Good Things Come to Those who ‘Weight’: How one Personal Trainer Lifts Others Up

Personal trainer and Barry’s instructor José Mendoza took a chance on Minneapolis back in June 2023. After saying goodbye to thirty in-person clients, having to look up Minnesota on a map when he first got the invitation, and leaving his entire family for a new state and job, Mendoza took a risk and a bet on himself.

Growing up in Atlanta, Mendoza was first introduced to the world of fitness when he was a student at Tri-Cities High School. He eyed someone with a jacket that read “cross-country.” Mendoza says he remembers asking them shyly, “Hey, what is that?”

“It’s a running club,” said the stranger.

“I remember thinking — oh my God, I would love to do that,” Mendoza says.

Attending a school an hour away from his home, Mendoza says he felt alone. He didn’t know anyone at his school and wanted to be more than the “totally random guy” from south Georgia. He grew up in a different demographic than most of his classmates, coming from the lower middle class.

“I didn’t really know what I was doing when I first started,” Mendoza admitted. “But when I first joined the team — it was through running where I just found myself, and my confidence grew.”

Though now he runs with music, Mendoza used to never run with headphones because he would always envision himself as a character in a grandiose scene: a crowd of people racing to win first place — to break through the finish line and the vision of his family being there in the stands.

The reality? His parents never got to see him race because the commute was so far from home.

“It was always me cheering myself on,” Mendoza says. “It’s almost like you’re teaching yourself with this compilation of your life experiences.”

Mendoza eventually went off to college, attending Georgia State University on the path to becoming an architect. After his first year, though, he changed his major to a sports-oriented field and got his bachelor’s in exercise science in 2015.

“I didn’t see any other Latino people, any gay males that look like me, doing what I was doing, so I wanted to be that person that sets an example so other people can identify with me.”

Jumping into the Fitness World

“You can’t just join Barry’s, you have to either get scouted or asked personally by someone in the company,” Mendoza says.

It was this exclusivity that the average person would have feared, but even Mendoza’s old boss at his first job in the industry at BLAST900 told him from the very beginning: “Why are you not at Barry’s? You have it — and this is not something you can just teach someone — you have the Barry’s.”

Not thinking too much of it at the time, Mendoza told himself “One day”and continued to work at BLAST900 as a fitness manager until the Atlanta location closed in 2021.

Two months after the closure, Mendoza remembers the initial doubt that crept into his mind, as he had already tried getting into Barry’s and didn’t make it in. But he told himself, “If it was meant to be, they will reach out to me.”

Lo and behold, Mendoza received an email in the fall of 2023 with an invitation to join Barry’s, getting an interview, an audition and eventually a part-time spot working as a fitness instructor in January.

Not only was Mendoza also a personal trainer at the time, but he was also training 30-plus clients and was burning himself out, training nearly 12 clients daily, Monday through Friday.

“I was hungry for more, but I noticed that my fire was going down, and I was confused why that was happening,” Mendoza says. “Being in Atlanta my whole life, I’ve always wanted to live elsewhere, but also, being Latino, it’s not something you do; leave your family behind.”

Ultimately, Mendoza ended up moving to Minneapolis, leaving behind nearly 30 of his clients and a solid source of income to be a full-time instructor at Barry’s, teaching 15 classes a week.

“I remember when I was here, I was just, like, in prayer mode, and I was asking the universe to please just give me all the signs if this is the right decision,” Mendoza says.

Building his own business simultaneously, Mendoza now has 12 of his own clients from personal training while working at Barry’s and residing in North Loop with his pup, a bike for transportation and his boyfriend.

Coach Mode On: Mendoza’s Approach to Personal Training and Coaching

When Mendoza is working as a personal trainer, he starts by asking his clients: “Are you clocked in, or are you clocked out? Because if you are clocked in, I want to engage with you, and I want to train you. If you’re clocked out, maybe you should just cancel, and we’ll see you another day.”

Mendoza says results are at the top of his priorities and uses three core concepts that are what he believes are the three keys to success in the fitness world: strategy, mindset and accountability.

Strategy falls under clients’ fitness and nutritional programming, while mindset is about keeping a mentality that is working toward breaking the cycle of old habits, and accountability can look like having a friend join a class and being honest with yourself.

“When clients tell me I don’t have the money, here’s how I relate to it: When I hired a coach, I paid $7k for this coach to train me for a whole year, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s a lot of money,’” Mendoza says. “But, then I was like, this is an investment, this is going to help me out, loving myself to the next level.”

If someone is unable to afford personal training even after they make adjustments to their everyday purchases, Mendoza says simply taking 10,000 steps a day and trying out free videos on YouTube with a balanced, mindful diet is a good place to start to work toward getting a personal trainer in the future.

Combating Fitness and Health Misinformation in a Digital Age

One of the biggest changes Mendoza has observed from Atlanta to Minneapolis is how much harder it has been to get his own clients because many Midwesterners use the outdoors as a venue for cardio.

“I am extremely vocal on Instagram about the fact that people have to lift weights and do so properly to reduce injury,” Mendoza says. “I would be lying if I told you all I did was Barry’s.”

Mendoza stressed that going on YouTube and watching a workout video by an influencer is not the same thing as hiring a personal trainer because the people behind the videos don’t always have certifications or educational backgrounds and, most importantly, are incentivized by subscribers and viewership.

“For some people, I’m like, ‘I hope you realize that this person doesn’t look that way because this is all they do,’” Mendoza says. “These people are actually lifting outside on their own time, but they’re not disclosing that — and that’s just the fitness world these days.”

Whether it’s overconsumption through fitness equipment or habits that claim they lead to fast results, Mendoza says you have to be aware of what you are buying and make sure you are doing your debt list rather than choosing “quick and easy.”

“My own Instagram feed is overwhelming,” Mendoza says. “It’s always, do these movements ‘X’ amount of times, and you’re going to look this way — and that is simply untrue.”

The gaps in many programs found on online apps lie in the fact that they do not take age group, physical limitations, injuries, or future life plans into account, Mendoza says.

“Many of the young’uns are like, ‘I’m just going to do the $30 for 30 days sort of ordeal,’ and I am like, ‘You are wasting your time,’ because at the end of the day with fitness, you have to get back to the basics,” Mendoza says. “You have to keep it simple and know it’s all about progressive overload, adding a little more each week in weight and reps.”

On his own fitness account, Mendoza says he defers from posting content that promises quick results across the board and instead posts his favorite movements for the upper body, examples from his lower body workout circuit or a combo he enjoyed that day.

“If people proceed to ask me, ‘Oh, how many sets and stuff did you do?’ that is when I choose education and maybe even invite them in for a free workout.”

Functionality over Aesthetic: Changing Lives and Mindsets

Happening all in Minneapolis, Mendoza shares how two clients found success through his work as a personal trainer:

From Peloton to … Barbie?

Mendoza has a client who was doing strictly Peloton workouts and asked Mendoza to be her personal trainer the second time they met.

“When I first started training her, it was kind of hard because she had this mentality of, ‘We need to go fast, no breaks and quick movements,’” Mendoza says. “She wanted me to change her workouts every week, like Peloton style.”

With this client, Mendoza says he had to be honest with her — and that meant telling her to take breaks and change her way of thinking from fast-paced and entirely cardio-based to weighted sets and reps.

Just weeks ago, it was her birthday, and upon arriving, Mendoza remembers being outside the Hewing Hotel and seeing a woman in a red, beautiful dress. He looked out the window and gasped: ‘Oh my god, that was my client,’ while Mendoza’s boyfriend exclaimed that she ‘looks like a Barbie.’

Mendoza walked into the room and told his client about their reactions, and immediately felt a rush of joy because, for him — she was a client and a project he had the pleasure of working on.

“Just to see her, looking so gorgeous and confident — that was something that made my day,” Mendoza says.

Functionality is so back

Imagine having nearly every injury a person can think of. Well, for Mendoza, that is the life of one of his clients, who is a retired pro gymnast and, according to Mendoza, was “very scared” of him prior to training.

“She kept telling her friend, ‘Please tell him to take it easy on me,’ and for me, I knew that she was going to be okay because I modify and curate plans that are specialized,” Mendoza says.

Seeing her twice a week and doing mostly bodyweight exercises, Mendoza says she came in nervous and arrived at her next session with uplifted energy while they laughed nearly the whole time.

After a couple more sessions, she was able to do laundry without struggling to pick up her clothes from the basket and was able to stand up and bend down without excessive pain.

“It’s not just about having the six-pack, it’s not just about the number of the scale,” Mendoza says. “A win for me, it’s being able to hold dumbbells for a longer time, maybe your heart rate doesn’t go up as high or as fast as it used to because your cardiovascular is responding well and you’re getting healthier and your heart is getting stronger.

Sometimes Mendoza trains five people in a row, each of them one-hour sessions. Mendoza admits, “It can be exhausting, but these stories of success make it all worth it.”

Looking into the future, Mendoza says he would love to have more clients who are a part of the gay community to train with him because “It’s better when you have someone that you can relate to, with a similar lifestyle.”

At age 32, Mendoza says how he views his own body has changed drastically over the years, as now he prioritizes being able to simply do the things he enjoys.

“When I was in my 20s, the vanity was more real, and I was all about having a six-pack and looking super lean,” Mendoza says. “Now, after having my shoulder dislocated, I still obviously want to look good, but I also want to be able to wake up the next day and do the things that I enjoy doing, so I don’t push myself beyond the point where I’m gonna wake up tomorrow super sore.”