PT apprenticeships

Some statistics for thought, showing why I think we need an apprenticeship system for PT. Most trainers simply won't get enough practice of their skills to be any good. As noted in this article on mastery, the practice must be "deliberate practice" where the person challenges themselves, and it must include study and reflection on the skills.

I have now worked at 4 different gyms, and applied for jobs or had a good chat with the managers of 8 more gyms. So I've got a bit of an idea of how things are done, this is subject to change of course as I learn more.

The typical fitness centre - gym plus group classes plus pool, etc - has at least 1 trainer for every 200 members, though since gyms are open 100 hours a week, about 8 trainers is the minimum you can get away with if you want the gym to be staffed all the time. A small gym has 1,000 members, a big gym 5,000.

On average around 3% of gym members are interested in having personal training. It can be as low as 0.5% if the trainers are real slugs and the team leader is a lazy moron, and as high as 6-7% if the gym has a few really competent and ambitious PTs and the management is very supportive of PT. But 3% is the average. Thus, 30 PT clients for every 1,000 members.

This doesn't sound like much, but most PTs will only need 10-15 clients for a full schedule. Remember that to pay for PT, people need jobs, and most are 9-5. Thus 80% of PT happens from 6-9am or 6-9pm. Working 5 days a week just mornings or just evenings, the PT will have 30 open slots. With the typical client doing 2x 30' sessions a week, that's 15 clients to completely fill the schedule. In practice some of the 20% of people available during the day will come a bit outside those times, and the 6-9 slot won't be full, nor would the PT want them to be since they'll burn out training 6 people in a row with no break. And some people might do full hours a few times a week, and so on. The PT could choose to work both mornings and evenings, but few do this for long before burning out.

Thus, 10-15 clients fill a PT's schedule, so that 300-500 gym members can easily sustain one PT. Those 300-500 gym members, around 100 of them will be gone 12 months from now, replaced by 100 new ones; 30-35 of these will do the initial appointments with the gym instructor/PT, only around 10 will stick to the programme, and 3 or so of them will take up PT.

 Most trainers working as general gym instructors won't have the opportunity to take an individual from being a complete beginner to achieving their goals - whatever that goal is. That's simply because someone joins up, does the first appointments, and usually doesn't come regularly, or if they do come regularly, they'll come at some other time the trainer is working, and not necessarily have that trainer check on their progress. Do the trainer's methods work? We don't know, the member didn't follow the routine.

 So the only way to see if the trainer's methods really work - the only way for the trainer to get deliberate practice in their working hours - is for them to get PT clients, those are the only people you can be sure will mostly do what you tell them over some months.

 Now, of all the PTs in a gym, you usually find that 2-4 of the 8-20 are doing half the total PT sessions with half the total clients in the gym, they'll usually have 8-20 clients each, basically 1hr training each client weekly, so 8-20hr a week PT, and 400-1,000hr annually.

The other 6-16 trainers are doing the other half, and have 0-3 clients each, thus doing 0-150hr PT annually.

Again, they're doing lots of hours of general gym work and should be learning something from that, but most trainers will be getting under 100hr a year of taking an individual from beginning to reaching their goals, that is less than 100hr of seeing if their training philosophy actually works. That's not enough to improve. If you spend just 2hr a week practicing the guitar or lifting weights or speaking a foreign language, while you'll improve from "ignorant useless drongo" to "novice", you won't go beyond there. 

Of course the PT can do their own study, going to seminars and watching other trainers and coaches, and so on. You find most don't. This is why you can get a PT working for a decade who can't coach a pushup or below-parallel squat, and who thinks properly-coached deadlifts are dangerous.

It's said that it takes something like 2,000hr of deliberate and mindful practice to become a competent practitioner of it, 4,000hr is enough you can teach others, and 10,000hr for mastery. Most trainers will never become competent, they don't have enough experience, or clients to let them get that experience.

 Much the same applies for lots of jobs, I know. But this is the one I'm interested in. So I think we need some sort of apprenticeship system for trainers and coaches, mentors and so on. It works for carpenters, electricians, plumbers - practical skills need practice. We need to put the hours in to find out if our ideas actually work. Because frankly most of us have no clue what we're doing. This is of course more than the typical gym-goer, who knows less than nothing, that is actually has some wrong ideas, so that even a clueless PT can help them.

But things could be better. It's telling that most PTs have themselves never even got a written-out routine from another trainer, let alone paid for personal training.