Who needs a personal trainer?

I've come to the conclusion that personal trainers are overrated. Last Friday night at the gym we got cornered by the sales manager for the personal training program at LA Fitness and he signed us up for a free "consultation" on Saturday morning. After going through all the questions, "what is your fitness goal," "what is your biggest obstacle," he ran us through a couple of straining arm exercises. Ouch!! Then we sat down again and got the sales pitch. My favorite part of the conversation was:

Manager: (drawing two numbers on a piece of paper, 149 and 160) So, which price would you choose? (referring to the initial fee for getting started with a personal trainer)

Tabitha: Well, really neither. It doesn't fit into our budget.

Manager: Are you telling me that there's a price on your fitness?

Ben: I majored in economics in college. EVERYTHING has a price.

Manager: (Dumfounded) Okay, don't think about budget right now. Let's say you're going to buy clothes ...

Tabitha: (laughing) Yeah, clothes aren't in the budget right now.

Manger: Okay okay, so let's say you're going to buy gas. Which price would you choose, the lower one, right? You don't have a budget for gas, right? You need it!

Tabitha: Actually, we do have a limit for gas in our budget.

Manager: Ok food. You gotta buy food.

Ben: We have a budget for that too.

The guy just could not get over the fact that we couldn't pay $150 initiation fee and THEN $40 per session on top of that. Go figure!! Who DOES pay that is what I want to know. If you go 3 times a week, that's nearly $500 a month! However, we decided that we definitely needed to hit the weight machines, me to tone muscle and Ben to build muscle, so we started doing research on training and muscle groups. Then we figured, hey, we can do this ourselves! Both of us have come up with a schedule for training that we thing is going to work pretty well for us. So, who needs a personal trainer when I can do it myself?