Considerations for a longer (and successful) career in the fitness industry

WRS: The idea for my initial post on the career "life span" of the personal trainer came about as a passing comment during dinner with a friend last week.  Interestingly, it has really whipped up some healthy discussion across the industry around the world.  I've received quite a bit of feedback, most of it a nod of approval that, yes, we can do more to improve the quality and integrity of the personal training profession on a global scale.

I have come to know Wendy Sweet (RGN/ B.PhEd/ MSpLS) during my time in New Zealand and respect what she's done for personal training in this country.  She is the founder and developer of Les Mills personal training in NZ. She is a fitness industry consultant and educator and the recipient of the 2009 Fitness NZ Award for the Most Outstanding Contribution to the NZ Fitness Industry. 

After reading my blog post, she sent me an email with some keen observations on how things might be improved upon, not just in NZ but in other parts of the world as well. The following comments by Wendy are in reference to the relatively short career lifespan of the personal trainer.

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The key factors I have found over the past 15 years with the proliferation of club-based PT programmes which rely on high numbers of trainers paying fees each month to the club, are as follows:

Inadequate attention to the role and training of a PT Manager in health clubs.
Many of these managers are recruited because they have proven themselves as great trainers. What they lack however, is the training to become great leaders, motivators and performance-driven managers. To do this, they need to first and foremost, understand fully the issues surrounding effective PT management and they need to have the tools to ‘do the job’. Only then will they be able to grow the teams of trainers and more importantly keep Trainers long-term (3+ years).

New Trainers who are transitioning into their role and don’t know how to focus on the ‘retention’ of clients.
Basically these Trainers are being given client ‘leads’ at point-of-membership sale as the clubs are recruiting new members into ‘boot-camp’ programmes or 6-12 week weight loss programmes and the new Trainers are not being taught how to up-sell these group clients into one-on-one clients AFTER they have completed their group sessions. I have seen this as the major problem for Trainers working in large clubs where the club has a fixed intake of Trainers every 2-3 months. Many clubs have become so focused on recruiting ‘new’ trainers that they fail to manage and up-skill existing Trainers into being able to self-generate a client base long-term.

Trainers who are too young and too inexperienced and therefore don’t have the ‘life-skills’ in order to manage and mentor their clients into longer-term goals.
This was my personal observation a number of years ago whilst managing PT’s and it has also now come up in my masters research. Basically, young inexperienced Trainers reach the full extent of their knowledge and advice to clients at around the 9-12 month mark. They don’t know how to progress their regular clients into other areas such as doing a multi-sport event or doing something ‘different’ with their fitness goals. The client becomes bored and moves on and if the Trainer hasn’t up-skilled then the Trainer has nothing ‘new’ to offer their client. Most of my research participants found that the longer the client was with them, the more the Trainer had become the client’s ‘Life-Coach’.

Finally, the BIGGEST issue, is that if new Trainers can’t SELL, they don’t make any money and leave.
So it is the responsibility of the education institutions as well as the clubs to educate Trainers on how to up-sell sessions and retain clients. Many of the large clubs have devised varied business models to recruit new Trainers, and don’t have the right people to teach Trainers a process similar to what I have devised and called the ‘The five R’s of PT’:

1.    Develop the RELATIONSHIP first and foremost by having a great first training session...it’s the only session that counts in order to progress to the next stage....

2.    Devise processes to RETAIN your clients and evaluate their progress for at least 6-12 weeks (this means excellent programming and interaction/ communication with clients), so that you can achieve the third ‘R’ =

3.    RESULTS (many new trainers also don’t have the knowledge to get results with their clients because they are recruited straight from certification programmes that aren’t teaching them how to get results with clients, but that’s another story!)

4.    REFERRALS – you can’t get referrals without all of the above.....

5.    REVENUE – and the final thing I focus on with new trainers is that they will NEVER reach and sustain any revenue into the long term, if they don’t pay attention to numbers 1-4!!