I’ve been waiting a few weeks to watch the Insight program that went to air on SBS tonight. When I spoke to one of the producers a few weeks back, she was looking for negative experiences from clients with PT’s in private training and in boot-camp environments. While I could only relate my negative experiences to personality clashes (can count them on one hand over my 9 year career), I have had some clients come to me from other trainers with negative experiences. Most of these cases came from trainer reliability and schedule clashes.
Insight were searching for negative experiences, and they did find a few, which perhaps shows that the industry does need further regulation?
A large amount of the conversation was around the topic of qualifications. In my personal opinion, an 8-week course is enough to get started as a Personal Trainer, as long as it is followed up with a highly regulated mentoring program. While ‘Insight’ did not manage to draw any real conclusion tonight, I would like to say that perhaps the biggest outcome was that too many trainers are coming out of their short courses and starting their own business without guidance or training in a practical setting. Some trainers are acting outside their qualifications, not correcting poor technique and creating further physical complications.
The human body is a complex piece of nature, and requires large amounts of knowledge to understand how it moves, the human psyche is a mind-field that requires large amounts of awareness and maturity when relating to another human being. As Ron Palmer mentioned in the chat room after the program, working in the fitness industry like a double-barreled shot-gun. It’s a combination of art and science. With the art of working with people, and the science of the human body and its physical abilities.
I’m not sure what motivates many of the young people who jump into these short courses and think they’re going to make a career from personal training. Is it the course providers & their sales team pumping them up with hyped-up money-making fiction? Do they think it’ll be easy? Do they think it’ll be better than working in a shirt and tie? Would they just rather work outdoors? Do they actually want to help people? Do they want to get fitter themselves? In some cases passion, enthusiasm and a lifetime of sport/gym/exercise experience can be the perfect lead-up to an 8-week course and result in a great qualified personal trainer. I have employed many of them in the past, but I doubt the majority of those graduates are in that position.
In my experience, good trainers are hard to find, especially straight out of a fast-tracked course. I think increased regulation should lead to a mentoring program where registered trainers, are linked up to industry professionals like an apprenticeship scheme. They should follow a set amount of hours, variety of experiences and client circumstances. Good trainers learn through experience, they know that they don’t have all the answers, and when they don’t, they refer the client elsewhere or refer to their notes and get back to the client during the next session. It seems that much of this debate stemmed from inexperienced trainers acting outside their level of expertise.
While many people on the program attempted to direct the topic in their own positive direction (which is great), Insight’s goal was to highlight the negative experiences in the industry, and I think they needed to. I think these negative experiences will only be wiped out with increased regulation and I’d recommend they start with an industry standard mentoring program.
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