When you can no longer work it out

Jennifer Candipan knew the relationship had run its course, but she just couldn’t end it. For six months she kept up appearances, until she couldn’t avoid the situation anymore. She had to break up with her trainer.

They weren’t dating, it was simply the typical trainer-client relationship -- friendly workouts two or three times a week at the gym. But the leg presses and ab crunches she once looked forward to weren’t fulfilling her, fitness-wise, and monotony was setting in. When the end came, it wasn’t pretty.

“It was like breaking up with a boyfriend,” says Candipan, a 27-year-old writer living in West Hollywood. “I had guilt issues about it. I avoided his phone calls. I finally told him that I needed to take a break for a while, and he sounded upset. For the first month after that I changed my workout schedule so I wouldn’t run into him.”

The client-trainer relationship was never meant to last forever. Sure, there are pairs that have endured for years, outlasting marriages and jobs. But the majority are short-term affiliations that end for a variety of reasons: boredom, finances, personality clashes, dissatisfaction with results. When Candipan finally ran into her trainer, there were no hard feelings or awkward moments. Having decided that she’s “not the conventional workout person,” she’s now learning Pilates and aerial arts.

Renata Faiman wasn’t happy about cutting her trainer loose, but finances ultimately drove them apart. “Of course you want to look fit, but once the bills start coming in, you start wondering if you can afford it,” says the 23-year-old Los Angeles publicist. Sessions were running about $700 for about 20 sessions. “I felt bad when I had to do it,” Faiman says. “I told her it had nothing to do with her.” Luckily the trainer, also young and without limitless funds, “was totally cool about it.”

Trainers and clients should be thinking of the day they part company, says Fabio Comana, certification and exam development manager for the American Council on Exercise. Trainers should devise a program with goals and dates to achieve them, guiding the client toward eventual self-sufficiency. There will always be those who need perpetual motivation and hand-holding, but most eventually acquire the knowledge and incentive to go it alone.

“Unfortunately we don’t see that often enough,” says Comana, as sometimes trainers rely too much on the paycheck clients provide.

Clients, he adds, should ask trainers exactly what they’re going to learn, how they’re going to learn it, and be assured that eventually they’ll be able to go it alone if they choose to. If a trainer can’t set up and follow a mutually agreed-upon program, consider it a red flag.

When it comes time to split, honesty is the way to go. Some larger gyms provide liaisons, such as personal training directors, so clients don’t have to deal with the trainer directly, easing any tensions. But there can be bad feelings all around. Some trainers take the news too personally and clients feel embarrassed about working out with someone else.

Greener pastures were what drove 23-year-old Alyson Sanders to break off with trainer Steve Zim about 10 years ago. They had gone through a three-year workout relationship when she was skating competitively at the age of 13. Then she was seeing results from her workouts but wanted to shake things up. “I was hearing about all these other types of fitness programs going on, different methods of training,” says Sanders, who lives in L.A.

Zim, with whom she got along, understood. “It was a mutual thing almost,” she said. “He could tell my heart wasn’t in it anymore.”

But the rash of trainers that followed Zim weren’t exactly matches made in heaven, a common situation many people face when searching for the right trainer. Some wouldn’t listen to her concerns, others were giving her bad advice. “One of my trainers said I could eat anything I wanted as long as I exercised, and well, that turned out not to be true,” she says.

When she decided to return to Zim a year ago she was nervous. “I didn’t know if he’d be mad at me,” she says. He wasn’t, and she’s already dropped weight.

Zim’s not the kind to feel like a jilted lover. The owner of A Tighter U fitness studio in Culver City has been around long enough not to take splits personally.

“One client told us that it was time for her to find another program, and I said terrific. If we’re not doing the job for you, you need to find a place that will. And a lot of times they do come back.”

Zim, like many trainers, sometimes has to initiate the split for various reasons, including chronic tardiness, last-minute cancellations and even worse behavior, such as when the client sees the trainer as a convenient punching bag.

“I have zero tolerance for abuse,” says trainer Jeanette Jenkins, whose clients include Queen Latifah and Terrell Owens. “I had a client who was extremely angry -- not at me, but she was taking it out on me. In boxing sessions she’d literally be trying to hit me.” Jenkins decided to call it quits, suggesting to her client she hire a new trainer. “I told her I didn’t want to train her anymore.”

She’s also had to give the heave-ho to male clients who think that buying a package of training sessions entitles them to date the trainer. She has a short answer for that: “It’s never going to happen.”

Over the years, Zim had to let unmotivated clients go, those who repeatedly cancel appointments or try to engage the trainer in long conversations during sessions to avoid working out. “For me,” he says, “I have a finite amount of time. And the client has to feel like he’s progressing. It’s really about feeling comfortable.”