It seems like everyone I know wants to be a personal trainer. These people have found the amazing gift of fitness, which has brought them confidence, discipline and improved mood. They would like nothing more than help others get there, too. Trainers are some of the most passionate people I know: they spend most of their time wondering how they can help people get better. The industry knows this. The industry loves this. The industry uses this.
There are no shortage of pathways available to people who want to become trainers. While the certifications and courses are on a continuum of being god-awful to being well-respected, these certifications do not show people their actual prospects of succeeding and what this job is really about. Why would they? I have been to way too many workshops where almost everyone in the room barely trains at all and paid even more money to listen to some trainer we end up worshipping (you were the one who brazenly introduced the mamba to Hi-Lo step? YOU ARE A GODDESS).
The industry has a steady stream of people willing to pay hundreds, and sometimes thousands, to become certified while not knowing the reality of how many sales it will take to pay off; you’ll be amazed at the amount of people who after two years still have not made enough net money to pay for original certification costs. This is because of industry changes, not understanding what the job is actually about, and lack of planning the financial aspect of being a personal trainer.
This article is not for the bored weekend warrior, stay at home mom or dad, the retiree or fortunate inheritance beneficiary. This article is for those who are seriously considering personal training as their career and only source of income. When people look to the industry for information, current trainers treat them just like clients: Cheerlead! Celebrate! Confidence! We are doing a disservice to you.
Industry Changes
I grew up in a rural area. There were only two, box gyms in the entire county. If you ran into anyone who said they were going to the gym, you knew where they were headed depending if you were in the east or west. In the past 10 years, this has ballooned to two YMCAs, one AnytimeFitness, two Snap Fitness, a couple independent chains, one Gold’s Gym, three Cross Fits, one Curves and several studios. Circa 2006, we did a market analysis for one of the original gyms and scored extremely high on people identifying us as the leader of wellness in the community. The consultant’s answer as to why was simple: you are the only show in town.
This new competition has been extremely helpful to the consumer. The idea that you could get access to a gym for only 10 dollars per month would have been laughable in the early 2000s, but now everyone’s pricing is trending this way. Gym contracts have started to go the way of VHS tapes. Services are no longer bundled so you can pay a la carte for what you actually need.
In response, gym owners and managers have three courses of action: keep expenses extremely low (mostly in the way of salaries), get volume without participation (sign up 100 people for memberships and hope only a few show) and use personal trainers as a way to cover variable costs (memberships keep the lights on, but personal training actually makes owners wealthy).
This means gym salaries suck while needing more trainers for less people to train. Prospecting hours are usually minimum wage and will be removed after a certain probation period. The pay rate for actually training a client isn’t typically good (as low as $12 an hour). Realize this hourly rate doesn’t factor in time spent prospecting, programming, and implementing.
In response to gyms needing more personal training revenue, there has been an influx of easy certifications to produce more trainers. You can choose the open book exam that you may take for $99 (here) or a weekend workshop where everyone passes (here). Even if you take one of the more advanced certs, don’t sweat it; while the materials may include high-level things (biochemistry, biomechanics and anatomy), it usually never makes its way to the test.
Personal training is a great job for those who do not care about the fiscal implications. A big constituency of people who are trainers do not care about the income. They get out of the house, socialize and help people. Doesn’t get any better than that.
This makes life hell: they are willing to work any wacky hours because efficiency doesn’t matter to them (Three hour gaps between clients? That’s cool!), not care about horrible payouts (I’ve never looked at my check!) and they will inevitably pull away potential clients (Team work everyone!). Managers are also caught in this game. Whether five employees sold the revenue or ten, it only matters about the final numbers. To get there, you need multiple people at a wide range of times.
Pay attention to the trainers at the gym you attend: every three months usually comes a rotation of trainers leaving and coming. The probation period for prospecting has ended, they don’t have enough clients for sustainable income and have been sold on another attempt elsewhere. I joke and say I don’t have enough data to pull up a trainers’ resume on my phone, and it’s because 1) trainers are constantly moving from place to place to try and make something happen and 2) that you need to work at multiple places to even survive.
The disdain for big-box gyms is well known, and it would be myopic if I pretended that this was all the fitness industry had to offer, but it is a good starting point: most likely you will end up here at some point. In response, trainers do all sorts of things to try and make a living. Most new trainers do not actually know what the day-to-day life of a successful trainer looks like because there are so few successful trainers to role model.
What the Job Actually is:
I should be clear that I do not consider myself a “successful” trainer. I was lucky enough to get a managerial job very early on and not have to do the ground-level grind, even though I have worked for a few different gyms solely as a trainer. Where I managed was mostly at gyms where people burned 50 calories on a NuStep and celebrated with copious amounts of donuts and coffee in the lobby — otherwise known as Healthy Living.
This might give the implication that since I was not a successful, independent entity that I should not be talking about the problems of training. While this would be an ad hominem and not actually address my arguments, let me twist this another way: I have nothing to sell you. There isn’t a workshop, class or certification I’m trying to get you to purchase. I am not trying to launch my status in fitness by being viewed as a thought leader or recruiting you for my gym. I am also not enjoining you to work longer, do more with less and spread yourself as thin as gluten-free, pizza dough.
And trust me, burned out you will be, but probably not because of the reasons you think.
There is a huge gap between what a trainer ostensibly does and the actual interaction with clients. Since this industry is really only about sales, most of the time is spent selling people on experiences and results. The financial pressures also bring a whole litany of negative outcomes for clients: poor programming, learned helplessness and accepting people outside their scope of practice. For trainers, it is easy to rationalize away these problems.
People’s idyllic version of training goes something like this: a person comes in with a wellness goal, and after being sold on the experience/plan by a trainer, the trainer implements the plan, results come in a mostly linear fashion and everyone rejoices with before and after photos. After all, this person is spending anywhere from $500 to a $1000 per month to come and work on this specific goal, showing they are motivated and willing to seek help.The Current State of Personal Training: an Industry Perspective of Personal Trainers in a Small Southeast Community
This can’t be further from the truth. Let me state clearly that in personal training, the wellness goal rarely matters. I understand this is tantamount to saying the Sun revolves around the Earth, especially for an industry whose supposed goal is mostly sexy appeal. Otherwise, what the hell is going on? While the starting point is always a wellness goal, this can quickly devolve into clients showing up for miscellaneous reasons with a tacit agreement to never acknowledge the goal posts have moved.
This study, The Current State of Personal Training: an Industry Perspective of Personal Trainers in a Small Southeast Community, has some GOLDEN quotes about exactly what I’m talking about (emphasis mine):
“Personality is huge. I mean, I’ve seen [clients] stay with [trainers] with, you know, they’re caring, considerate. They have them do the worst exercises! They’re wasting their time, talking about the movie they saw last night while [the clients are] doing their triceps press-downs, but they love working with them because-they’re not really interesting in having a trainer and getting results—but they know they’re going to see their friend for $35 an hour.”
“One trainer stated, “I’d much rather get results. But at the same time, if [the clients] don’t have a husband to listen, they don’t have any kids in the family, basically all they have is their work, then you become their best friend, pretty much. And they look forward to seeing you once or twice a week, or three times a week. So you basically become more than just a trainer to these people.”
At one of the gyms I managed, there was this super-sweet trainer that always was so understanding and empathetic no matter how far their client strayed from the workout plan. Someone could not have worked out that week because they were busy keying people’s cars, and he would have promptly said “No Problem. Let’s get it going again!”
I asked “How can you handle it? Almost none of your folks are reaching their wellness goals, they almost never workout without you, and barely put effort in during your session. How do you keep showing up so enthused?”
The response annotated: if they barely make it in here once a week with me, then what chance will they have if you remove me from the picture? When they are ready, they will pick it up again.
I realize all of this makes me sound like an unmitigated asshole. Who am I to say why you should or should not purchase something and what you should or shouldn’t get out of it? Completely correct. Also, if someone gets out of the house, builds social networks, and feels more productive, they are very much accomplishing a wellness goal. This isn’t about the consumer being wrong – people can pull whatever they want out of their experience with their trainer regardless of what their original intentions were.
This is about preparing people considering the field for what many sessions are actually like. We get so stuck in promoting ourselves (the workouts, the testimonials, the eagerness to help), that sometimes it is difficult to step back and realize what is actually happening in our sessions. The pitch doesn’t equal the reality.
Most of your clients will see some results from working out with you, but then the monster of lifestyle change will rear its head and the rules change; the wells get deeper to dig and progress stops. Ever see someone working with a trainer for months and they never change physically? It’s because people aren’t here for the stated wellness goal: it’s a chance to have a moment to themselves, a chance to use a trainer to complain about their lives, a chance to feel productive.
This has led many people to say that certifications are worthless; it is only about motivation and getting people on board that matters. This is entirely true. Your value as a trainer is to be a plastic, moldable creature, obliging to the sustainable reason the client continues to come. Are you going to be okay on session 54 when your client has again yo-yoed back to original weight, done everything to avoid personal responsibility and continues to complain about their spouse while looking for affirmation that their past diet transgressions have been forgiven?
Personal training is about constantly teetering the balance of a multi-dimensional scale. Yes: one of the weighing plates does have the label of results, but also on this scale are plates for motivation, perceptions, programming, adherence, self-image, personality, sales and countless others. Realize now your job will be mostly behavior change, not exercise programming, and really consider the implications of that.
Someone comes to you and you identify barbell training is the best way for them to get the results they want. Guess what: most people do not want to do barbell training. You can either try to win an epistemological argument about exercise or do what they find motivating. You cannot afford losing a client over something like this. At a conference, a “Trainer of the Year” told a packed room to never wed yourself to a tool at the gym because it is going to automatically cut down on sales opportunities. Funny how the focus isn’t on what’s most effective for a client, but ways for you to be more marketable.
The amount of clients needed to sustain any sort of lifestyle is pretty high (the focus of the next section). This means that any opportunity to sell cannot be turned down. Certain ethical dilemmas arise from this that might tweak your values. Just like the trainer I knew had rationalized his relationship with his clients (maybe one day they’ll change!), you too might find yourself facing situations you didn’t original predict but must face to make enough money.
Dilemma: Should I give in to poor programming because my client is motivated by it even though it won’t help her reach her wellness goal?
Rationalization: If she quits training with me, she might be less likely to keep coming to the gym, so let me give in to her enough and hopefully change things over time.
Dilemma: I don’t have any knowledge about people with (insert any medical condition here), and I don’t want to mess it up.
Rationalization: I’ll study it online and prepare myself for them – I can’t turn a client down! It’s a chance to learn!
Dilemma: I don’t think my client needs any of these supplements he keeps buying from the gym, but I get a commission off of them and I need the money.
Rationalization: Well he is an individual and should be able to educate himself on what he needs, and if it makes him feel better, what’s the harm?
I had a prospective client come up to me saying that they wanted to work on their core and tone up (the words core and tone up always means things are about to go awry). What came next was a laundry list of red flags: poor body image, bad relationship with food, tons of cyclical diet patterns, misconception of appropriate exercise routine, desiring poor programming. Think about working with this person: do you have the mental wherewithal to show up to every session, listen to the new, wacky diet plan, put them through bad routines (60 minutes of crunch variations!) and say with a straight face “good job, see you next week?”
If you are a successful trainer, you would no doubt take this on and see what happens, because to be successful you work with everyone which takes a certain gumption.
Triple-Heart bypass? Sure! ACL reconstruction? Sure! Aspiring Boxer! Sure! Olympic Athlete? Yea, Why not! Training to withstand a stronger gravitational force on an expo planet! Of course, I got you! There is a certain ego that must be obtained to have a chance of making a career that suspends any hesitation that you might not be, at any moment, the best person to help any individual. Trainers complain about this all the time: that’s bad programming; this person’s going to eventually get hurt; what are they doing! None of this truly matters: we are selling experiences and feelings and not wellness outcomes.
On this post about the problems of being a trainer, someone said in the comment section “what you can expect when at your base level, you are just a cheerleader and motivator.” At first, this plucked my identity: but we do so much more! Then I realized that most of our programming is shit because of time constraints, that most people just need us as an appointment to put in the calendar and that we don’t really have such a unique skill set to justify a higher salary. Add in the amount of time you actual spend to secure a client and the costs do not seem to be worth it.
Income, Time and Costs
Does the prospect of working 60 hour weeks, driving to multiple gyms and flirting with financial disaster seem appealing with the chance of, if you are more successful than half of your peers, earning $36,000 a year without benefits? Especially when that pay-off is only a long-term possibility?
Sales Chart to Earn $37,700 Gross:
| Place | Gym 1 | Gym 2 | Self-Employed | Totals |
| Clients per Week | 10 | 10 | 5 | 25 per week |
| Price per Session | 20 | 15 | 75 | – |
| Yearly Income | 10,400 | 7,800 | 19,500 | 37,700 Gross |
| Sessions | 260 | 520 | 520 | 1200 yearly |
If you were able to conduct 1200 sessions a year at this payout structure, you could make 37,700 gross (I wanted to keep the numbers easy to digest, so I’m off from the median). The amount of hustle and grind that this spreadsheet contains is hard to communicate. Really study this: look at having to work at three places; look at the rates per session; imagine having 25 clients a week to program for.
If you worked every day, that would be 3.5 sessions a day to make this work. This means starting at 5am and training people till 10pm from Sunday to Sunday – you cannot turn people down to get here, so you need to always be available. This requires 60+ hours weekly to maintain. The costs of certifications, marketing, insurance, tax, self-employment tax and other necessary factors are absent.
In personal training, there are a few divisions of time: prospecting, programming and conducting. The entire previous section was only about conducting sessions, which is actually a small percentage of your time. Most of your time is spent prospecting, and very soon you will learn that programming, the purpose of all your education, gets dwindled down to nothing.
Let’s posit a range of 2-5 hours to secure just one client. At best, for you to convince 10 people to train with you, it will take 20 hours to make that happen. If you add the 10 hours for the actual training, you are up to 30. Most likely, this is at multiple places. The driving between places and meeting people at different locations will easily add 1.5 hours for traveling every day for 7 days. Let’s call it an even 10 hours for traveling. Bam: 40 hour work week.
Without even having a workload that is fiscally sustainable and covers your expenses, we have a full , including this PTDC articlework week without including actually preparing for the sessions. If you ever wonder why programming is so poor in gyms, look no further: no one has time to individualize anything. Most people, including this PTDC article, suggest a base template that you can either scale up or scale down for a person. While this is a smart solution, it doesn’t lend itself to long-term viability: most people want constant variety, so more workouts will be made or risk losing the client.
In comes the circus workout. Ever see someone with a trainer running around the gym like a chicken with its head cut off, going from station to station with a timer as the client continues an endless stream of exercises with no commonality? These workouts usually get the moniker of “functional” and aren’t too viable for reaching a wellness goal for reasons you can find here. So why does it happen?
- No programming necessary (it’s the equivalent of an exercise raffle to see what’s next).
- Since results don’t matter, it’s about the somatosensory effects, and since their heart rates will be high, breathing heavy and sweating, the client will equate this to a great workout.
- It is highly motivating since it is always different. No boredom here!
One trainer I know has a stack of 100 pre-written workouts. He shows up with his client, randomly draws one, and then gets to work. As appalling as this might sound to some of you, it is the best way to go if you want to be successful. Remember: our hypothetical trainer only has 10 clients, and somehow the workload is beginning to be unmanageable. Imagine having to then push this to 25 to make the median income listed above.
It would be glib to say that with that first week behind them, it will now get easier since the original 20 hours of prospecting can shift to future clients to start to build a sustainable practice (Insert typical insincere-cheerleading: on to the next 10. You can do it!). Here are things to consider:
- Retention. To keep clients, it is probably realistic to spend one hour a week on them not including the session or initial programming. Basic maxim: easier to keep a client than find a new one. This can by finding a special exercise they’ll like, sending them thank you cards, or other ways to make a connection. Remember: they most likely aren’t here for wellness goals, and you need to create value in another ways.
- Diminishing returns. By just showing up at a gym, you are going to get clients, but then the law of diminishing returns starts kicking your ass. You will be putting in more work to get even less clients as the ratio starts to climb to that 5:1 region instead of 2:1 we used.
- Vacations, Life Events. Cash flow is a bitch as a trainer. You usually spend every Tuesday night with someone, then out of nowhere they can’t see you for four weeks, so instead of driving to a gym for two clients, you are doing it just for one –time sink. July and August are nightmares: everyone takes off for vacation. Client workload does not matter if sessions aren’t cranked out.
- Other Revenue Streams. The people who have “made it” have their hands in tons of projects: websites, blogs, guest speaking, event-leading, group exercise and virtual training. Try doing this on top of having a workload of 25 people you train. There is a reason burnout is high.
Spend some time thinking about this and make your own spread sheet. You need to ask yourself if you are ready to spend double the time to prospect than train, an additional hour a week to retain and how to create more streams of revenue. It’s difficult to successfully scale training: you have to conduct every sessions yourself.
If you are going on an interview, find out:
- How much people actually make at their business. The biggest lie is on interview day (remember: cheerlead and confidence!) when they say you can easily make $60,000 a year and then they can’t name who actually does that.
- The turnover rate of their trainers. At24.2 Billion dollar industry in the USA. any given moment, I can go on craigslist and apply for tons of jobs because of not the dearth of trainers, but the inability to get someone to sustain their ability to survive.
- Those who have made it. There is always one at every gym that is making a killing. This usually always becomes the shinning beacon when onboarding; if they can do it, so can you! Try and get to talk to them to get an understanding of what their schedule is like.
When people say you have to eat, breath, and live personal training to make it, they aren’t kidding. You won’t be eating much since you can’t afford it, and you should consider yourself lucky oxygen hasn’t been privatized.
Conclusion
Everyday people get such an immense sense of satisfaction out of training (I made this point in my opening paragraph). I, too, have received letters and emails of people saying how thankful they were for me to have trained them, and that I changed their lives. This fills me with a huge sense of purpose.
But regardless of our personal affinities for the industry, there has to be a certain responsibility to tell people what it actually means to be a personal trainer. The fitness industry is a 24.2 Billion dollar industry in the USA. Oddly enough, one of the hugest scams each year is weight-loss. Odd coincidence? I blame a glitch in our programming.
We are constantly turned to the on position when it comes to fitness: we are required to always be cheerful and reassuring. When anyone is seeking guidance, the cup of empathy runneth over. When they look for affirmation after a success, we cheer. When they tell us their fitness sins, we forgive. Each step, no matter how trivial, is to be reinforced with a “you can do anything attitude.”
In the world of 6-pack abs, chiseled arms, revved up metabolism, muscle confusion, energy boosting drinks, and the endless YOU CAN DO IT atmosphere, no wonder no one is asking how the engine is running under the hood. No one even thinks to ask anymore because of how we have been conditioned to respond.
Trainers always remind me of the guy from office space who, when asked why he is so important to the company, responds ferociously that he has “PEOPLE SKILLS DAMNIT!” The mere mention that something is askew sends them in to a defensive fury about their importance. There might be tons of bad trainers, BUT I MAKE A DIFFERENCE.
My argument has been focused on what potential trainers don’t know about the industry from trends to the actually duties to the fiscal reality. This has very little to do with whether trainers affect people’s lives positively. They do. This has very little to do with the success stories you, I or any other wellness professional has. They exist and are real.
This is about how hard it is to make it as a personal trainer and how hard it is for us to acknowledge that fact. One of the top selling points is how you get to effectively change people’s lives through exercise– who doesn’t like that feeling! But, somehow we forget to mention that to keep the heat on in your apartment this winter, you might have to do a slew of other things that have very little to do with helping people get fit. It’s important to know this job is about sales, and because of it, you might do some things that tweak your morals (like poor programming or sling supplements).
There are people who make it in this industry; there is at least one at every gym. If you know, without a doubt, that this is your singular passion that you are willing to do anything for, I have no doubt you can soon be in front of a room of your peers trying to show them to the Promised Land. If you aren’t willing to put in 60 hour weeks, work from 5am to 10pm, be everything to everyone 365 days a year, try to obtain multiple streams of incomes from a variety of sources, and forgo financial security for the first few years, I don’t blame you. After all, No Judgments.
Weekly Ration 