How much do you make as a Personal Trainer?
As the Sales Director of Bodycore, I talk to 99{00c9fc3b0c04b1c5d0a150e1e4af74c5798b192c7044c1cd852c32d3af5e6a7d} of the people thinking of becoming a Personal Trainer. The people I talk to have pretty normal 9-5 jobs and are thinking about joining this crazy world of Personal Training. Some of them are self-employed, some single mothers, some work off-shore in oil, some have office jobs – you get the point.
The thing they have in common is – they all love the gym and they can all see themselves enjoying a career in it.
How much do you make as a Personal Trainer?
It’s the question I probably get asked most of all.
What the job adverts say
If you have ever been on gumtree loking for a job, you may have seen an advert saying:
EARN 70K A YEAR DOING WHAT YOU LOVE
only to find out you have to shell out a few thousand pounds for a personal training course.
Yes, it is possible to earn £70,000 a year with this, but probably not in your first year.
So what is more realistic?
The Business Plan
There are many ways to make a living as a Personal Trainer ranging from hourly wages running classes and gyms and getting salary’s for private facilities. What I will focus on is the self employed/freelance model as this is where 90{00c9fc3b0c04b1c5d0a150e1e4af74c5798b192c7044c1cd852c32d3af5e6a7d} of trainers go (e.g. Puregym).
In these gyms (please note it is different from gym to gym), you run your business by exchanging your time e.g. running classes as rent. In Puregym, you spend 15 hours a week, split into 3 x 5 hour shifts. Leaving 25 hours for you to do what you want.
The great thing about this model, is that you can charge what you want for PT when you get clients.
Let’s say you need to make £600.00 a month to meet your very basic monthly outgoings e.g. Rent, Car, Food.
The lowest rate I would advise is £25.00 per hour session. So to meet your basic costs you need to find clients who will do 24 sessions in a month (6 sessions a week).
So here’s how you do that.
Aim to get one extra session a week:
Week 1 – 0 sessions
Week 2 – 1 Session
Week 3 – 2 sessions
Week 4 – 3 Sessions
Week 5 – 4 Sessions
Week 6 – 5 Sessions
Week 7 – 6 Sessions
So in 7 weeks you could be covering your basic needs but only working 21 hours a week (15 hours on shift + 6 hour sessions per week).
When you get to week 52 after a year- there’s no reason why you can’t earn £600-900 a week with this method.
How do you get those clients though?
This is the bit some people struggle with. Especially when they first start. It takes some work but I have found this:
Talk to 10 gym-goers every day. Give them help, advice and just be a nice person.
Of those 10 people, 1 will do a consultation with you.
For every 5 consultations you will get a client.
So in theory, for every 50 people you talk to, you will get a client.
Why doesn’t every PT make this money?
I think it comes down to comfort zone. You really have to go outside your comfort zone and talk to people about them. A lot of the Personal Trainers I see not making progress are the ones who sit in the staff room and do the minimum. They begrudgingly do classes and don’t really engage people through conversation and genuine caring, and therefore don’t really get clients. They don’t DO.
At Bodycore, we push our students to live outside their comfort zone. It’s where change happens.
If you are someone who genuinely wants to get paid for doing something they love, get outside your comfort zone and start doing.
By Steve Marsden