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A personal trainer works with his client

Pros and Cons of Being a Personal Trainer

Personal training can be a great career choice for people who are social and love to help others achieve their fitness goals. If you’re willing to work with all kinds of personality types and a varied schedule, you will reap the personal and physical rewards that come with this line of work.

Pros of Being a Personal Trainer:

  1. Helping Others
    This is undoubtedly the biggest perk to becoming a personal trainer. You have the opportunity and skillset to change people’s lives on a daily basis. You are there to set goals with your clients and watch their self-confidence grow as they start to improve. These individuals count on you and trust you, which can be a great feeling!

  2. Meeting New People
    Being a personal trainer is a highly social job, and you will constantly be meeting and working with new people. You’ll form some great bonds with others, and if there’s a client you don’t like, they won’t be around forever. You’ll never get bored with the people you work with because you’ll be with different people every single day.

  3. Working for Yourself
    While you don’t have to start your own personal training business, you always have that option. When you’re first starting out, you can get a job at a gym to build up a clientele, but once you gain some experience, it’s not that big of a transition to start working for yourself. This means that you can set your own schedule, and you’ll no longer earn just a percentage of what your client pays; it will all be yours!

  4. Your Own Health
    If you do decide to work at a gym, chances are that gym will provide you with a free membership to work out there anytime you’d like. Even if you work for yourself, simply being a personal trainer will motivate you to maintain your own health because you want to set a good example for your clients.

  5. Flexible Lifestyle
    Especially if working a 9-5 job is not your cup of tea, the world of personal training may be a good fit for you. If you’re an early bird, you can schedule appointments for the early morning and then have the rest of the afternoon to run errands or spend time with family. Or, if you’re a night owl, you can hold your sessions at nighttime. Whatever makes you more comfortable.

Cons of Being a Personal Trainer:

  1. Weird Hours
    Since most of your clientele probably will work a 9-5 job, you will rarely, if ever, work that shift. That means that if you hold sessions at 7:00 & 8:00 at night, you may miss out on your child’s T-ball game or spending time with them before they go to bed. Your schedule may clash with your significant other’s or your friend’s work schedules, so it can be difficult to spend quality time with them.

  2. Flaky Clients
    You may have a client start off completely pumped about changing their body and their life, but two weeks later, they practically drop off the face of the earth. Losing clients means losing money, and that can happen at any time because they usually aren’t locked into a contract.

  3. Difficult Clients
    These are probably the clients whom you wish would disappear from your life forever. Ideally, all clients would be motivated and realistic about their goals, but unfortunately that’s not the case. You’ll face clients who don’t follow their workout and eating plans and still expect overnight results, and sometimes they’ll even ask you for a refund if they don’t get the results they wanted!

  4. Clientele Starts off Slow
    Clients are looking for a personal trainer with experience and a lot of evidence that they know what they’re doing, so your clientele will probably get off to a slow start. You can remedy this by asking friends to recommend you and marketing yourself, but it may be a good idea to have a back-up income for the first couple months.

  5. Unsteady Income
    There is a “busy season” for personal training that lasts from January to July, and a “slump season” that goes from October to November. As a result of this, your income can be starkly different for those two periods, so you’ll need to save money and prepare for those slower months when you don’t have as many clients.

Last Updated: June 19, 2015