5 Hard-Earned Lessons I Learned About Being a Personal Trainer

There’s no substitute for experience

Photo by maxhome fitness on Unsplash

I remember being a freshly certified personal trainer like it was yesterday (it wasn’t).

I was wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to conquer the fitness industry.

Things didn’t go according to plan. My personal training certification taught me the basics. But the basics only take you so far.

There are plenty of problems you will face as a trainer that books simply don’t teach you. There are a lot of things that you need to learn from experience.

Here are five lessons that I learned the hard way, through experience. Hopefully, some of them can help you avoid that same overwhelmed feeling of inadequacy that I ran into as a young trainer.

1. You need to know when to fire a “bad” client

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”

Most people agree with the spirit of the quote, but they don’t always follow it in practice.

This comes in the form of holding on to clients after it’s clear you aren’t a good match. This occurs most often when:

• The client's goals are more ambitious than their work ethic.