5 Useful Tips from the Community for New Personal Trainers

After speaking to our incredible Facebook community about what advice they’d give to themselves as recently qualified personal trainers, we had some amazing responses. Interestingly, they were around topics that we commonly see newer trainers asking about in the group.

This is the power of belonging to a group of people that are all developing their skills together; just being around a group of ambitious fitness business owners can do wonders for your business mindset.

1. Becoming Qualified Is Just The Start

Getting your personal trainer qualification is the launchpad to your personal training career, but if you stop learning there, you will miss out on one of the most rewarding aspects of having your own business. As you develop your skills as a personal trainer, you’ll develop your interests around health and fitness too. You may discover a passion for nutrition, particular styles of training or find it particularly rewarding to work with a group of people with a medical condition. This could be the start of your niche developing.

Recognising the need for ongoing study after you qualify is absolutely normal. And, in fact, essential to your development as a highly qualified specialist personal trainer. When you’re researching who to take advice from, always learn from people who are well placed to teach you. In fact, as Justin pointed out in the Facebook thread, it’s often the business skills that are most in need of ongoing education.

2. Niche Is Important, But It’s Not A Race

If you’ve spent any length of time at all learning how to market your personal training services, you’ll have come across the importance of developing your niche. While this is important, especially for online trainers, it’s important to remember that you’re not in a race to find your niche from day one.

In fact, experience working with the broad range of clients known as “gen pop” (general population) who have fairly generic goals but a wide range of personalities can be a fantastic way to actually find your niche. Niche is in part about who the client is and what they want to achieve but it’s also about the kind of people you enjoy working with most.

3. What Happens Outside The Session Is Just As Important As Inside

It doesn’t take a great deal of time on the gym floor to realise that the time the client doesn’t spend training with you is having a greater impact on their goals than the hour or two you’re together each week. Being in a position to support them through the other 23 hours in the day with guidance on nutrition, time management, sleep, and motivation was once considered to be “beyond the remit” of the trainer, and we should stay inside our scope of practice. 

If you feel uncomfortable supporting your client with that, it may be worth investing some time and resources into bringing those things inside your scope of practice. Those factors are going to have a significant impact on your client, and how hard they can push during  their gym sessions.

Similarly, as Sasha identifies in the Facebook thread, recognising that there may be times when you work as part of a network of health professionals. This means you’re able to provide your client with a suite of health-focused behaviours, including psychological, social factors and even chronic pain management. You’ll develop professional contacts inside related communities that you can collaborate with.

4. Keep It Simple

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you need to impress your client with all your knowledge. They already recognise you as a specialist. The purpose of working with any professional will be to take something that your client finds complicated and make it easy for them to understand and perform.

As Lorna identifies, giving only one or two cues for an exercise and then letting the client practice and feel the movements. They are likely to do the one cue better and after a few practice reps, you’ll be able to give them the next cue once they’ve got a feel for the last one. When they get that one movement right - even if everything else is wrong - remember to praise them, and tell them why or how they did a good job.

5. It’s Your Business

It’s important to recognise as early as possible that you’re a business owner. The purpose of a business is to look after you. It should be something you enjoy working on. That means you need to be able to take time off whenever you need to, to look after yourself.

It also means that you can say no to working with clients that you don’t enjoy working with. That actually might be evidence that you’re developing a clear niche, but you can always refer them to another trainer if you find you need to for any reason. 

One of the things new trainers commonly struggle with is knowing what to charge. Know that you don’t have to be the cheapest trainer in your gym to have a successful business. In fact, the cheapest trainer in your gym that is competing on price very probably doesn’t have a very successful business, and may actually resent the hours they’re doing.

As Kefilwe says, your price is up to you. You can charge whatever you want, but you’re likely to base that in part on what other trainers in your area charge, how much you want to earn divided by the number of clients you want to work with, and your experience and expertise.

Conclusion

Personal training is a rewarding career, and it can feel frustrating when you compare your first year with someone else’s 10th. Showing up for your clients with integrity, helping them to move and feel better, and being a consistently positive factor in their lives is an incredible career. You can specialise whenever you want, but don’t feel like you need to make a decision on that immediately. It’s likely to find you over time. It’s your business, and you can run it however you want.