My Experience on How I became a Successful Personal Trainer:
Hi guys! It’s Travis here today. How are you? I’m doing pretty good. Last night I had my first zoom call for the epigenetics course I’ve recently completed that studies the role that epigenetics plays in our fitness. On the back end of this course, is a 6 week online learning platform and a weekly zoom call. The virtual class was super interesting dissecting the different language you might use with clients based on their personal genetics. Really amazing stuff!!
I hope you liked my post yesterday and that you feel you’re starting to get to know me a bit better and where I come from. Can you relate? Did you also have a part time job like I did selling insurance to pay the bills as well as your Personal Training job on the side? I was so happy the day I was finally quitting that dead end, boring job.
I had just started in the gym, thinking life was going to be great and now all these people I was previously giving free advice to would become clients which actually pay me to hear the advice. I thought I finally had made it and my PT career was going to take off!! Like I said, I couldn’t be more wrong! NO ONE was interested in becoming my client not one person!
However, within a short period of time, cleaning treadmills and passing the gym floor for hours became too similar to sitting at the insurance desk all day. It was boring and it didn’t fulfill me as a trainer. Luckily I got the cardio boxing classes which showed me the path to what I knew was in my DNA. Classes started with a few people but I was very much committed to growing those numbers. So I did courses, research, learned from trial and error and eventually clients quickly multiplied and participants started to roll in.
Once I discovered this interest in group sessions an opportunity came up to help out one of the former trainers at the gym with his bootcamp. This ended up becoming a pretty steady income for me, so after many years of doing heaps of extras (now teaching, working at the gym and running bootcamp sessions), I was able to safely cut some hours from my day by dropping the gym and just focusing on teaching and bootcamp.
I was loving running bootcamp sessions, experimenting with different training methods; circuits, tabata, strength, conditioning, cardio boxing, etc. I loved teaching new moves to all the clients incorporating my love of functional training with them. I began introducing them to kettlebells, battleropes, powerbags, bodyweight movements, heavy medicine balls, resistance bands and suspension trainers. But, this was still a fairly hefty workload as I was now full-time teaching and at 4-5 sessions a week at bootcamp and I began thinking about the bigger picture.
What was I going to be doing in 5 years time? Was I going to continue working a full-time teaching job, whilst running bootcamp before school in the morning and after school in the late afternoons? This commitment had already left me lethargic, I had given up playing football, I wasn’t able to enjoy any time with my wife or family and I wasn’t really training much either, all because I was basically tapped out on time!
Something had to change, I wasn’t sure what, or how, but I knew that I couldn’t keep this up! I’ll share the rest of my story on how I became a successful personal trainer on Friday.
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