The fitness industry is a growing market with more and more people becoming health conscious and wanting to look after themselves the best they can. This is leading to more people becoming interested in becoming a personal trainer to help others attain their health and fitness goals. But what are the steps to achieving this? Here is the low down on how you too can become a personal trainer.
The first thing you need is passion. Passion for not only exercising yourself and moving well in your technique but also a passion in wanting to help others. Passion is what drives you forward in any career, it is also what keeps you developing yourself going forward and not becoming stagnant and bored in what you do.
The next part of the pathway is to educate yourself and get certified by a professional qualification. A solid knowledge is needed to make sure you move well to avoid hurting yourself or others and understand the body systems. This makes any work towards fitness goals way more safe and effective. The most dangerous person in a gym is someone assisting others without any form of knowledge base.
Educate Yourself About Fitness
The first course needed is Fitness Instructor. This gives you the foundation in the human body and how it works, muscles, bones, energy systems plus gives you that practical time in the gym with professional instructor teaching you how to move with good technique on all the machines, equipment, free weights and body weight exercises. This course will give you the qualification and confidence to induct people around a gym.
Once this 3 week course has been completed the next stage in becoming a one to one trainer is to complete the Personal Trainer course. This is more in-depth into anatomy and physiology of the body, more detail in training principles and methods plus looking at nutrition which goes hand in hand with training. Answer burning questions such as how much protein should you be eating? What foods best fuel you pre or post workout? How many calories should you be eating? The Personal Trainer course is 4 weeks long and give you the certification you need to work on a one-to-one basis with clients.
This is where International Fitness Alliance comes into play. We are a leading fitness training company from the UK training up people from all works of life across the Middle East. With an awarding body in the UK, the certifications you receive are recognized worldwide and will never expire. With offices based in Qatar, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, the courses offered can betaken live or virtually online from anywhere in the world. The courses have been developed to be as accessible as possible to anyone. We offer the Fitness Instructor and Personal Trainer courses along with multiple short courses you can add on to upskill. Courses such as bootcamp instructor, kettlebell, suspension trainer and indoor cycling.
Look for Opportunities
Once you are trained up as a personal trainer there are many career options to choose from. With many new gyms opening up across the region, the first option would be to work as a personal trainer within a gym. This choice gives you all the equipment you need without investment and access to many clients in one place to market yourself to. Offering inductions or talking to people will help develop trust and rapport leading to a proportion of them investing in themselves and you. A benefit of being based within the fitness center is that you can book clients back to back making the most of your time.
If you prefer a little more freedom, the next option open to you would be to freelance. This will be where the personal trainer will go to clients and train them at home. A lot of apartment blocks have their own gym facility or clients will also invest in some equipment. It would be beneficial if you as the trainer had some key equipment that you could take around – suspension trainers, bands and even some kettlebells can be easily transported. The upside here is that you will not need to split any of the income with the gym. The downside being that you will need to drive more from client to client so more time needs to be given between bookings.
Now if you are really passionate about fitness, you could even open up your own personal training studio. Yes, this is an investment, but there are so many rewards in owning your own business and being your own boss. You could now be the one employing trainers so that you can be making an income even when you are not physically training a client.
Wherever you choose to train clients, consider how to market yourself. Word of mouth is still the biggest form of promotion so offering incentives to existing clients for referrals is a great way to build up business. Staying on top of your game and education keeps giving you an edge over others. Social media is a great tool of communicating who you are and your brand to a wide audience. Consider having a separate business account to personal account so that everything posted is relevant and professional. Offering training tips, nutrition advice and workouts are perfect ways for people to get to know you and what you can do. The world has also opened up a lot more since the pandemic. What is stopping you training clients online from anywhere in the world?
International Fitness Alliance is more than just a training provider. We offer a mentorship program for all our students. We help link you to gyms, we get experts in to share their knowledge on programing, marketing and many other topics relevant to you as a trainer. We support you from the beginning, through your education and ongoing through your career.
The opportunities are endless as a persona trainer. It is also one of the most exciting careers you could choose as you actually make a difference to peoples' lives and health. So, if this is something that you are excited about and keen to explore, do get in touch with us and let International Fitness Alliance start you off on your journey.
After a tumultuous 2021 international fitness alliance is pleased to announce it will be resuming its YouTube show. You can expect weekly videos covering fitness related topics from how to answer the most common questions you face as a personal trainer, how to ace your fitness job interview, reviews of cutting edge workouts, a look into fitness technology and fitness product reviews and much, much more. We are also very interested for ideas so if you have anything that you'd like us to cover please drop us a message or an email and we will be sure to try and cover all the topics that are requested.
As a fitness education company we were so excited to come across this video by neuroscientist; Wendy Suzuki. Dr Suzuki takes an academic look into the benefits of fitness in brain function and most astounding the protection it lends to degenerating diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Below is a short excerpt from the lecture and you can click on the link for the whole video, your brain will be happy you did!
As a curious neuroscientists, I went to the literature to see what I could find about what we knew about the effects of exercise on the brain. And what I found was an exciting and growing literature that was essentially showing everything that I noticed in myself, better mood, better energy, better memory, better attention. And the more I learned, the more I realised how powerful exercise was, which eventually led me to the big decision to completely shift my research focus. And so now after several years of really focusing on this question, I've come to the following conclusion. That exercise is the most transformative thing that you can do for your brain today for the following three reasons. Number one, it has immediate effects on your brain. A single workout that you do will immediately increase levels of neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, and noradrenaline. That is going to increase your mood right after that workout. Exactly what I was feeling my lab showed that a single workout can improve your ability to shift and focus attention and that focus improvement will last for at least two hours. And finally, studies have shown that a single workout will improve your reaction times which basically means that you are going to be faster at catching that cup of Starbucks that falls off the counter, which is very, very important. But these immediate effects are transient.
They help you right after. What you have to do is do what I did that is change your exercise regime, increase your cardio respiratory function to get the long lasting effects and these effects are long lasting, because exercise actually changes the brain's anatomy, physiology and function. Let's start with my brain favourite brain area that hippocampus. The hippocampus, or exercise actually produces brand new brain cells, new brain cells in the hippocampus that actually increase its volume as well as improve your long term memory. Okay, and that that including in you and me, number two, the most common finding in neuroscience studies looking at the effects of exercise long term exercise is improved attention function dependent on your prefrontal cortex, you not only get better focus and attention, but the volume of the hippocampus increases as well. And finally, you not only get immediate effects of mood with exercise, but those lasts for a long time, so you get long lasting increases in those good mood neurotransmitters. But really, the most transformative thing that exercise will do is its protective effects on your brain. Here you can think about the brain like a muscle the more you're working out, the bigger and stronger your hippocampus and prefrontal cortex gets. Why is that important? Because the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus are the two areas that are most susceptible to neurodegenerative diseases and normal cognitive decline in EEG. So with increased exercise over your lifetime, you're not going to cure dementia or Alzheimer's disease, but what you're going to do is you're going to create the strongest biggest hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. So it takes longer for these diseases to actually have an effect. You can think of exercise therefore, as a supercharged 401 K for your brain, okay? And it's even better because it's free.
So, this is a point in the talk where everybody says, That sounds so interesting, Wendy, but I really only want to know one thing, and that is just tell me the minimum amount of exercise. I need to get all these changes. And so I'm so I'm going to tell you the answer to that question. First. Good news. You don't have to become a triathlete to get these effects. The rule of thumb is you want to get three to four times a week exercise minimum 30 minutes an exercise session, and you want to get a robic exercise in that is get your heart rate up. And the good news is you don't have to go to the gym to get a very expensive gym membership. Add an extra walk around the block in your power walk up the stairs, take stairs, and power vacuuming can be as good as the aerobics class that you are going to take at the gym. So I have gone from memory pioneer to exercise Explorer from going into the innermost workings of the brain to try and understand how exercise can improve our brain function. And my goal in my lab right now is to go beyond that rule of thumb that I just gave you three to four times a week. 30 minutes. I want to understand the optimum exercise, prescription for you, at your age at your fitness level for your genetic background, to maximise the effects of exercise today and also to improve your brain and protect your brain the best for the rest of your life.
