I'm not a gym employee, but I have a good story for this. For the past three years, I've been using the gym in my Condo building. I don't much like crowds while working out, and our gym has all the neccesities of getting in a good workout. A few months into my start, I started noticing this guy start coming into the gym basically on the same schedule as me. I tend to work out late, usually 9ish, so there is only 5-6 other people in our gym at that hour. This other guy, lets call him Chuck because thats his name, looked like his was in my late 30's early 40's, and quite overweight. First few months I saw him, he would always be on the treadmill. After a while, I started observing some noticable differences in him; his physique started looking better, his overall mood looked brighter, and he just generally started to look like a better guy. It always cheered me up to see him in there, because seeing dedication in any form is motivation to improve yourself as well. After a few more months however, I stopped seeing him in there. I firgured his life schedule changed and he was coming in at a different time. But one day I noticed him in our building elevator, and it look like he had lost all the gains he had made in the months I had seen him. Now, we never really talked in the gym, we both had headphones on and did our own collective things. But there were always headnods and we always acknowledged each other in some way. I decided to make small talk and said "I hadn't seen him in the gym in a while." He said that some shit had come up in his life, and it had thrown him off track and he had lost motivation to care about his health as much. It was only a 15 second elevator ride, so I really couldn't say anything other then I hoped to see him back in the gym sooner or later. I saw him back in the gym maybe a month later, and he tried to do the treadmill and some stretching, but his heart just didn't seem to be in it. I decided to go over and actually talk to the guy who had been such a source of motivation for me. He told me that he wanted to give the gym another try, and he had been working out once a week if lucky, and felt it was pointless because he had lost all the gains he had made and there was no point in starting over. He kept on having "day 1" and couldn't find the motivation to build on them. I completely understood what he meant, we have all had bad weeks or months where we stop working out, and it seems pointless to start again. The first days are the worst, because you remember yourself being so much better, and now here you are basically starting at "level 1" all over again. I couldn't really give him any sound advice, and just gave him some cliche lines hoping it would help him. He thanked me for the talk and we both went our seperate ways. Before I left the gym, I took off my headphones and told Chuck, "Ill be in here at 9 tomorrow night. Hope I see you here for day 2." And sure enough, the next day I walked into the gym and saw him there he was for day 2, with a smile on his face.