"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.