hundred and five pounds. That was a total of one hundred pounds lost. The only problem was that I was keeping the weight off with only diet and cardiovascular exercises. Soon after, a friend of mine approached me about lifting weights. She believed I could pack on quality muscle and she was right. I gained ten pounds the first month. The great thing was this ten pounds was pure muscle. Resistance training helped me to not have to be so strict with my diet and cardio. It helped me burn more calories all day. The weights also helped change the shape of my body to give me a more muscular look. I was fascinated by these changes in my body. That fascination led me to search for a quality personal training certification company. I found the International Sports Sciences Association after about a month of searching. No other organization caught my attention like the ISSA. The ISSA was a perfect match. I used the seminar and home-study course to get my certification. I wanted to be certified to help others feel as good as I did. The most important thing my certification did for me was teach me what mistakes I made in the past so I would not repeat them on myself or others. Presently I am twenty five years old and have had a great time growing with the ISSA. With my personal training certification I built an almost fifty thousand dollar a year business while still going to college. My business included me doing the following in a city of about fifty thousand people: training people one on one (at home or in a fitness facility) in exercise and nutrition, training groups of people at gyms, being the personal trainer to the local hospital for their employees, holding summer exercise groups for kids at a local elementary school, teaching college level weight training / wellness classes for a local community college, consulting local gyms on fitness equipment and exercise classes, training college athletes, training bodybuilders of all ages, guiding intense professional people (doctors, lawyers, executives, etc...) through the weight loss process, and I also have been paid just to walk with people. My business was successful because I was certified by a very reputable company (ISSA). The International Sports Sciences Association helped me build a wonderful business which has helped me to help people feel good about themselves. Helping others as a professional trainer with a professional organization has given me a great sense of well being. Thank you ISSA!

David Gluhareff has been a Certified Personal Fitness Trainer since the late 1990's!