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Letters: PT qualifications must teach people real-world skills
I read Scott Hopson’s feature on personal training with interest (see HCM Sept 12, p54). While I agree with many of the points raised, I think there are more fundamental explanations and solutions to the challenge of making a successful career as a personal trainer.
We must first consider the environment newly qualified PTs enter. In the current economic climate, more gym operators are erring towards self-employed, rental-based models which guarantee revenues, as opposed to high quality service and continued employee training and development. This means graduates face a ‘cliff’ following qualification, having to fend for themselves.
At The Training Room, we’ve bridged this gap by being a full-service careers provider rather than merely a training company. You can have all the knowledge, qualifications and client skills in the world, but if you don’t understand what’s expected of you in the real world, you’re being set up for failure. We focus on an academy environment where students adhere to strict codes of conduct (similar to those of top club operators) and uniform standards from day one. We provide additional business training, presentations from large corporate operators and work experience during training to ensure that all our graduates are industry-ready.
I totally agree that making money from PT alone is challenging – we’ve always taught our graduates to work the different income streams available to them. We insist all our students study group exercise classes such as group cycling and boxing circuits, and also strongly encourage external income streams such as boot camps and weight loss classes. This leads to an interesting and lucrative initial career which can become more specialist in later years.
Jonathan Davies, Founder & CEO, The Training Room
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A tiered approach to cater for all levels of exerciser
I was interested to read the recent editor’s letter, ‘A broader church’ (see HCM NovDec 12, p3). If the fitness sector carries on delivering the same old journey in the same old way, we’ll only get the same old results – and that’s madness when it only appeals to 12–15 per cent of the UK population.
At Active Nation, we’ve torn up the rule book in a bid to persuade the nation to get, and stay, active. Our exercise experience is based around the real reasons, uncovered through research, why people don’t commit to exercise: choice, variation, support and value.
Rather than pitching our starting point at the high intensity level, assuming that everyone is an experienced exerciser, we’ve created three levels of intensity – Discover, Explore and Excel – based on a psychological exercise behavioural model. ‘Discover’ is pitched at those who have never exercised before; ‘Explore’ is for people who have been exercising regularly for between one and six months; and ‘Excel’ is for those who’ve been exercising for the last six months or more. Each level comes with a huge range of exercise choices and an appropriate pathway for progression that also has synergy with our group exercise classes and personal training.
It’s a solution that we find is welcoming new exercisers, but that’s also flexible enough to accommodate high intensity trainers. When 70 per cent of new members each month are new to exercise, it’s a route that we feel to be appropriate. The key to the success of our approach is in the diversity of activities we encourage people to get involved in: adding variety helps them reach their goals quicker and helps maintain their motivation.
Stuart Martin,Group commercial manager, Active Nation
