HELP NICK (HUNGER) - How To Become A Successful Personal Trainer
HELP NICK (HUNGER)
How To Become A Successful Personal Trainer
Do you want to make personal training and health coaching into a career? You need to understand and implement the acronym HELP NICK from the book How To Become A Successful Personal Trainer. In the next 8-blog posts, I'll educate you about the characteristics of successful personal trainers: Hunger, Energy, Looks, Personality, Networking, Intelligence, Concocky and Knowledge (experience.)
The infamous 6-figure income can be achieved with an assortment of the mentioned characteristics, but the more that you have, the greater the likelihood that you'll be able to make personal training into a career. Most importantly, when you learn how to HELP NICK, you'll be HAPPY with your life as a trainer and not burn out like most self-taught trainers (thanks to crappy associations like NASM who don't give a rats ass about you, they just want you to take all their certs for your MONEY!) When you come into the fitness industry with unrealistic expectations, it's VERY common to burn the candle at both ends and quite within your first two years. My goal with these next 8 posts is to change the way people look at the fitness industry and avoid the high attrition rate. Let's begin with Hunger.
HUNGER
The example in the book I use comes from motivational speaker Eric Thomas, How Bad Do You Want It&
Trainers hyper preach about GRINDING and WORKING HARD, but realistically, they're barely SHOWING UP. The unwritten oath that you're about to make as a personal trainer is that you work when your clients don't. That means get used to training at 4am-8am & 5pm-9pm. To be hungry means training and working when your competitors aren't (weekends, holidays, early mornings etc.) As a new trainer, you need to train everyone, including but not limited to: younger, older, shoulder injuries, back problems, knee post-op, stroke, athletes, fat loss, hypertension, type II diabetes, lateral epicondylitis, coronary artery disease (CAD), HIV, special needs, dyslipidemia, and NPC competitors. Once you've been training FULL-TIME (25-35 hours per week) for 3-5 years, you'll probably be be ready to specialize.
During the initial five years of training, you need to be able to weather the storm of losing clients and a 20-30% decrease in pay due to holidays and vacations. In my experience, most trainers quite within the first 6-9 months because they had unrealistic expectations about the world of training. Personal training IS NOT about training athletes, kids, Instafamous and/or celebrities, it's exactly the opposite. Learn how to work with the general population for 3-5 years, and then you'll be ready to turn your PASSION into a career.
Watch what I have to say about HUNGER with an interview from 2016 Personal Trainer of the Year NSCA – Nick Tumminello.