Are you a personal trainer or trying to break into the industry? Here are some tips!

Being healthy and fit is more popular than ever. As such, there’s an increasing demand for knowledgeable trainers to slake the thirst of a parched fitness population.

But, breaking into personal training might not seem like the easiest thing to do, especially if you’re somewhat introverted.

We’ve assembled some of our best tips for people looking to break into personal training.

Let’s get started.

How to Break Into Personal Training

Get Certified

There are no shortage of personal trainer certification organizations, which is both good and bad. It’s good in the sense that getting qualified is more accessible than ever. The bad is that all certifying organizations aren’t the same quality. In fact, some will grant certifications after only a 2-day weekend training course!

If you were a client, would you really trust a trainer who’s only real education consists of a weekend seminar?

Not likely.

And that brings us to the next point regarding certification — it’s only the beginning of your career as a personal training. Just because you have obtained your qualification does not mean that your learning is complete. In fact, it’s just started to scratch the surface!

If you are looking to get certified, a few of our favorite professional organizations are:

• National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM)
• American Council on Exercise (ACE)
• International Sports Sciences Association (ISSA)

Specialization is Helpful

As we mentioned, fitness is more popular than ever these days. This also means that the number of people getting certified to be personal trainers is larger than ever, which makes for a very competitive environment for new personal trainers.

To help separate yourself from every other new personal trainer on the scene, it can help to further your education beyond the generic PT certification and specialize in a particular area of fitness that appeals to you — yoga, spinning, group fitness, etc.

These specialization certifications cost more time, effort, and money on your part, but they will go along way to helping you secure a job with a gym and snagging more clients from other trainers.

Get in the Trenches

No amount of classes can fully prepare you for (or replace) working with people face to face. Yes, the textbooks, online classes, and webinars can help you understand the basics of how to program and structure a diet plan.

But, working with a live human being isn’t the same as programming a generic workout for a robot. Each person will have different preferences, experience levels, and schedules that you have to work with.

For instance, if you really like barbell training, but your client is intimidated by it or just doesn’t like to train with that kind of equipment, how much effort do you think they’ll give in their workouts if you force them to only train with barbells?

Not very much.

As such, while you might have a general framework you like to use for your programming, you need to be flexible and meet your client where they are. After working with them for a considerable amount of time, you can start to mold them and introduce more complex movement patterns.

As you gain more experience, you’ll understand the importance of flexibility when working with people 1-on-1.