"But I just want to tone up", Part Two - Employment

In part one I discussed the educational requirements of training, now it's time to look at employment.

Firstly, employment requires qualification (as discussed in part one), first aid and registration.

First aid is usually Level 1 first aid - knowing how to treat spider bites, sprains, shock, do CPR and so on. Technically a workplace only requires one person on duty with first aid, but in practice this would make rostering a headache ("Let's put Bob on to replace Anna tonight, no wait, Bob doesn't have CPR"), so fitness centres simply require every employee to have it. If self-employed, your insurance company will not cover you if a client is injured and you didn't have first aid. 

To be employed or insured as self-employed means registration with a professional body such as Fitness Australia or Physical Activity Australia (formerly known as Kinect). These professional bodies require continuing education. This is not very demanding, usually around 10 hours of face-to-face classes each year. For example, the kettlebell coaching course I did most recently was two 7 hour days and was worth 14 points of the 20 I require every 2 years. 

Where does a PT work, anyway?

There are three basic ways a personal trainer can get employed.

• community gym - run by local council, YMCA, or large company like Belgravia Leisure
• commercial gym - privately owned and run, often by a large company such as Fitness First or Genesis
• self-employed - this could be the PT in their car with a medicine ball and skipping rope, all the way up to a large shop in a busy strip. 

Community gym

The trainer begins with a base of 1-6 gym shifts of 3-5hr each in a week, during which they do the initial appointments discussed here, and after about 3 months will be expected to be ready to take on personal training clients. Of course those appointments are the trainer's chance to meet potential clients. 

Gym shifts will be paid at a casual rate of $20-$25 an hour. Council-run gyms will often have further penalty rates for weekends, early mornings, etc, bringing it up to as much as $30 an hour. In most cases the staff contract will state that after six months the trainer can ask for these casual shifts to become permanent part-time. The hourly rate will drop to $16-$20 an hour, but the trainer will now have some sick and holiday pay; on the other hand when they need to miss a shift they'll have to officially request leave, rather than just ringing up a colleague and asking if they can do the shift. 

PT clients will pay around $60 an hour for their sessions, and the trainer will see $30-$40 of this. There are never permanent part-time rates for PT. New trainers will earn on the lower end, more experienced trainers doing a lot of PT will earn on the higher end. 

Commercial gym

The PT typically pays a franchise fee of $500-$2,000, does an introduction to the franchise which is really a short marketing course in how to do the hard sell, and then pays rent of $200-$400 a week to work at the large commercial gym.  The trainer signs a 12 month contract which is very difficult to get out of. Usually the first month is rent-free, the second month 1/3 rent, the third month 2/3, and the fourth and following months are full rent. During the first few months the PT is required to do gym floor shifts. The rent paid is not really for access to the facility's equipment, but access to the potential clients. 

Usually the PT is free to set their own rates they'll charge clients in a very broad range of $45 to $125 an hour. Some centres will restrict the rates based on the PT's seniority and previous success, newbies with 0-3 clients $45-$60/hr, people who've been there 3 years and have 20 clients $70-$125/hr, that sort of thing. The PT will get 80-90% of the client's session fee. 

So you get more money per client, but have to pay that rent each week. This is, incidentally, why PTs at Fitness First and the like will be more pushy about getting people to do personal training than PTs at Woop Woop Community Gym. The Woop Woop trainer with no clients brings in no money, but the FF trainer with no clients will actually be losing money. 

Working in a commercial gym is really like being self-employed. 

What about insurance?

In both community and commercial gyms, the facility itself covers the trainer's insurance. If through reckless stupidity or bad luck you hurt someone, the person won't be able to sue you, but of course you'll most likely lose your job. 

At one centre I know of, a trainer we'll call Sue coached a 45 year old obese woman to do one-legged half-squats with a dumbbell curl on a bosu ball. Since the woman couldn't squat, let alone squat one-legged, trying to do it on a bosu ball was a bit much for her and she fell over. As she had avoided weight training her whole life (she just wanted to "tone" her muscles, and not be "bulky"), she had early-onset osteoporosis and broke her right radius and ulna. By the time the matter came before the courts, Sue was no longer employed by the centre; the centre said it was reviewing its recruitment process. 

On the other hand, Sue didn't have to pay the $11,000 compensation. If she were self-employed she would have had a large bill to pay. 

Self-employed

This is hard to generalise about. Some trainers have made a living with whatever they can fit in their car boot, others have set up a gym in their garage, others still will rent a warehouse or factory somewhere. The trainer must pay rent on whatever facility they're using, get their own equipment and insurance, and so on. 

Most importantly, they have to find their clients from somewhere. In a mainstream community or commercial gym only around 3% of members will be interested in PT. However even a small university gym will have a few hundred members and thus 15 or so potential PT members, and most community gyms 2,000-5,000 and thus 60-150 PT members. Most PTs can only handle 15-20 individual clients at once, so even a moderately-sized gym can support a few PTs. The trainer need merely to demonstrate competence, establish trust and rapport. 

But where does the self-employed PT find those 15-20 steady clients? In this respect, PT is like any other business, opening a cafe, hairdressers, bookshop, clothes shop or the like. Most new small businesses fail in the first 18 months. 

The self-employed trainer can charge whatever they like, or rather whatever clients will pay. And they get every last cent of it, especially if they do what many self-employed people and receive payments in cash and fail to declare it on taxes. 

Given a typical level of new business success, the trainer should become self-employed not for money but for autonomy. If it's my place I can do things however I want. However, a lack of money also impinges somewhat on autonomy, and most self-employed trainers are spectacularly unsuccessful. Recently I met a trainer I'll call Trent.

"Where do you work?"

"Oh, I'm self-employed."

"Yeah? What sort of equipment have you got?"

"I got a squat rack in my garage, a few kettlebells, medicine ball, skipping rope, punch gloves and pads."

"Sounds cool. What sort of clients do you have?"'

"Oh, um... all sorts."

"How do you like to train them?"

"Um, I like to mix it up a bit."

"Doing well? How many clients have you got?"

"Pretty well, I've got... a few."

Trent was not self-employed, he was unemployed. Successfully self-employment takes a certain set of skills which are rarely taught in the courses we do. 

Overview

The new PT is best advised to first seek work at a community gym. The gym shifts will give the newbie a basic income until they've built up their PT, and help them meet lots of potential clients. A commercial gym won't offer that base income, and if the trainer is unsuccessful they'll end those 12 months with a heft debt.  Fitness is like any other industry in that many people enter it and a year or two later leave it; it wasn't what they thought it'd be. Trying out and failing at different careers is part of life, but it's probably best to minimise how much debt you finish with. 

If the PT turns out to be a real gun, gets clients easily and keeps them for a long time, then they can take the second step, since financially they'll be better off at a commercial gym. 

They can then save money and build their reputation and at some point go private and be self-employed.

Of course, this considers only money. Some people have strong marketing-oriented and self-promotional personalities and will be more comfortable at a commercial gym. Others are more warm and fuzzy and would be happier at a community gym. Some are fiercely independent and would be better-off self-employed. 

Training men and women

Many people imagine that men and women need to train differently. Even in high school sports with qualified coaches, it's been found that,

"Compared with coaches of male athletes, coaches of female athletes were less likely to know the credentials of their strength coaches, and they were less likely to use certified coaches to plan and implement their strength and conditioning programs. [...] Compared with their female counterparts, male athletes were more likely to have required training, participate in strength training year round, and train using more sessions per week."

That is, the coaches didn't really care about the strength of their female athletes, or about the competence of their strength coaches. I don't have statistics as they do, but from what I've seen in gyms, female gym-goers are less likely to be given strength-oriented routines, and when given them, will be pushed and supervised less (form will be allowed to be sloppier, there'll be less encouragement to increase resistance) by the instructors. That is, the greatest barrier female athletes face is the low expectations of their coaches - who are mostly male. 

Men and women's bodies react in the same way to training. If a person around 20 years old gets their heart rate up to around 140 beats per minute for 20 minutes, two or more times a week, they'll get an improvement in their cardiovascular fitness - that is, in four weeks if they go at this speed or resistance/incline their heart rate will be 130 instead of 140. If they can today just do 10 pushups, and now do 3 sets of 5, next session 3 sets of 6, and so on progressing in the same way, well in a month they'll be able to do 20 pushups in a go. If they eat less they'll get smaller, eat more they'll get bigger, and so on. Gender's irrelevant. It's all the same. 

All need to think of movements, not muscles, to do more over time, and so on. Exactly which movements and how much weight and so on depend on the capabilities and goals of the individual. Take two 30 year olds, the woman has done netball for 10 years, the man has done nothing but sit in front of a computer. Neither has done squats before, but the woman will learn them more quickly and perform them more strongly than the man for the first few months at least. But she mightn't expect so. 

The actual differences between men and women come from their different capabilities to begin with. In brief, these are that men have more lean mass than women of the same size, so they start off stronger; but women learn new movements more quickly and better... if they stop saying "I can't" and actually try. 

Body composition - a typical healthy man and a woman of the same weight, the man will be around 15% bodyfat, and the woman 25%. This leads to,

Strength - A man of 60kg might be 50kg lean mass (bone, muscles, internal organs) and 10kg fat mass, the 60kg woman 45kg lean and 15kg fat. Fat doesn't help you lift heavy stuff. So the man begins with 5kg more muscle and bone, 5kg more stuff to help him lift. If neither has trained before, he'll have more strength simply because of sheer muscle and bone size. Of course if he sits on his arse and she trains for a few months, she'll be stronger. I once had a woman client quit because she beat her untrained boyfriend in an arm wrestle and he couldn't handle it; a trained woman is stronger than an untrained man of the same size. 

Bodily awareness - If I say, "bend at the hips, not the lower back, but here at the hips," do you bend at the hips, or the lower back? If I say, "shoulders back," do they go back, or do you hunch up, or just look confused? That's bodily awareness. In general, women have more of this than men. So they learn new movements more quickly. And only once a movement is learned can we add resistance and get the person stronger. This is why when people get interested in strength, men mostly go to powerlifting, and quite a lot of women go to Olympic weightlifting. You can be a physical idiot and eventually squat, bench and deadlift well; but you have to be pretty switched-on to ever snatch and clean & jerk.

Joint mobility - since women's pelvic girdle must be able to open up during birth, they begin with greater joint mobility than men. This makes some movements easier for them, such as deep squatting, front squatting and so on. Many men simply can't get their shoulders forward for a front squat, or back for an overhead squat. Mobility like strength can be improved over time, but it's hard work which most people avoid. 

Psychology - women underestimate their current and potential strength, men overestimate it. A woman will say, "I can't" before even trying something, a man will say, "I'll try." This is why men get more injuries than women, and why women fail to reach their potential in physical training. Women will for example press a 12kg kettlebell overhead for 6 reps, then when you ask them to do it again, say, "I can't."

"But you just did. You've rested, now do it again."

"I can't."

Obviously there are cultural issues here, women being taught that being helpless is attractive, etc. That's a bit above what we're looking at here, though, which is just what happens in the gym. Your body can never get stronger than your mind. It's for this reason Neghar Fonooni and her friends have started Girls Gone Strong. The development of physical strength will at the same time develop mental strength. You're not "tough" until you've been buried under a weight, got up and then tried again. 

The differences in body composition, natural strength, joint mobility and psychology will of course lead to different approaches in training. Men will need more practice at the basic movements to master them, more joint mobility work, meanwhile the mobile woman who's mastered the movement is loading up the plates and getting stronger at it - if she's decided to let herself. 

That said, all these things are individual. A person may have a long training background giving them great bodily awareness, but a bunch of injuries to work around. The women clients I've trained for a year or more, if any other trainer gets them half-squats and curls on a bosu he may get a rude surprise. 

Recently a fellow trainer had to be cautioned for giving overly-complex routines to beginners.

"Just keep it simple, build the movement skills. Barbell lunge and press? Seriously? Can she do a squat? First squat, then a dumbbell squat, then a barbell squat, then a lunge, then maybe lunge and press. One step at a time, start simple, teach the movement skills."

"Especially with girls," he said.

"No, especially with people who lack the movement skills."

"Usually girls."

He's a new trainer, he'll learn in time. Without naming the trainer, I told this story to a woman client who has squatted 60kg for 30 reps.

"That guy sounds like a douche. Makes me mad, that people think like that. Can you point him out to me and I’ll show him how effective a simple move can be. That’s right, I’ll bitch slap him."

This is a woman who I originally found doing crunches on a swiss ball. She's come a long way. Strength and confidence. 

There are differences between men and women. But there are greater differences between individuals. A competent trainer will deal with the individual and their capabilities and goals. I don't care what you have in your pants, you still have to fucking squat, deadlift and press properly.