You may have heard the advice to seek out those who are truly living the life you want to lead. Furthermore, those who clearly aren’t following their own advice aren’t worth your time. This is why people tend to ignore overweight nutritionists. And this is why you can only build a career as a personal trainer by getting fit yourself. But what should your fitness goals be?
Improve Your Endurance
As a personal trainer, you’ll need to be able to keep up with clients throughout the day. This means you must have enough endurance to potentially work out for hours alongside clients. If you have a high level of endurance, you’ll have more energy when you’re working with clients, too, even at the end of the day. This makes endurance a top priority. This is especially true if you are going to train for an event or training others for an event like races. If they need to go five miles, you need to be able to go ten. If they’ll be swimming ten laps with you, you should be able to swim twenty.
Increase Your Strength
Why should a personal trainer work on being stronger? You’re a spotter for your clients, whether you realize it or not. You may need to catch them before the fall, and you might need to carry them back to the bench when they’re hurt. It doesn’t hurt if you can impress them by lifting far more weight than they can. This has the side benefit of reducing your risk of being injured if you have to grab something heavy. At a minimum, you must be strong enough to demonstrate each exercise hour after hour with reasonable resistance. The bar is set higher if you’re going to be a certified strength trainer.
Master the Necessary Skills
As a future personal trainer, you’ll need to pass the ACE CPT test. It is hard because you have to complete 150 questions in three hours. These questions come from a nearly 800-page textbook. Preparing with an ace practice test is the best way to make sure you’ve mastered all the material and can finish the test in time.
Let’s suppose you’ve learned all the theory. What equipment do you expect to use with clients? Know how to set it, tear it down, and clean it. Are you going to run through a number of exercises? Know how to do all of them correctly and the safe modifications for people with various health conditions. For example, there are moves pregnant women should never do. Be able to do all of these moves yourself effortlessly and repeatedly, because most clients will learn by watching your example.
Reduce Your Body Fat Percentage
Citing a low body mass index number won’t matter to most of your clients. What they will notice is a fit, trim personal trainer whose appearance proves what they can do and embodies what the client’s goals. This is why reducing your body fat percentage is probably one of your goals. You must have, at a minimum, a healthy body fat percentage. A low body fat percentage can make your muscles appear sculpted. However, you don’t have to push yourself to have almost no body fat.
There is room in the market for those who aren’t in perfect form. If you’ve lost fifty pounds or more, you have a great testimonial. People working with clients who want to repeat that feat could still be overweight themselves, as long as they have the necessary knowledge and can outperform their clients. But even here, you need to be leaner than you were before.
