The personal trainer industry is thriving like never before. It doesn’t matter if someone has experience as a fitness coach or someone completely new.
A personal training certification can help you gain the credibility you need to advance your career in the fitness industry, especially in today’s time, when the career paths in the fitness industry are more diverse, and a personal trainer no longer has to stick with exercise to keep their career afloat. Trainers these days can capture newly emerged niches to advance their career, get additional certifications to increase their credentials, or become lifestyle coaches.
With how the fitness industry is positioned, the opportunities are endless. You just have to be creative enough. However, finding the right role for yourself can be hard, especially if you’re new. That’s why we’ve created this guide to highlight opportunities for certified personal trainers that’ll help you advance your careers.
Besides that, if you want to earn your personal training certification, we recommend you check out W.I.T.S. Education’s personal training course that’s accredited by the N.C.C.A.
How Can You Become A Personal Trainer?
Personal trainers are tasked with a lot more than normal gym trainers. They need to develop safe and effective exercise programs spanning different fitness niches. This is why you need to work a little harder to become a personal trainer. Moreover, fitness trainers need proper certification before starting working with clients. This is done to ensure that clients get proper training and that the trainer knows about fitness training.
To become a certified personal trainer, you’ll need a high-school diploma or equivalent. You’ll need to enroll in a personal training course and earn your N.C.C.A. certification. Without that, you won’t be considered a personal trainer. Once you’ve earned your certification, you can start training the clients. as a newbie, you’ll first have to build your portfolio before you can start working solo. So it’s a good idea to work with someone else to gain experience and practical knowledge.
What Do You Learn When Getting Your Personal Trainer Certification?
Body Anatomy
Unlike other exercise and fitness programs, personal training is about body anatomy. Trainers work with several clients each day and need to offer a personalized approach to all of them. This is why they need to understand how different body parts work to design exercise programs.
Moreover, clients work with a diverse range of clients, from young adults to senior citizens, and each age group has special requirements regarding their bodies. Trainers need to understand this difference and do so. They need to first understand body anatomy. That’s why all certified personal training programs start with understanding the human body.
Types Of Nutrition
Personal training isn’t just limited to exercise. Trainers must recommend diet plans to their clients; they can’t do that if they don’t know about proper nutrition. During their certification training, personal trainers learn about healthy eating, different types of essential nutrients, and which ones are best suited for each client.
Besides that, in the case of weight management, diet plans are more important than workouts because no matter how effective a workout program is, it won’t give any results if the diet isn’t proper. Other than that, trainers may get clients with eating disorders, and the basis of their fitness training depends on the diet programs the trainer designs.
Developing Exercise Programs
Developing exercise plans is a lot more difficult than it seems. Trainers need to understand the client’s long-term fitness goals and translate them into realistic exercise programs that can give good results without causing any muscle fatigue or other injuries to the client. Moreover, the trainers must also understand different workout techniques and the client’s ability to do them.
If a client wants strength training, trainers must ensure they’re healthy enough to withstand such heavy training. If not, then trainers first need to bring clients to that level using other fitness training methods. Similarly, if senior citizens want to lose weight, common weight loss exercises might be too harsh on them, so trainers must come up with alternative ways to help them achieve their goals.
Client Management
When working one-on-one with clients, trainers need to learn effective client management. They need to understand how to cater to different schedules throughout the day. Meet the client’s requirements, resolve any complaints they might help, and convince them to perform certain workouts.
Additionally, the client’s goals might not always be achievable, so trainers need to help them set realistic goals without lowering their motivation. These client management skills are the most important because they can’t be taught. Trainers can only be guided and have to develop these interpersonal skills on their own through experience. 
Different Exercise Forms
Finally, personal trainers are expected to know different exercise forms. Clients hire personal trainers and pay them a premium price for the services. However, learning all fitness training forms is impossible, so personal trainers are given basic training. They can use this training to master other emerging forms of fitness training without needing any certifications. However, for certain forms such as medical or youth fitness training, trainers might need certifications to increase their credibility.
How Can You Expand Your Career In The Fitness Industry?
Go For High-End Coaching
High-end coaching comes at a premium price, but as a personal trainer, you’ll need to offer more one-on-one training to make the high-end clients happy. These clients come with a set of demands that need to be fulfilled which is why becoming a trainer of such caliber requires a lot of experience and knowledge.
If you’ve done your share of personal training and successfully trained many clients, you can start going for a high-end fitness coach. But as the name suggests, you won’t just be a trainer; instead, you be a coach. This means you’ll be required to offer additional services apart from fitness training, including lifestyle recommendations and mindset coaching.
Go Into Management
Management is the right option if you’re looking to switch from a physically demanding job to a more laidback one. You won’t be required to train clients, but you’ll be responsible for all the gym or fitness studio activities.
Your responsibilities will include managing the administrative staff, onboarding new clients, finalizing promotional and marketing work, checking the equipment, and making decisions regarding the gym’s operations. This job suits older personal trainers who want to transition to a different role because they can’t offer the same efficiency when training.
Open Your Own Fitness Studio
If your area lacks options for fitness training, you can take your career to the next level by opening up your own fitness business. Remember that physical spaces and equipment will be costly, so you’ll need to either save up or find the right funding. Besides that, you’ll also need to offer something unique so people will choose your business and not your customers. So you can offer a unique service or start with a specialized niche and work your way up from there.
You can also work alone or hire staff to offer different fitness training options. For example, if you want to offer group exercise classes, you’ll need to either learn about it or hire a group exercise instructor. That decision depends on your schedule and the capital available.
Branch Into Other Niches
Once you’ve gained enough experience and have a dedicated clientele, you can start branching out into different niches to offer a more personalized approach and capture more clients. Popular fitness niches these days include youth fitness training, senior fitness training, medical fitness training, and lifestyle coaching. If you look around your area, you’ll be able to find other unique niches that aren’t covered by the mainstream market.
Additionally, depending on your target audience, you can offer special services to attract more clients. For example, you can target mothers and offer a play area for kids so mothers can work on their fitness without worrying about their kids.
Become A Consultant
Consulting plays a crucial role in the fitness world. A successful personal trainer can make a good living by offering consulting services. You can offer a variety of consulting services such as training new trainers, designing exercise programs, helping new trainers open their businesses, and offering private one-on-one coaching for new personal trainers.
Pursuing consulting alongside your personal training business will help you build strong connections and expand your business. You’ll be able to find new niches and take your career to the next level, all the while making an additional income.
Start Online Fitness Training
Since the pandemic, online fitness training has taken off. Even after things have gone back to normal, some still prefer the remote setting that works best with their schedule. Online coaching prevents people from wasting time traveling and changing their schedules for training. With online classes, they can work out whenever they like in the comfort of their house. On the other hand, online training saves you from investing in a space or workout equipment.
You won’t be limited to a specific area and can take on clients from all parts of the world. The difficult thing is to get your services noticed by the people. You; ‘ll need to learn different marketing techniques, so check out this guide on running an online fitness business.
Work With Companies To Develop Fitness Tech
Technology is playing a crucial part in transforming the fitness industry. Wearable technology is causing the latest disruptions. Fitness enthusiasts are investing in different forms of wearable tech to keep track of their fitness levels and workout outcomes. However, the tech still has a long way to go. Tech companies invest in serious research and development to design effective and conventional technologies.
These companies regularly seek fitness trainers to help test their tech and help them perfect it. You can take advantage of this and work with these tech companies to help them perfect their technology. These companies pay a good amount for testing and verifying their data.
Go Into Athletic Training
Athletic training or sports coaching is an emerging fitness niche. It’s different from regular athletic training, which requires a different certification. Sports coaching is mainly focused on the youth and improving their athletic performance.
But since the people who participate in these training are kids and teens, the training isn’t as intense. If you can work with the youth and love sports, then athletic training is a great option. Moreover, if you want to offer more specialized training, you can opt for a youth fitness specialization where you’ll learn how to properly work with kids.
Get On The Lifestyle Wellness Trend
Lifestyle wellness coaching is a holistic approach to fitness training that involves mindfulness and lifestyle changes to help clients achieve their fitness goals. Lifestyle coaches do a lot more than make exercise plans. They are responsible for revamping the client’s lifestyles so they can lead more fulfilling lives. Wellness coaching allows clients to get insights into their health and fitness and use it to make lifestyle changes that’ll help them succeed in different aspects of their lives, such as personal growth or career.
This training involves you identifying the issues with your client’s lifestyle and modifying them, so they not only become fit but also lead happier lives. It involves creating a good relationship with your clients and coaching them to improve their wellness and fitness.
Want To Learn More About Fitness Training? Enroll At W.I.T.S Education
W.I.T.S. Education is a fitness training center offering personal health trainer programs for people seeking work in the fitness industry. You can take classes to become a certified personal trainer, a group exercise instructor, a medical fitness instructor, and many more. If you’re considering opening your own fitness center, W.I.T.S. Education also offers a course in fitness management.
They include informative online lectures and hands-on labs in their courses. Their labs are located all over North America. The institution has also received accreditation from the N.C.C.A. and the American Council of Education. Additionally, they have the widest network of schools and universities where students can earn course credits. Check out their courses and join right away!