This interview describes the pros and cons of being a personal trainer in the fitness business, and how modern technology like AI is affecting the business of personal training.
Watch how AI is transforming fitness training in Nashville, TN.
Summary
- Fitness Career Pathways
- There are multiple ways to work in fitness:
- Business owner: own a gym, rent space, or operate as a sole proprietor.
- Employee: staff trainer in a health club (steady client flow, less marketing).
- Online model: remote coaching via Zoom or hybrid sessions.
- Program seller: develop and sell digital fitness or nutrition plans without direct contact.
- Specializations may include rehab, seniors, pregnancy, athletics, disease-specific fitness (e.g., MS).
- What Makes a Good Coach
- Core traits: empathy, professionalism, education, motivation, adaptability, and work ethic.
- Success defined by each client’s goals (e.g., athlete vs. hip-replacement recovery).
- Professionalism in gyms builds reputation; clients notice behavior even when not engaged.
- Realities of the Job
- Early mornings, late evenings, and midday gaps are standard.
- Emotional labor: trainers handle clients’ stress, excuses, and life struggles daily.
- Requires flexibility in problem-solving; “one-size-fits-all” plans rarely work.
- Sustained motivation and positivity are critical, even on bad days.
- Pros and Cons of the Fitness Industry
Pros:
- Flexible scheduling; ideal for part-time or second jobs.
- Healthy, positive environment.
- Fulfilling work—helping others improve their lives.
- Potential for strong income and autonomy once established.
Cons:
- Irregular schedule and inconsistent income early on.
- No benefits (health insurance, PTO).
- Must “always be on”; emotional fatigue risk.
- Repetitive stories and client excuses over time.
- Influencer Culture
- Social media partnerships = affiliate links and paid posts.
- Can generate side income, not a sustainable career.
- Followers belong to the platform, not to you.
- “Influencer” ≠ “Coach”; influencers focus on self-promotion, coaches focus on client outcomes.
- Technology and AI in Fitness
- AI as the Great Equalizer:
- Produces diet/exercise plans, marketing materials, and client communication instantly.
- Benefits new trainers (reduces learning and marketing barriers).
- Risks: homogenous content, loss of human touch, credibility erosion.
- Smart gyms and AI apps now provide feedback, motivation, and posture correction.
- Despite automation, human coaching for empathy, accountability, and customization remains irreplaceable.
- Timeless Principles
- People will always seek self-improvement and emotional well-being.
- Coaches help by offering implementation and accountability, not just information.
- “Marketing is putting the right message in front of the right person.”
💬 Q&A Summary
Q1: What are the main career options in fitness?
A: You can own a gym or service business, be an employee trainer, offer virtual or hybrid coaching, or create and sell programs online.
Q2: What qualities make a great personal trainer?
A: Education, empathy, professionalism, adaptability, and a strong work ethic. Trainers should help clients reach their version of success.
Q3: What’s daily life like for a fitness professional?
A: Expect long, irregular hours and emotional intensity. Coaching involves listening, motivating, and adapting to each client’s personal struggles.
Q4: What are the biggest pros and cons of working in fitness?
A: Pros include flexibility, health, fulfillment, and potential income. Cons include inconsistent pay, lack of benefits, emotional burnout, and “always-on” energy demands.
Q5: How can someone find their niche?
A: Start with general fitness clients, then follow interests and patterns that naturally emerge—injury rehab, senior fitness, youth athletics, etc.
Q6: How should trainers handle cancellations?
A: Establish a 24-hour cancellation policy at signup and enforce it early to prevent long-term issues with no-shows.
Q7: How is AI changing fitness?
A: AI automates coaching, tracking, and marketing—empowering beginners but reducing differentiation. However, emotional support and accountability still require humans.
Q8: Is becoming a fitness influencer a viable career?
A: Not really—treat it as side income. Social platforms can change algorithms or ban accounts, and followers don’t belong to you.
Q9: How can physical therapists or trainers build clientele?
A: Build referral networks with related providers (orthopedic surgeons, massage therapists) and maintain consistent professionalism and reliability.
Q10: What will never change in fitness?
A: People will always seek to feel better and become better versions of themselves—coaches who can deliver that transformation will always be needed.
Transcript of the presentation on running a Nashville personal training business:
Dan DeFigio is here to talk about the business of personal training.
And let me tell you a little bit about this guest speaker. He has been making himself available to speak to this class for years. And he has a ton of experience in the personal training business, the business of working with people.
And he’s not a one trick pony. He’s an author, he’s a podcaster, he’s a mentor, an expert. He’s also a Who Wants To Be A Millionaire contestant!
I mean, the list goes on and on really. He has a very impressive resume and he has just a lot of wisdom and experience to share with you. So I’m excited that those of you that could join us today are gonna have an opportunity to hear from Dan and ask questions, because he has a lot to offer.
He’s different than any of our other guest speakers. Dan provides a unique perspective of the fitness industry, and how that industry is evolving, particularly with the widespread use of AI. So I’m excited to hear from him about that.
[Dan DeFigio]
Thank you very much. It’s nice to see you, it’s nice to be back and thank you for the great introduction. I got a lot to live up to now, I guess.
So as Dr. Grubbs was saying, I am an old man now. I’ve been in this business since literally before the internet was a thing. So I have seen an awful lot of changes.
I’ve been successful for more than 30 years. So this industry has been really good to me. And so I want to give back to the next generation, and hopefully save you guys some time and heartache and don’t make the mistakes that I made so you can do well in whatever field you decide to go into.
Today, I primarily want to talk about the fitness business as in personal training and nutrition coaching. And I want to talk about pros and cons because just like any industry, there’s pluses and minuses to it. There’s no panacea career-wise for anyone.
So I will invite you at any time to interrupt me because I will talk a lot if you let me. So feel free to interrupt me. I’m gonna ask Dr. Grubbs to monitor the chat box so he can interrupt me. If anybody has a question, you can either just unmute yourself and jump in or you can type it in the chat box and I’ll try to attend to all of that. At this time, I will share my screen. You should see PowerPoint presentation.
Yes, can I have a thumbs up? Fantastic. So my name is Dan DeFigio. (That’s how you say my last name.) And that is my cell phone number and my email. So if you have any questions or concerns or you want to talk with me about anything at all, you are welcome to do so. I am at your disposal.
So — pros and cons of fitness. First of all, like what does it mean to work in the fitness industry?
There are tons of different variations. For starters, you can own your own business. You can either be a sole proprietor, like you’re a trainer and you hang your shingle out and you work with people either in a gym or at your home or in a public space.
You can own a gym. A lot of people do that. Or you can do something that I do.
I actually own a service business, but I don’t own a place. I pay rent to other people’s gyms. So we work with our customers in their space.
That’s a little bit different from a business model standpoint, but it’s worked well for 30 some years. So I don’t think I’m going to change it. Another version of working in fitness is instead of owning your own business, you can be an employee.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s how I got started in this field. I got hired at a health club in Nashville.
That’s where I live, Nashville, Tennessee. I got hired as a staff trainer for starters, and it’s a great opportunity for you to practice your teaching chops, develop your training skills and your business skills because you have this sort of built-in mechanism of new clients coming to you. When you’re an employee, you don’t have to do as much work finding your own customers.
When you own your own business, it is all on you. So that’s something to keep in mind. My company, Basics and Beyond Fitness and Nutrition, we do mostly one-on-one coaching, but that’s not the only way to go about it.
Group fitness and group coaching sessions are very, very popular. They’re very effective. I think community is important when people are doing anything that is kind of difficult and uncomfortable.
So the small group class, or even just sort of the neighborhood community feel of being a member at a gym, doing your own workouts there is a nice aspect. So there’s, once again, pluses and minuses. The one-on-one is very focused, very individualized, but there’s also the bonus of having the community in a small group setting.
Nowadays, we can do either live in-person sessions or we can do distance sessions. Lots of, a couple of my trainers, you know, when the pandemic hit five years ago, we all transitioned to working with our people over Zoom or FaceTime, since we weren’t allowed to be in the same room with each other. And several of my trainers liked it and the clients love it.
And it works well for them. They don’t have to drive anywhere. They can do their workouts in the comfort of their own home.
And their coach works with them over Zoom. And that works great. So that’s a real nice way to take care of it.
You don’t necessarily have to work with people in the same space together. Some people do it as a hybrid. We have clients who will either travel a lot for work or they wanna come see their coach live one day a week or one day every two weeks.
And then they have some other sessions over Zoom. So any version of that is a great way to go about it. Whatever you like, whatever your customers like.
One of the things I wanna touch on as far as different versions of making a living in the fitness field is you have a wide variety of how much personal contact you’re gonna have with people. There are some people in this industry who do quite well making programs and subscriptions for people. They make a package and they sell it.
And that’s how they make their living. They actually never talk to a human. That personally doesn’t work for me because I like the one-on-one coaching aspect and the human interaction.
But if you don’t find yourself to be that much of a people person, but you still are passionate about fitness and wanting to help people, then making your own programs and selling them online is certainly one way to go about it. The opposite end of the spectrum is that you see a variety of individual people every single day for all of their sessions live and in person. And anywhere in between on that spectrum, it’s all good.
There are lots of ways to deliver help to people, lots of ways to deliver your expertise and your opinions and your motivation. It just depends on A, what your customers want and B, what you want to be as far as a provider, what you want that to look like. It’s really nice that in this day and age, we have so many different options for how we can deliver this kind of help to people.
Lastly, there are so many specialty niches in fitness. There are special certifications for pregnancies and cancer patients and osteoporosis and senior fitness. There’s youth athletics and youth fitness.
Every special niche or need that you can imagine, you can develop a specialty in that. Now, my advice to you, if you’re interested in considering fitness or personal training as a career, my initial advice would be start with a bigger pool of people to work with, like what we call general fitness, general population fitness. These are people who just want to lose weight, get in better shape, take better care of themselves.
Their lifestyle is kind of a disaster and they need some help reining all of that in. So that is probably the biggest need that we have here, not only in the United States, but worldwide is basic lifestyle stuff. So getting people to exercise more, help them with better nutrition and help them to lose weight.
Most people want that. So you can start with that since you have so many people to choose from clients wise. And you’ll probably find it over time, you will sort of naturally fall into the kind of specialties and niches that you are really excited about.
My own personal day to day, I do a lot of orthopedic rehab and manual therapy. I have a good staff for the work hard and get in shape kind of stuff. But most of my personal work is working with, helping people do rehab and corrective exercise and that kind of stuff.
So I fell into that niche myself, but whatever your excitement and passion is, whether it’s working with athletes or older people, or I’ve got, I know somebody who does only multiple sclerosis patients. That’s her thing. So it can really get specialized.
If you want to be good in this business, there are certain things that you are, certain characteristics that you’re gonna have to develop. First and most importantly, a good coach is gonna be driven by trying to help people become their best. We have to be careful about putting our own agenda onto what we think people should be like or what they should do.
What constitutes success for one person might look very different than success for another person. If you are working with a high school athlete, success for them might be getting a scholarship to college, an athletic scholarship to college. Whereas if you’ve got a 75 year old lady who just had a hip replacement, her version of success is gonna be able to be getting up and down the stairs so she can stay in her own home.
So it really depends on how the customer defines success. And regardless of what that looks like, a good personal trainer is gonna be driven by trying to help them get there. A good personal trainer clearly needs to be properly educated and properly skilled.
And unfortunately, there are a lot of clowns in this business. I think Instagram has sort of magnified the clown factor in our society. I used to go around the country and do workshops for personal trainers, continuing education.
And so I can say with confidence that most personal trainers are not very good when it comes to their clinical skills and their ability to teach exercise well. So if you want to get a leg up on the average clown, take some time to really educate yourself. I’m thrilled that you guys are in a official academic program for this kind of thing.
Learning the ins and outs of actually teaching exercise is a skill that is really important. You owe it not only to yourself to be great, but also to the customer, because they don’t know. A good personal trainer needs to have a professional demeanor and a professional approach.
One of the benefits of spending your days in a fitness facility or a commercial gym is that it’s kind of a laid back atmosphere. It is friendly, you can clown around a little bit. So it’s not a stuffy office kind of space.
However, you do need to make sure that you conduct yourself with a good professional demeanor. I cannot tell you how many times in my early days as a fitness coach, someone would approach me in the gym and say, I’ve been watching you for two years. And it is, you know, you really have impressed me by how much you focus on your people and you’re not screwing around like some of these other guys and you’re really, you know, take what you’re doing seriously.
So I will put out to you, if you are spending time in a fitness facility or a commercial gym, people are watching you. They are watching how you conduct yourself. So you are basically on an audition for your professionalism, whether you realize people are watching you or not.
So that happened a lot to me as a young man. So I can definitely say that’s a thing, so. A good personal trainer is going to have people skills in, I’m gonna just say caring as the umbrella term for that kind of thing.
Empathy, understanding, motivation, and creative ways to really connect with people. If you have a personality that is a little more like, I don’t know, kind of like the biggest loser stuff they put on television where you’re like yelling at people and kind of shaming them into trying to do things your way. That’s generally not a very good way to get people to respond to you well.
It might make interesting television for some people, but for the most part, a very small percentage of the population responds well to being yelled at and demeaned. So, you know, empathy and understanding and support is really the nuts and bolts of our people skills right there. Lastly, if you wanna be good in not only this business, but any business, you have to be willing to put in some work.
I know I sound like an old man when I say stuff like I’m gonna say right now, but one of the things I have really noticed over my 30 some year career is there seems to be a different attitude in a lot of younger people as they come out of school or they’re newly certified, they’re 22, 24 years old, they’ve done nothing and accomplished nothing, but yet they sort of expect to have exactly the schedule they want. And, you know, they want their career to look like, you blink and do the genie thing and make it exactly the way you want it right out of gate. And you can get there, but there are dues to be paid.
And you’ve gotta do the work in order to get that. And you have to earn the ability to get things the way you want them. So a work ethic is important.
I think if you think, you know, you’re in good physical shape and you like to work out and you got some people on Instagram who are following you, you’re gonna be able to like snap your fingers and make a good business. You’re in for an unpleasant surprise. Your day-to-day work as a fitness professional looks like this:
Life as a personal trainer in Nashville
Number one, you should plan for having some long hours. You’re gonna start early. A lot of people like to do their workouts before work.
So 5, 6 a.m. is not unusual. Conversely, after work times, people get off at work 5, 36 p.m. and they wanna do their workout then. So you’re gonna have later nights also.
There are often gaps in the middle of the day. You’ll find as you are getting started building your personal training clientele, it’s relatively quick to be able to fill the before work and after work times. And then the middle of the day is kind of a lull time.
So be prepared for that. What we do day-to-day is just so much more than actually leading workouts and leading exercise sessions. We are dealing with people’s lives, their emotions, their self-esteem, their stress at work and family and politics and all the things that make living in society difficult.
You’re gonna hear about it every hour, every day. So we have to put on our support pants and be able to stay empathetic with people when they’re dealing with all the different challenges of life. It’s really a lot more about, it’s a lot more than just that exercise when it comes to supporting people through times.
If you wanna be a good fitness trainer, you’re gonna have to have a variety of strategies to attack problem solving. Not everybody responds well to the same strategies and the same styles. This especially goes with nutrition and lifestyle coaching.
When you start getting into people’s habits and how they prepare their food or don’t prepare their food and how they plan ahead or don’t plan ahead, you’re gonna have to be able to come up with ways to assist people and make them better regardless of what they can or cannot do during the day. The problem with handing people meal plans that you download from the internet is it’s basically an all or nothing thing. It’s like you’re gonna go from whatever, okay, let’s take your average Mrs. Johnson person who has kids and a job and she gets up late and the kids are screaming all the time and she doesn’t have time to make a good breakfast for herself and she rushes off to work. She grabs whatever she can grab in the break room at work. They go out to lunch and they generally have some sort of a restaurant or a fast food kind of thing. She gets home, she hadn’t thought about dinner, everybody’s hungry so she grabs whatever she can grab and put that together.
And so it’s sort of a daily chaos regimen that a lot of people have. So however you are going to start to attack certain things in that process depends on the personality of your client and what they are and are not able to do. So there’s more than one way to skin a cat basically is what I’m trying to say.
And you may have in your mind, this is what healthy eating looks like, this is what a good lifestyle looks like, but you’re not gonna be able to take Mrs. Johnson and go from zero to that perfect day right away. So it takes baby steps and it takes strategies to start to work this kind of process. And that’s the whole concept of coaching is helping somebody step-by-step work these things into life till they become a little bit more normal, a little bit more doable.
You’re gonna have to be very good at motivation and encouragement. Even when you are internally like clenching your fingernails and rolling your eyes at hearing the same excuses and the same problems over and over every week, it’s gonna drive you nuts. I have pulled out all my remaining hair or almost all my remaining hair from this over the years.
But trying to stay, I guess, emotionally neutral and try to maintain your motivation and encouragement for people is something you’re gonna need to be good at. When it comes down to it, if you can help people feel better, either physically and or emotionally and or about their own self-esteem, you’re gonna be a hit because people are struggling in many, many, many different ways today. We just, as fitness folk, we happen to use exercise as one vehicle to help them feel better.
But there are other ways you will help them feel better too, by being supportive, by helping them feel more empowered and in control about their lives, by helping them manage stress and giving them opportunities to get an actual win during the week. These are huge milestones for people. And even if their exercise performance or their nutrition performance is not great, there are lots of other ways to give people wins throughout the week and support them.
And so if you can make somebody feel better in any way, you’ve done a good service. So that’s the number one, that’s the number one job, make your people feel better. Anybody got anything they wanna throw in on that?
We got anything in the chat or?
[Speaker 2]
Yes, there is a question in the chat, Dan. It’s from Michael, what helped you to find your niche? What made you confident that that’s what you wanted to certify in?
[Dan]
Well, thank you for the question, Michael. I think honestly, in talking to so many professionals over the years, we tend to have, we’re drawn to things. I found my own history was that before I got into fitness, I was actually, I was living in Boston, Massachusetts and I was teaching martial arts.
And I found early on that I had a pretty good talent for having this innate sense of how someone’s body was moving. And I could talk about these little subtleties and like how they’re thinking about this certain thing, this certain move. And I could see the light bulb go off in people’s heads.
And so that sort of translated pretty easily into teaching other kinds of exercise and movement. And so when I started getting into fitness, you’re gonna see a lot of common issues like overuse problems, corrective exercise and posture things that need addressed. And so after you get a few hundred people under your belt, you start to recognize some patterns and you start to be able to have some tools and some ways to sort of keep people from falling into the trap of having a rotator cuff problem or having a disc problem in their back or something like that.
So my own, the way that I got into it was I just saw some common things. I started to learn prevention and correction for those common things and I liked it. And so I started sort of doing, I’m kind of a nerd at heart.
So like I like to do deep dives into learning things. And so I spent many years going to a lot of physical therapy workshops and just learning a lot about injury rehab and corrective exercise and all that kind of stuff because I really enjoy it. But that’s just me and my particular niche.
Everybody that you talk to who has a niche has either known from a very early time that this is the kind of person they wanted to work with. This is what they wanted to bring into the world. Or like I did it where you kind of start general and then you just dial in over time into something that you seem to be really good at and there’s a need for.
So it could be either way. Either you go in saying, I’m gonna be this guy because I love it already. Or you go in as a generalist and then basically the world will tell you what you’re good at over time.
How’s that, Michael? That’s perfect. Thank you so much.
Thank you for the question. What else, ladies and gentlemen? Nothing else for now.
Okay, we shall move on. So pros and cons of being in the fitness business. On the plus side, being a personal trainer is perfect for part-time work.
In fact, one of the things I usually suggest to folks who are getting into this is set yourself up with another part-time job like driving for Lyft or Uber or doing bartending or waiting tables. Something that you can do part-time to make some extra money while you build your personal training clientele. And that way, as your client base starts to increase, you can decrease your day job.
Personal training, you have the ability to make your own schedule. You take things by appointment. So it’s perfect for part-time work or for some extra money.
Speaking of money, if you do well and you get a good reputation and you build a good business, I make a nice living. And I’ve been blessed by not having to sweat money these days. So it can be a good lifestyle.
You’re working in a healthy and an active environment. I used to, as I was getting my fitness business started, I actually, I used to be a real piano player. And I was out on the road with a contemporary blues and funk band for five or seven years.
And yeah, so if you imagine the dichotomy between like healthy eating and exercise in a fitness and nutrition world, and late nights in smoky bars and blues clubs like that, it was really two different worlds for sure. Fortunately, when you are in the fitness business, you’re generally in an environment that is positive. Everyone’s health focused.
There’s high energy, high motivation. It’s a good and healthy environment to be in as opposed to something that’s physically unhealthy like being in smoky bars or being like in an office that has this sort of hostile toxic work environment. So that’s a pro.
It’s a good setting generally. And then from a personal satisfaction standpoint, I mentioned before that one of the things I really like to focus on is what are we bringing into the world? What are we bringing to the people?
And being able to be a leader and someone who encourages and helps and serves these people for me is very, very fulfilling. That’s like the number one thing for me in this field. So being able to be a role model, being able to help prop people up when they stumble, that’s a big pro for me.
Now it’s not all rainbows and Skittles, my friends. There are some difficulties in this field too. For starters, one of the things that’s a real challenge for just about everybody is you have an unreliable schedule and therefore an unreliable paycheck when you’re getting started.
You can go through a couple rough years in the beginning until you have a steady clientele that you can bank on. That’s why I suggest that having another variable part-time job on the side is a good idea.
You can go through a couple rough years in the beginning until you have a steady clientele that you can bank on. That’s why I suggest that, you know, having another variable part-time job on the side is a good idea as you’re getting started. Something that is difficult and has been difficult, you know, for me for decades is when you are that guy who is the role model and the motivator and the encourager and the service person, you always have to be on.
You always have to be high energy. You’re never allowed to have a bad day. No one’s that interested in what’s going on in your world, you know.
So, you are there to serve and to educate and to encourage and to lift people up and that requires a lot of energy. Sometimes you’ve got to dig deep to find that well to be able to create that space for someone even if you’re really not feeling it. You know, if this is your eighth or ninth person of the day, sometimes it’s hard to find that big motivation.
As I mentioned earlier, one of the challenges can be that the hours can be hard. Going back to being on, you know, we’re always serving and taking care of other people and I don’t know if any of you guys have reached a point in life where you’ve been a caretaker, maybe for an aging parent or something like that, but it can be fatiguing and when you make your job taking care of people, it can be really draining if you’re not careful. So, that’s something to think about too.
When you are a fitness trainer, typically industry standard is there are no benefits. You don’t get health insurance, you don’t get unemployment, that kind of stuff that you would typically get in a more say corporate setting, a salary job. It’s typically hourly and you will be responsible for your own insurance, your own health insurance, your own professional insurance, that kind of stuff.
One of the things that is a little bit challenging when you’re a grizzled old man like I am is, you know, I have heard the same stories and the same excuses and the same situations every week for 32 years and sometimes it is hard to pretend that like, oh my god, this is so unique and you’re so special and I never heard this before. You’re going to hear a lot of the same stuff over the years and which in one hand is good because, you know, you start to recognize some patterns and be able to understand where people are coming from and be able to have sort of a system that helps them get out of a particular situation, but it’s a little bit challenging sometimes to hear the same story for the thousandth time and pretend like, oh this is like, I’ve never heard this before.
Anybody want to throw in anything or ask anything about that? What’s the chat box look like, Dr. Grubbs?
[Speaker 2]
Just some general comments about how awesome it was that you were in a band.
[Dan]
Yeah, if Stevie Ray Vaughan and James Brown made a band together, that’s kind of what we did, so.
[Speaker 2]
I like that. I would be at that show, no doubt.
[Speaker 1]
It was good. I’m glad I did it. It was a little bit of a challenge.
Okay, we are, what, about 15 minutes out? I want to make sure that I don’t miss, I’m going to skip a little bit of this and get right to a couple concepts because I want to be able to talk about technology and fitness and because that is really changing things. One thing that has come up in the last few years as I talk to newer and up-and-coming aspiring fitness folk is the idea of being an influencer.
I don’t want to discourage you from this, but I do want to encourage you to frame it right in your mind. If you want to be an influencer on social media, especially in the fitness world, there are a couple different ways for you to make money. Number one, they do something that’s called a partnership and basically that is, in business, it’s called an affiliate system where a company will give you a special link for you to promote in your social media feed.
And so, when people click on that link, it basically tracks that it is your sale from your following. So, you can get paid like a kickback, basically, for things that you promote in your social media feed. That’s called an affiliate relationship.
You might want to write that down. It’s everywhere. Or you may have grown up with it, actually.
It’s not that new anymore. Another way that influencers can make money is just to out and out get paid to post something for a company or for a person. That’s pretty common also.
So, while I said, you know, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to do this as an influencer, but I do want to remind you that this is not really a career. You should look at it as it’s a way maybe to make some extra money. Out of the literally billions of people who use social media, there’s just a handful who actually make a living, let alone a lot of money, at this kind of thing.
You have probably statistically a better chance of winning the lottery than you do in making millions of dollars as an influencer on social media. But, you know, it could be some extra money depending on how you do it. But I want to just make sure that, you know, it’s a temporary extra money thing.
Do not build your life on this because it can be gone in a second. If Instagram or Facebook or TikTok changes their algorithm, you’re done. Or if they ban your account, you’re done.
And another thing to remember is they’re not your customers. The people who follow you, they’re Instagram’s customers. They’re TikTok’s customers.
They’re not yours. So, you don’t have any control over that. When you build a business more sort of traditionally, when you have people’s contact info and you use email to touch base with them and text messages and stuff like that, then they’re your customers.
Nobody can take that away from you. But if Instagram decides that you are, your account gets banned for something or you get hacked, you’re SOL. Lastly, as I talk about the influencer thing, you know, so much of that is like me, me, me, look at me.
This is me in this picture and look at my abs and this is all about them, you know. And sure, it’s nice to be an inspiring role model for people. But the difference between being an Instagram me, me, me person and being a good coach is a coach really flips that and puts the emphasis on the customer and how can we make you better.
So, I think that’s an important framework for that. I hope that’s clear. So, I want to get into now what’s happening in fitness lately.
The big point that I want to make is helping people and coaching people is the same idea, even though the delivery looks different. Even 10 years ago, you know, we have many more ways to communicate with people and many more ways to deliver a service to people than we used to have. So, right now, there’s a lot of internet competition to coaching.
I mentioned here on my slide, you know, Peloton and Mirror and all the Les Mills stuff and all of that is available to people now. So, people have lots and lots of options. People do a lot more browsing on the internet now instead of, you know, having just a handful of like local gyms to pick from.
They have literally the entire planet to pick from as far as who they want to pay attention to, who they want to pay money to help them with, what they want to plug into. So, there’s just a ton of, I don’t want to use the word noise, but there’s just a lot of stuff for people to weed through in order to make their decisions about what they want to do for their own wellness. So, sometimes it’s a lot harder to stand out than it used to be.
AI tech in personal training – pros and cons
I’ll put it that way. And lastly, I want to talk about pros and cons of AI because this obviously is an enormous change globally. I mean, artificial intelligence is the biggest global changing technology since the invention of the internet 30-some years ago.
It is really blowing the doors of stuff. I am seeing that in the fitness business, at least, it is becoming what I’m going to call the great equalizer and here’s why. Artificial intelligence can do a lot of the things that humans have been doing for people.
Right now, the platforms can analyze, you know, the data from the wearables and your nutrition logs and all the tracking apps and everything. And even chat can put out exercise and diet plans that are actually pretty good. So, on the plus side, even if you don’t really know what you’re doing, you can get some good programming to give to people.
So, that can be helpful. The technology has gotten to the point where it can actually correct some of your movements. You know, there are a couple of the smart home gyms that have sensors that can look at your deadlifts, your overhead presses, and make some comments about your form where you used to have a coach who needed to do that now.
But the humans are becoming less necessary for that kind of stuff too. There’s posture evaluation software and musculoskeletal measurement things that physical therapists and chiropractors are using too. So, like, there’s just so much more that the machine, that capital T, the capital M machine, can do these days that it’s fascinating, for starters, I’m going to use that word.
So, on the cons side of artificial intelligence, clients can use this technology to replace you. Nowadays, the machine can give people motivation and accountability and education and all the things that their fitness trainer would, you know, traditionally be the one to supply. Now it’s all available with a click.
The chatbot trainers, like a lot of the common companies have, can give you the reminders, the motivations, answer the questions, you know, sort of take the place of being someone’s go-to to take care of their motivation and answer their questions. The apps here are even getting into the stress reduction and mindfulness too. So, poor dieticians, they’re going to be out of work if they already aren’t.
Because, like, AI will give you literally endless instant meal plans based on any medical condition, any food allergy, any anything. It can come up with stuff that is pretty good for starters. And will also, it doesn’t take any time at all, literally with a click.
One of the things that is plus and minus, in my opinion, is that artificial intelligence really gives a leg up to newbies. That’s why I am calling it the great equalizer. You can use it to curate research and education, which is very handy.
I mean, I use it to curate research myself. But it used to be that, you know, it took a good chunk of time to learn a lot of stuff because you had to go to workshops, and you had to read books, and you had to, you know, really work at this, educating yourself. Nowadays, AI can hand up a lot of stuff on a platter to you right away.
It can create marketing materials and all your social content and your blog articles and all of that with just a click. You don’t have to be a good writer. You don’t have to know what you’re saying.
You just need to, you know, tell the prompt what you want, and it’ll spit out something that’s not bad. On the downside of that, you sound like everyone else, so you’re not special. The stuff like websites and videos and voiceovers that used to be time-consuming and expensive now are just done with a click.
Artificial intelligence equalizes all of the search strategies and all the marketing. So, like, there’s very little difference in the marketing strategies and the search stuff for between someone who’s brand new as a fitness trainer and someone who’s been at it for 30-some years like me. That playing field is a lot more level than it used to be.
So, all of the barriers, like I mentioned in this slide here about the expense of paying for stuff and marketing experience and the personnel needs and body of work and credibility can be less necessary because someone who’s brand spanking new with all these tools can sort of look at and scale like a 20-year veteran. So, that can be, you know, it’s handy if you’re the new person, but I think it might be problematic long-term because it destroys a lot of credibility. However, it is not all gloom and doom.
I know we have to wrap up here. Things change. Technology’s different.
We have up and down economies. We get fads that come and go. Gosh, we even had a pandemic five years ago that changed the world, but here are some things that don’t change.
Number one, people are always going to have a vision for what a better version of themselves could be and they will always be willing to invest in trying to move towards that. Write that one down. Number two, people always want to feel good about themselves and they will gravitate towards people who can make them feel better.
You can be that person. Coaching, so far, has always been the best route for personal improvement and having someone help walk you through the process and be your buddy and be your support. I don’t know if that can be replaced by a machine or not.
That remains to be seen. Marketing, regardless of the tools that you use or the technology that is available, is really about putting the right message in front of the right person. Write that down, too.
No matter what business you get in, you need that one. Coaching is about solving problems for people. That’s what we do.
We support them. We help them. We solve problems.
We make them better. We make them feel better. And regardless of what information or tools or technology are available to people, the things they really need to make shit happen are implementation and accountability.
Thank you for listening.
[Speaker 2]
Thank you, Dan. Are there any other questions, thoughts, comments? Is anyone considering building a small business in the fitness industry?
I am considering to because I want to be a physical therapist. I did a job shadowing at this clinic and he owned the PT clinic. I was considering doing that.
I want to own my own clinic in the future. I was wondering how does that process look from starting that from the ground up? Well, there’s two ways to go about that.
Sorry? No, I just said great question.
[Dan]
Yes, good question. In the physical therapy world, you can either sort of do the hospital clinic track or you can do the private practice track. And the similarities between fitness and physical therapy as far as the business structure are pretty similar actually
If you from the fitness world, if you want to be sort of an employee and have your customers handed to you as gym members, you can do it that way. And the physical therapy setting is the same. You can get hired as a staff person in a hospital setting or a clinic setting and you are a provider and they send you the customers and you do the treatments.
You know, you’re responsible for that and you do all your own paperwork and that kind of stuff. But you get a paycheck and there is no shame in that. That’s a steady way to go about stuff.
If you want to start your own practice, it’s harder, but you have more flexibility. You know, if you start your own practice, you have to find your own customers. A lot of therapists are not even taking insurance anymore.
They’re all their cash payment right now because the insurance situation is such a nightmare and it’s going to get worse. So that’s, you know, that’s something to decide later on. What a lot of people do and it might make sense for starters is unless you have a real drive to start this thing from the ground up all by yourself, it might make sense for you to be an employee in a clinic for starters.
[Speaker 2]
Yes.
[Dan]
And then go out on your own after you’ve got your feet wet and you kind of know what you’re doing and you’ve spent some time in that terrible insurance world and you just get a feel for the landscape.
[Speaker 2]
Yeah. My plan is when I finished out of grad school, I wanted to do travel physical therapy for a couple of years and then get grounded in maybe like a clinic and again, deal with the insurance and deal with that headache. But then after I’ve gotten my feet into the door and I have made networking, made some connections and I’ve been doing it for a couple, for at least, I would say probably eight plus years at that point, then I’ll probably look into starting my own clinic at the end.
[Dan]
Definitely. Here’s my big advice when it comes to starting to build a clientele on your own. Connect with as many providers who can refer you as you can.
Meet, you know, spend time wooing the orthopedic surgeons and the massage therapists, you know, and the people who are in a position to send people to you. That is a way better way to build a practice, you know, to be recommended by someone that someone is already seeing as opposed to you doing, you know, just doing your own advertising as a nobody. Gotcha.
Thank you. My pleasure. Thanks for asking.
[Speaker 2]
I know I’ve had friends that have worked as like are working as personal trainers and stuff and I know that they’re young in it and young in the business and they have had like they went through a lot of their clientele canceling on them and stuff like that and I was just curious as to like if you had that, if you ever had that problem when you were trying to start and like how you kind of deal with it.
[Dan]
The way we handle that is when somebody starts up with us, part of their initial paperwork, you know, we get their medical history and their orthopedic situation and all that. Part of the paperwork is a agreed upon cancellation policy. So, we have, we maintain a 24-hour cancellation policy, in fact, and I think you will find that if you set that precedent early, people are understanding about needing to pay for a reservation that they make.
If you’re not too sticky about it in the beginning, it’s really hard to go back and start to reinforce the policy cancellation policy after you’ve been letting it slide for a while. So, I’m going to, my advice to you for that would be to set the precedent early and the way I handle it if I don’t want to necessarily be sticky about it with somebody is somebody cancels at the last minute and I’ll say, okay, I can let it slide this time but I’m going to remind you that, you know, we do have this 24-hour cancellation policy in effect. So, next time you’re going to have to, if I’m saving you a spot, we need to get paid for that spot whether you can come or not.
Perfect. Thank you.
[Speaker 2]
Yeah, I have to say, Dan, I struggled with that when I first was a personal trainer working at the JCC when we would, they had a cancellation policy but they would encourage us to create some flexibility if it was a first-time no-show. But when you’re working with a lot of clients and particularly those that may be older adults and can be forgetful, it can be a challenge, right? Because if they don’t show, then that was a spot that could have been paid for with another client where you could have earned some income.
So, then you’re just kind of out there. But again, you’re working with the public and you’re trying to build a relationship and so being empathetic and being flexible with them can be beneficial long term. So, identify with that.
Any other questions? Okay. Dan, thank you again for spending your time this morning with us. I always learn something new from you when you speak. I hope this was beneficial for you all regardless of where your interests are taking you with respect to the career you’re pursuing.
A lot of transferable, applicable information here that if you listen and apply, like Dan said, can kind of hopefully make your transition and success in the industry less bumpy per se. But you have to get out there and you’ve got to do it and you’ve got to learn for yourself. So, I recommend all of you go out there and try to get a job that puts you in that setting.