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Forge a Successful Fitness Career with Internships

Are you thinking about a career in fitness or looking to advance your position in the health and fitness industry? The outlook for personal trainers, fitness professionals and group fitness instructors is very bright indeed! Now is an excellent time to capitalize on this exciting and popular profession. According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, the personal fitness training industry is set to grow nearly 30% between now and 2018, making “personal trainer/fitness instructor” one of the top growing occupations in the nation.

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How to Become a Lifestyle Coach

Online health coaching

If you’re like a lot of successful personal trainers, you know from years of working with clients that even the best fitness evaluations and strength, cardio and weight management programs aren’t always enough. The problem–life gets in the way. From my own experience as a personal trainer, regardless of how great my programming was, it had zero value if my clients had adherence issues. Many of the hundreds I’ve helped over the years followed a plan for a while and then went back to their old self-sabotaging ways.

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How to Become a Spa Professional

As the fitness industry embraces wellness concepts such as mental training, mindful movement and holistic programming, now more than ever the spa world offers viable career opportunities. Why? One reason is that it has long embraced these same healthy goals. The fitness professional who is curious about employment in the spa industry must take methodical steps toward discovering whether or not this specialty field is a good fit.

Spa History and Legacy

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How to Become a Fitness Manager

Advice from fitness club managers

The pathway beyond group exercise instruction and personal training is not exactly clear cut. Fitness professionals realize early on that adding classes and clients to their already jam-packed, hectic schedules may not be the best use of their time. However, figuring out a way to increase stability and cash flow is challenging. Since most fitness professionals end up working for several facilities simultaneously and/or fend for themselves as independent entrepreneurs, finding a mentor can be tough.

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Planning Your Fitness Career Path

Whether you just graduated from university with a health-related degree, recently obtained your first fitness certification or are contemplating how to get more out of your current position in the fitness industry, deciding on the right career pathway is an important—and sometimes overwhelming—process. The good news is, the fitness industry offers an abundance of opportunities for a variety of personality types, aspirations, skill sets and interests.

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How to Become a Yoga Instructor

If you are enthusiastic about yoga and have seen its transformative effect in your own life, it’s natural to want to share that with others. And if you are comfortable in front of a group but also know how to connect one-on-one, teaching yoga may be a perfect fit.

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Programming for Profit

As the health and wellness industry has developed, so has the understanding of what constitutes fitness “product” in the minds of consumers and facility operators alike. Nowadays, a company’s product is more than a tangible “thing.” It includes every aspect of fitness: personal training, group exercise, kids’ training, the facility, staff training and development, studio-based classes, floor layout and, above all, member experience.

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The Real Cost of Hiring the Wrong Employee

When Nick Locascio, club manager of The Leading Edge in Greenfield, Massachusetts, hired someone for his front desk, he had no idea how much she would cost him—emotionally and financially.

“Instead of greeting and interacting with our customers, she spent her time on Facebook, texting and chatting with friends,” he says. “At one point, I caught her watching a movie on her laptop [while] wearing earphones.”

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Don’t Be That Manager: The Yes Person

Many personal trainers are promoted to manager or director solely on the basis of their success as a trainer and not necessarily because of their management skills. Now it’s your turn: You are the new personal training manager. You’re finding out how different being the manager is from working with clients on the floor.

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Manager Meltdowns

Regardless of how big or small your role is as group fitness manager (GFM), your success depends primarily on how effectively you communicate with a diverse audience. Each employee has a need to hear you, understand your message, store the information and act on it. Keeping employees informed can eat up a lot of time and may prevent you from getting to initiatives that could grow the business.

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The Top 5 Sales Phrases Every Trainer Should Know

You stock your training tool kit with uber-adaptable equipment for every fitness level: a TRX, a stability ball, maybe some tubing or a yoga mat. Since you can never be completely certain what your fitness client will need on any given day, your go-to gear adapts to any training trial. But what about the tools you use to gain new training customers–do you have a stash of stand-by sales phrases that adapt to diverse personalities equally well?

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The Personal Training Membership Model

The 2010 IDEA Personal Training Programs & Equipment Survey found that approximately 75% of respondents ask clients to pay for individual sessions/classes or packages of sessions/classes. Some fitness professionals suggest this business model should become a thing of the past. “When you sell ‘packages’ of sessions, you’re chasing money and not building projectable income for yourself,” warns Troy Fontana, CEO of Freedom Fitness Unlimited in Sparks, Nevada. “The only security you have is the six, 12 or 20 sessions your client just purchased.

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Managing Your Online Reputation

Most personal trainers recognize the impact that social media investments can have on their business. By actively improving your online presence with blogs, Facebook pages, YouTube videos and/or Twitter updates, you can increase your opportunities to enhance client-trainer relationships, multiply promotional efforts and gain authority on a topic (Alsac 2010). But this article is not about creating a social media strategy. It is about course-correcting the one you already have—to ensure that you are being portrayed in a positive light.

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Business Development and Marketing

In this article series we have covered a wealth of information to help you create and maintain a business edge so that you stand out from other trainers, coaches and fitness centers. I have enjoyed thinking through the elements that I believe have given my personal training and coaching business, Cross Coaching & Wellness, a business edge in my local community and in the fitness and wellness professional world as a whole. Writing these articles has also motivated me to stay on track with my own advice while I am sharing it with you.

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Pilates Equipment: Tax Breaks

Your Pilates equipment costs you money, and it also makes you money. In the midst of tax season, when you are finally ready to consider your assets, take some time to get organized. The following questions and answers relate to Pilates equipment purchased for use in a studio and are by no means comprehensive. Rely on the advice of a trained and trusted financial adviser before filing your taxes.

Equipment Cost

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Create Your Own Fitness DVD

Creating a fitness DVD is a great way to generate additional income. However, making a DVD is also a time-consuming venture that requires a lot of planning.

Step 1: Prepare a Production Plan

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Interval Training Advantages

One of the main reasons for all of the attention being given to interval training in the fitness industry is that it can improve fitness quickly, which is great news for busy people who don’t want to spend 2 hours in the gym.

Designing Interval Workouts

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