Introduction

What You'll Learn
Learn what it takes to become a personal trainer in a thriving industry. Understand the physical, psychological and emotional demands of working with an extensive client base.

Why it's Important 
Aside from the Institute of Personal Trainer Code of Ethical Conduct, the fitness industry is widely unregulated. But personal training is a profession nonetheless and should be seen that way should you choose to join the industry.

Table of Contents:
Pros & Cons of Being a Personal Trainer
Personal Trainer Salary
Finding Your Why
What it Takes to be a Personal Trainer
Getting Qualified
Becoming a Fitness Business Owner
Creating a Business Plan
Career Progression Options

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Pros and Cons of Being a Personal Trainer

Before embarking on your new career, let’s weigh up some of the pros and cons of becoming a personal trainer, so you can decide if it’s for you.

Our top 3 pros for becoming a personal trainer include:

1. Rewarding Work
   When you successfully help a client improve their health and fitness, you can often witness a full transformation of character. It’s hard to believe it when you’re just starting out, but even your clients will become amazed at what they achieve.
   
2. Flexibility
   Once you have established a client base, you can more or less choose your hours, days off and holidays. Some trainers work early mornings and early afternoons, and others choose to work late afternoons to evenings. The beauty of it, is that you choose!
   
3. High Earning Potential
   There is an excellent earning potential for driven personal trainers. Dependant on your location, it’s not uncommon for trainers to charge up to $100 (£70.00) per hour. This can be even more if you choose to do semi-private or boot-camp styled sessions.
   

3 of the main cons of becoming a personal trainer include:

1. Steep learning curve
   Personal training isn’t a matter of having knowledge of just training and nutrition - you really have to become a good businessperson, coach, and salesperson as well.
2. Uncertain income
   If you take the freelance personal trainer option, there is no guarantee of income. It comes down to your ability to sell your services and retain your clients.
3. Draining Work
   Doing back-to-back sessions sounds easy, but the reality is that the work is mentally and physically draining.

Should you do it?

With all that being said, we don’t want you to think the cons should put you off. We’ve created this guide to help you overcome some of them. Read on to find out the 7 steps to becoming a personal trainer.

Personal Trainer Salary

To many, becoming a personal trainer is a dream career, filled with prestige, flexibility and job satisfaction. You’re helping people, every day, to optimise their health and fitness and improve the quality of their lives.
 
Sounds great, right? Well, it really is!

Becoming a personal trainer is a highly appealing profession to a number of people. Many individuals who enjoy working with people, remaining physically fit and helping people change their lives for the better will pursue this profession. Not to mention you can make a pretty good personal trainer salary!

However, this does not necessarily mean it is an easy career path to follow.

A personal trainer’s job is far more demanding than simply hanging out at the gym all day people watching and telling others what to do. The psychological and physical demands of personal training weed out many newcomers to the profession within the first year.
 
In this lesson, we’re going to start by looking at some of the pros and cons of becoming a personal trainer. If you still decide it’s for you, keep reading, because we then lay out 7 steps on how you can become one.

LEARN MORE: PERSONAL TRAINER SALARY

Personal Training For the Right Reasons

The popular business book by Simon Sinek called “Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action” encourages business owners to approach their business by answering the big question - “why?”

You’ll be putting some long hours in at the beginning, so having a “why” will help to keep you motivated.

Not only will it keep you motivated, but it will also make it much easier to sell your service to potential clients.

For many personal trainers, fitness changed their lives in such drastic ways that the natural next step was for them to inspire and coach others on making similar changes.

Once you’ve figured out your “why”, you can then figure out the “what” and the “how”. However, as Simon says, it all starts with “why”.

On the surface, personal training looks like the best job in the world for anyone interested in health and fitness.

You get to work in a gym, train when you like and talk fitness all day with your peers and clients.

While this isn't completely untrue, there are a lot more facets to becoming a personal trainer that most people thinking about joining the industry overlook.

What it Takes to be a Personal Trainer

While it might seem as though becoming a personal trainer would be the dream job. It comes with its demands that are often overlooked before starting your career.

The Physical Demands

The physical demands of personal training can be challenging for some individuals. You might be in great shape, but you may still grow tired of the constant work required to stay in shape after a few years. Check out this video Frank Torres on his day as a trainer...

​You might also experience personal injury from overexertion if you are not careful. You will often have to demonstrate exercises or do them alongside your client to keep them motivated. Pushing yourself too hard in one day with multiple clients will take its toll on your body if you are not monitoring your own activities.

Scheduled rest and proper nutrition (the same thing you advice your clients) is essential. 

The Psychological Demands

The psychological demands of personal trainers are often too much for beginners to the industry; in fact, between the psychological and physical demands of the industry, most people change professions within six months to a year.

One of the great psychological challenges to overcome is the limited and potentially sporadic client base. It often takes years to develop a loyal client base and many people are not prepared for the uncertainty and commitment involved with building clients over time. If you are a good trainer who works hard and chooses a niche, you will grow your client base organically over time – but you must be patient in the meantime.

Getting Qualified

Before you can become a personal trainer and start changing lives and influencing people, there are a few pieces of paper you’ll need to obtain:

1. Level 2 Gym Instructor qualification - this is a pre-requisite to the Level 3 PT qualification
2. Level 3 Personal Trainer qualification - although University graduates with an appropriate honours degree can also advertise and market themselves as qualified personal trainers without the level 3 via a governing body like the Register of Exercise Professionals
   
3. First aid certificate - this will depend on your employer if you decide to go the employed route
4. Insurance - essential if you're self employed but likely provided for you if employed.
   

LEARN MORE: THE BEST PERSONAL TRAINING INSURANCE IN THE UK
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Becoming a Fitness Business Owner

Other areas in which some personal trainers can struggle is building a fitness business. That's because once you become a personal trainer you tend to think of yourself as just that, a trainer.

But in actual fact, you're not a trainer. Personal training is a service and you are a business owner. One of the biggest hurdles for new fitness professionals is learning this and that's why we built the Institute of Personal Trainers. To help new trainers get better at business using our 8 step model.

We use this 8 pronged approach to building a successful personal training business because it covers every aspect of what makes all businesses successful. With it, you'll learn all about the business mindset, branding, money and finances, systems, sales, marketing, management and essential skills.

Creating a Personal Trainer Business Plan

Naturally, the first step to creating a successful fitness business is to create a business plan. A business plan will act as the roadmap from which you'll make some of the fundamental decisions to move your business forward.

A good business plan will help you to explore the competition, decide on a brand, set your rates, build yuor packages and choose a niche.

LEARN MORE: PERSONAL TRAINER BUSINESS PLAN
LEARN MORE: BUILD YOUR ONLINE PERSONAL TRAINING PACKAGES
LEARN MORE: HOW TO SET YOUR PERSONAL TRAINING RATES

Career Progression Options

It's exciting to think about your new venture as a personal trainer as the final stepping stone to your dream life. But being a personal trainer isn't always the end of the road.

You'll find yourself moving away from the typical gym setting into other areas that often require higher levels of expertise, an increased salary and give you an improved quality of life. Some of those career progressions include:

1. High end coaching - You might want to take your experience or system and turn it into a high end coaching service that caters to high level individuals.
2. Management - If you become tired of the gym floor then management may be for you. The best fitness club managers are often the ones that worked their way up.
3. Business ownership - A big step that a lot of trainers take. Buying a gym and hiring a team is no small feat but often worth it for the highly motivated trainers.
4. Clinical work - This involves taking your qualifications to another level and venturing out in to further education to become a therapist, clinician or advanced sports trainer.
5. Consulting - If you've put your hours in and you find you're great at business, why not share your expertise with other novice personal trainers?

LEARN MORE: 5 CAREER PROGRESSION OPTIONS FOR PERSONAL TRAINERS

Should You Become a Personal Trainer?

Personal training can be an extremely rewarding career. Don’t rush the decision – it’s a big commitment but if you take the decision seriously, commit to lifelong self-improvement and genuinely care about helping others, you will find solemn in being a personal trainer.

Clearly, the field of personal training is not for everyone, but individuals who are able to cope with the psychological and physical demands of the personal trainer industry can be highly successful.

Those who succeed as personal trainers will have a positive energy, a drive to learn new things, an understanding of their limitations, suitable specializations and a work ethic to build and maintain their client base. Only you can decide whether you should become a personal trainer; but if these qualities describe you, you could very well make an excellent one.

Exercise:

Go to page 2 of your iPT Workbook and complete the exercise for this lesson.

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