Defining your Path as a Personal Trainer

If you are considering a career as a personal trainer let us first congratulate you. As a fitness trainer you build long term relationships with varied successful people, impact their lives positively and your efforts can echo in their lives long after you have stopped training them. You can even develop a bond with your clients some of whom may even consider you as a part of their inner circle of close friends and family. As a personal trainer you also have the unique opportunity to nurture a feeling of hope in the hearts of your clients because in the world of personal training, your clients are not simply buying your services but investing in the thing called “hope”. By hiring you, your clients eventually hope to achieve something greater with you around than if they were to do it on their own. You play a big role in creating a person’s better future as a personal trainer.

There are some things you need to consider when becoming a fitness professional. Before you decide on your education and certification you should ideally figure out who is your ideal audience. Before you embark on a career as a personal trainer ask yourself the following questions:

1. Why do you want to become a personal trainer?

2. What is the demographics and the segment of the population you want to be working with?

3. Are you ready and willing to adapt to your audience’s wants and needs?

Lets tackle these questions one by one.

Why Do you Want to Be a Personal Trainer

The reason that most people want to become personal trainers is to pass on what they have learned by living a healthy lifestyle. When you drop body fat and increase your muscle mass you feel great, confident and better than ever before. A lot of people want to embark on the journey of fitness in order to be able to help other people feel the same way that they did and learn from their own experience. What is your own purpose for becoming a fitness trainer? Think about your purpose for choosing a career as a personal trainer. If you are entering this business for making potloads of money, then you are going to encounter a lot of disappointments and failures. You also shouldn’t be thinking of pursuing a career in the world of health and fitness for other wrong reasons such as fame and glam because these reasons will also not fetch you much success.

The job of personal training provides one with a number of challenges and adversities. Clients are known to congratulate you for your successes but pin the blame on you for their setbacks and failures. Other trainers may undercut your services or take away your clients. The above are just a few of the many issues that can crop up in your journey in the world of personal training. If you have a strong purpose for pursuing the career of personal training, you will overcome most of the problems and race past the inevitable hurdles.

Your purpose and goal as a personal trainer should be less about how much money you are making and more about how many lives you are positively affecting. If you can consistently provide superior service and aim to help others meet their goals, you will steadily over time build a reputation, credibility and experience. Within a period of time, you will have built a reputation, credibility and also the requisite experience. In due time, you will have a solid clientele base of clients who swear by the quality of your trainings and also a list of clients in the waiting list!

Who is your Audience

The second step is to find out who is your ideal audience. Figure out which are the types of people you would like to work with on a regular basis. Think deeply about the kind of clients that you would like to take on in the future and also the types of clients who would best suit your interest and future skill sets.

For example:

1. Do you want to work with clients who desire weight loss?

2. Do you want to train body builders?

3. Do you want to train athletes, marathon runners or triathletes?

4. What is the age group that you would prefer training?

5. Will your customers be children, young adults, middle-aged or senior citizens?

Where you work or how you train depends greatly on knowing and understanding who your audience is. Your interests in the world of fitness, knowledge and skill sets must be narrowed down and choose beforehand the kind of clients you want to work with. Once you have decided who your ideal clientele is find out where they reside. This may involve figuring out the map of your neighbourhood and locality. It would be a good idea to visit gyms, franchise gyms, private clubs and personal training companies like Wellintra. Ask questions like what type of clients they work for, where the trainers work and the kind of environment they work in. All this information gives you a solid idea about where and how to start your personal training career.