Are you considering starting a career in personal training? Or, perhaps you are already a personal trainer and looking to advance your career even further? Today, society is placing more importance than ever before on fitness and healthy living, leading to high demand for personal trainers – there has never been a better time than the present to consider pursuing this career path. Within the next ten years, the health and fitness field expects to welcome tens of thousands of new personal trainers.
Whether you’re in the process of becoming a personal trainer or are already working in the field, you may be wondering if there’s anything you can do to climb the career ladder. Successful personal trainers are those who are able to look beyond their basic certifications and general job options to generate more responsibilities, create new careers for themselves, and earn a better salary. So, what career progression options are available in this field?
High-End Coaching
If you’re ready to start working outside of the established gym setting, want to dig a little deeper in your clients and focus more on the psychology and mindset surrounding fitness, high-end coaching could be ideal for you. It has many similarities to personal training, except for that you’re getting even more complete transformations for your clients in both body and mind. While helping your clients improve their physical fitness and body composition is still a key part of the role, it is set apart from a standard personal training service with the fact that you’re also working on helping your clients change their mindset so that they will find it easier to succeed not only with their fitness goals, but in many other areas of their life.
Start Your Own Fitness Business
As a personal trainer, you don’t need to confine yourself to standard employment. Once you’ve completed a personal training course, you’re not only ready to work as a personal trainer, but you’re also in a great position to start your own fitness business. If you have always wanted the opportunity to work as your own boss and set your own rules, personal training is an industry where it’s easier than ever to do just that. As a personal trainer, you are in a prime position to consider opening your own gym, fitness studio, health club, or even a sporting centre. Perhaps your local area is lacking when it comes to physical activity options and you want to provide something different from basic gym facilities, or maybe you want to provide a mobile service where you can work with clients from the comfort of their own homes - the opportunities are endless when it comes to starting out as your own boss.
Specialise in a Certain Area
Another great way to advance your career, get more clients and make more money as a personal trainer, is to choose an area of specialisation. Becoming an expert in a certain type of client will help you get more credibility and will encourage those clients to choose you over a general personal trainer due to the additional support and knowledge that you can provide. If you’re already a personal trainer and want to move into a more specialised area like obesity management, sports event training, injury rehabilitation, strength and conditioning or wellness coaching, you can find advanced courses available at TRAINFITNESS to help you expand your personal training knowledge and tailor your services even further.
Management
If you’re a personal trainer who wants steady employment with great benefits and a consistent salary, it might be worth considering a management position at a gym or health club. If you’re more interested in the business administration and customer service side of things rather than working one-on-one with clients, this could be the ideal opportunity for you to further your fitness career. Many successful personal trainers go on to become excellent managers thanks to their passion for fitness and their naturally great people skills which make them amazing customer service representatives and great bosses. The best personal trainers tend to be people who are creative, disciplined, and have strong people skills - all traits that make great management professionals.
Clinical Work
Once you have earned a personal trainer qualification, you might want to take it a step further and attend university to get a relevant degree that will help you further your career into clinical work. Bear in mind that some areas of clinical work do not require you to obtain a degree, so do some research into the areas that you are interested in and familiarise yourself with the entry requirements for each position. There are various specialised fields that you can enter in the clinical setting, such as occupational therapy, athletic training, clinical training, sports medicine, injury rehabilitation, physiotherapy and more. You can find these roles in a variety of different settings including clinics, hospitals, university campuses and schools.
Fitness Influencing
If you live your life vicariously through social media and love creating online content for your clients, fitness influencing could be an ideal direction for taking your career to the next level. Fitness influencers tend to be highly active on social media networks like Instagram and YouTube, promoting various health and fitness products through working closely with relevant brands while providing their followers with informative and educational content.
As a personal trainer, you may have already experienced some difficulty doing your job this year thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic and consequent gym closures, which led many personal trainers to start offering an online service. Whether you decide to focus solely on creating an online business or add a strong online component to whatever fitness career you decide on, it’s clear to see that this is the best way to future-proof your personal training career from any potential disasters.
Consulting
Consulting plays a very important role in the fitness industry. If you are already well-established as a personal trainer, there’s plenty of opportunity in sharing your knowledge with others. Many personal trainers will also work as a freelance consultant, helping others who want to get into personal training to get their foot in the industry, find the right education options and get meaningful work. Consulting can be offered in a variety of ways including teaching in gyms, creating online training programmes, mentoring new personal trainers, and private or one-on-one coaching to name a few.
Nutrition
Finally, while many personal trainers focus on helping their clients to exercise better and get the most out of their physical activity routine, no personal trainer can deny the role of good nutrition when it comes to improving your health and fitness. If you are interested in the effect that diets have on health and fitness levels, it may be worth taking your career in a more nutrition-focused direction. Whether you train to become a nutritionist or write and sell a recipe book filled with your favourite healthy meals, there are plenty of ways to take your fitness career down this path.
Working as a personal trainer doesn’t mean coaching in the gym forever. Once qualified, there are tons of opportunities available for personal trainers who want to expand their careers and focus on doing something that they really love.
