How to Become a Personal Trainer

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Becoming a personal trainer sounds like the ultimate dream if you love fitness, but as you can imagine there’s more to it than just getting paid to work out. You’re looking at early mornings waking up at 4am to train clients before they go to their office jobs, and late evenings doing the exact same thing when they finally finish. It takes a serious amount of hustle to get established because you can’t just watch a few online videos and suddenly start charging people to do split squats. You need a proper plan and actual qualifications to make this a reality so here is what you need to do to get started.

Get qualified‍ ‍

You need to get the right certifications and insurance before you’re able to train anyone legally. Usually this means getting a Level 2 Certificate in Gym Instructing followed by a Level 3 Diploma in Personal Training or whatever the equivalent is where you live. These courses teach you human anatomy and how to build safe routines so you don’t end up hurting someone. Finding a reputable course provider is a massive help here because some of the cheaper online only options just hand you a PDF certificate and pretty much leave you to figure it out yourself. Once you’re qualified you’ll need insurance, most personal trainers need public liability insurance (protecting against injury/property damage) and professional indemnity insurance (covering negligent advice). These are important for covering your legal fees and compensation if a client is injured or claims that you’ve given them poor guidance.

Where to work

Once you’ve secured your qualifications you’ve got to decide exactly where you want to work. You could get hired directly by a gym as a regular staff member which means you get a steady paycheck and you don’t have to worry about finding all your own clients right away because the gym hands them to you. The downside is the pay isn’t amazing and you’ll spend a large chunk of your shift doing things like wiping down sweaty benches and re racking weights that people have abandoned on the floor. The other route is going entirely freelance. You rent space in a commercial gym and you keep whatever you earn from your clients. That gives you total freedom but it means you're completely responsible for your own marketing and dealing with admin. You'll want to use some simple booking software to handle scheduling and payments so you're not chasing people for cash via text message every week. You can get specific personal trainer software these days that has everything you need in one place.

Getting clients

Getting paying clients takes time and you've got to talk to real people on the gym floor. Offer to spot people or give them a quick helpful tip on their form when they look completely lost near the squat rack. You also need to remember that people are paying for your attention just as much as your fitness knowledge, so you need to be attentive and put effort into helping them set their goals and meet them. That means being a good listener and being able to adapt to things like any physical limitations they might etc. Everyone is so different in what they can do and what they want to achieve. You might have one client that wants to lose a lot of weight, and another that wants to gain weight. Some people will only be interested in the aesthetic side of things and want fast results whereas others will want to focus on health and learn more about health and exercise as they go along. People often have very different time limits too which can be a challenge. So don’t go into things thinking you can give everyone the same exercises and just guide them through the same routine every week. Problem solving and adapting and being flexible with the way you teach people are all a big part of it.

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