I am over 70 years of age and have a rare form of blood disease that is not curable and I sometimes don’t have a lot of energy.  I must work out every day as a personal ideal but I do like to throttle back my exercise depending upon how I feel.  The problem taking a fitness club trekking class is the instructor takes a look at you and seems to make a snap judgement as to what level you can perform in their class.   Thus, there is this constant battle of my trying to arrange my own workout intensity against the perceived wishes of the trainer.   Over the years I have devised a list my own rather devious methods for managing my trainer and my workout.

• Join a class. Do not receive individual instruction.  In a class, you can better hide from the trainer and do what you want for speed and incline.
• Always show up late so you can take a spot away from the trainer.  You really want to be to the far right or left side of a trainer that faces the treadmills.  The most deadly spot is taking a treadmill right in front of the trainer.  Showing up late also shaves off total class time.
• Tell the instructor you need to warm up, thus you can typically use much lower settings of incline and speed for a while.  Almost all trainers understand that a person arriving late must warm up.
• Keep doing your warm up until the instructor spots the fact that you have been warming up for the past half hour.
• When the instructor tells you to go up to a high speed, don’t if you don’t want too.  To hide this fact, just appear to run faster by taking shorter strides.  If the instructor likes to walk around to spot speed and incline, put a towel over the display panel to hide the readouts.
• Try not to take a spot next to the student who follows exactly what the instructor tells the class.  Try to find other students that also shave off speed settings and chose a treadmill next to theirs.  You really don’t want to be running next to a person at speed 6 while you are at 5.
• Many treadmills have at least two methods of entering speed.  Choose the slowest method when going up in speed.  The treadmills at my club have direct speed enter as one method and up and down arrows as an entry for the second method.  I chose the up and down arrows and press them slowly.  I often can shave off 15 seconds or more from a speed increase.  Obviously, choose direct entry for speed when going down in speed if it is faster.
• Try to distract the trainer by conversation and then try to detect if they can remember the last speed and incline number.  Often times an instructor will call out the same incline and speed because they were engrossed in telling the class a story.   Most often some knucklehead student reminds the instructor we already are at that speed and incline which really ruins it.
• If you are caught with a lower treadmill incline than the other students, pretend that you failed to hear the last directions.  You can also pretend to be in a meditative state and failed to hear anything.  This works best if you hold the hand rail and close your eyes to paint the picture that you are zoned out in some Zen moment but make sure you can run a treadmill with your eyes closed.
• Having loud conversations with a person in the next treadmill often works for explaining that you did not hear the speed of 6 when you are currently at 3.  This really works if the person you are taking too also is at the same speed and incline you are.
• I also have razzed the instructor occasionally with comments that in past months they were setting lower work out speeds but now are being more aggressive. If the instructor is motivated to think about how this might have happened you must measure if this turns out well for you or not.
• I found out that I can clip some time off my class by removing the cover shirt that I wear over my tank top.  It is safe to do this off the treadmill and then I walk over to the bins used to house our workout bags and place the garment into the bag and walk back.  Bathroom breaks are also in this category for shaving time off and getting a recovery.
• If the instructor likes short recovery times, challenge and complain.  This really depends, obviously, on the instructor as to how successful this plays out.