Career Path for Group Fitness Instructors
GROOMing Habits, Part One
Unless you’re extremely fortunate, quality instructors are not knocking down your door begging for work. Instead, you likely find yourself cycling through recently certified fitness pros who have little or no experience. They come, they go and you start over. The amount of time and attention you invest in staffing can take your eyes off the bigger picture, which is to help people get fit and healthy.
Nine Traits That Top Trainers Look For in Managers
As an owner or a manager, could you be putting off talented trainers without knowing it? We asked some top fitness pros what they look for when seeking employment. What they have to say may help you become the type of manager that the best-quality trainers yearn to work for.
Inspired Business, Part Five: Staff Buy-In
At an inspired fitness facility, people are encouraged and motivated to generate a “positive vibration.” This business model makes members feel special, and it motivates people not only to join your facility but also to thrive in your fitness community. What happens when your employees are treated as well as your members?
Lessons From the Trenches, Part One: The Leader Within
Many fitness professionals aspire to take their careers to the next level. Whether the goal is to become a better personal trainer or coach or to become the chief operating officer of a large fitness chain, great leadership is the underlying theme.
How to Cope With Change
Change is inevitable. Organizations restructure, fitness facility ownership turns over and managers come and go. Although change can be positive, for many people the mere thought of it breeds anxiety and fear. During times of job stress, productivity declines; in addition, the rumor mill ramps up, morale may deteriorate and valued employees may look for other opportunities. As a manager, you are responsible for guiding employees through these potentially difficult times.
Transparency: The New Standard for Business Success
Many top business executives have shucked common practice and opened their books and boardroom doors to create greater company transparency. Can this emerging business standard really lead to greater financial success?
Educate Yourself, Elevate Your Business
SEducation is a cornerstone of a profitable business. Whether you’d like to update your coaching skills, learn new ways to manage staff or learn how to work smarter and not harder, the 2015 IDEA Personal Trainer Institute has everything you need to build a better business.
Lifestyle Medicine: An Emerging Medical Specialty
Fitness and wellness professionals know the importance of building a strong referral program with allied health professionals, such as physicians, but making connections is not always easy. Personal trainers, for example, have worked hard to gain trust from the medical community.
How to Choose a Retirement Planner
Working with a financial planner can help you make sense of the retirement plans that apply to you and help you identify the best solutions for your needs, says Taylor Schulte, CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® and founder of Define Financial in San Diego. “
Because it’s not easy for a couch potato to jump right into a 5-day-a-week workout plan, a good trainer might start with 1 or 2 days and slowly add more as the client begins to make exercise a regular habit,” he says. “The same idea can be applied to your retirement plan.
Retirement Planning for Personal Trainers
The benefit of being a personal trainer with a healthy lifestyle is that you can probably expect to enjoy a long, active life. While it can be possible to teach group fitness classes or train clients well into your 70s, it’s important to make a decision now: Do you want to have to work that long, or would you rather have the choice to work simply because you enjoy helping others? Do you know the age at which you would like to retire? Are you on track to accumulate the money you will need to support your retirement?
10 Things Fitness Pros Need to Know About the Affordable Care Act
With the passage and implementation of the Affordable Care Act, U.S. healthcare policy is placing an unprecedented value on prevention—a field that fitness pro- fessionals know well.
7 Steps to Business Happiness
If you’re a fitness business owner or an independently contracted personal trainer, chances are you’re following your passion and doing what you love: helping others achieve improved health and fitness. Good for you.
But owning your own business can be romanticized. In truth, once you’re out on your own, you’re likely a “one-man band”: the trainer, the admin, the lead customer service tech, the content generator, the accountant and the social media department. Welcome to business ownership.
Teaching Through Sadness
It’s one of those days. It’s bleak and cold outside, and my mom just called to let me know that my dad left on another biweekly, 10-hour bus trip to the cancer clinic for treatment. I am driving to the studio to instruct an early-morning cardio blitz class. My thoughts drift, and I feel a familiar heaviness in my heart. The last thing I want to do right now is teach . . .
5 Self-Care Suggestions for New Fitness Pros and Managers
Based on wisdom gleaned from experience (sometimes the hard way), a few veterans share their thoughts on how new pros can safeguard self-care early on in their careers.
Challenges That Affect Fitness Pros
Like others who pursue helping careers, those of us who are trainers and instructors are professional givers, and the issues that affect this group are unique, varied, and sometimes even detrimental to our own health. lack of self-care has many consequences. This list of the challenges that fitness pros may encounter was derived from our experts’ own experiences.
Possible Adverse Outcomes:
Health Coaching vs. Life Coaching
Coaching is not a new field. “The general consensus is that personal life coaching evolved in the early 1990s out of the coaching techniques being used to motivate business executives in the 1980s,” says Mary Bratcher, wellness coach and co-owner of The Biomechanics Method in San Diego. “The application of life coaching to the health and fitness sector began to happen in the early 2000s.”
Encouraging Instructors to Stay and Play
Many group fitness instructors are independent contractors and teach a variety of classes at various facilities. The majority of them would prefer to offer their teaching talents at a single facility in exchange for regular pay and full benefits, but such opportunities are hard to find.
Networking Know-How
Many experts suggest that networking is a great tool for growing a business. But the process can be awkward or uncomfortable for some fitness pros.
Frank Pucher, CEO of 121 Personal Training in Roseland, New Jersey, offers his top tips on becoming a master networker:
How to Make More Money: Become a Spokesperson
What do Shaun T and Tony Horton have in common with Jessica Simpson and Marie Osmond? They all represent companies as brand ambassadors and spokespeople—and you can, too!
According to InsideJobs.com, “A spokesperson is someone who’s chosen by a company to promote its brand through public announcements and endorsements. As a spokesperson, you’re the voice (and face!) of an entire organization.”
LEAD or Get Out of the Way
When someone asks you what you do for a living, how do you respond? Perhaps you say you’re “a group fitness instructor,” “a yoga instructor” or “a Zumba® instructor.” The correct response is, “I’m a leader.” You do more than simply host amazing classes that help people get fit. It’s time to think bigger about who you are and what you do, if you truly want to Inspire the World to Fitness®.