Studying to be a Personal fitness gym trainer

Studying to be a Personal fitness gym trainer - Finding the right course for you

It’s been a long-held dream of mine to become a personal trainer. Long before I ever started working for Health & Fitness magazine, I’d trained as an aerobics instructor and had loved having a part-time job that fitted around my full-time work commitments, that was fun, rewarding, and combined helping people get fit and build their confidence while keeping me fit too. It seemed obvious that my next step would be to train as a personal trainer, but a lack of time to commit to studying on top of a full-time job meant that becoming a personal trainer stayed a dream for years.

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But a few months ago, I got promoted to Fitness Editor and decided that having a solid, in-depth knowledge of all things fitness would be invaluable in my job. Of course, there were other incentives too. To put in bluntly, I’ve started thinking about having kids at some point in the future, and believe that being able to teach clients part-time would earn me some much needed cash without having to be away from a child all day, as with a typical office job. Also, in a time of economic instability, journalism as a job is no more safer from the threat of redundancy than a job in the city, factory or store. Why not train to work in another industry? Why not have a ‘back-up’ plan in place? And if there’s one industry that’s thriving (despite news of declining gym memberships) it’s the sports and leisure industry, whose employment figures have risen by 3.9 per cent in the last year compared to the UK’s soaring unemployment figures.

So, decision made, it was time to find out how to train as a personal trainer. I started my investigations, as I imagine most of our readers would, by flicking through a copy of H&F and reading all the adverts inside from all the various training providers. I then visited all their websites, and soon realized that choosing a course was going to be a complicated business. Firstly, there are so many providers to choose from, all promising top-notch training and qualifications. However, I found that the best way to narrow the list down was to work geographically, as it soon became apparent many of the providers only cover certain regions of the country. After all, what’s the point reading about a provider’s courses if they only cover the North East and I’m based in London?

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After working out who had training centres in London, I next looked into who offered part-time courses. One of the biggest factors for me when looking for a course to sign up to, was to make sure it would fit into my life, not interfere with my full-time job and not be so hard to keep up with that I’d end up quitting. Some providers offer more options than others, so again, you need to do your research. I soon found that Premier Training International (www.premierglobal.co.uk) had a range of part-time options, including the ‘Blended part-time’ option. But having no idea what Blended meant, I called one of their Career Advisors to find out more (0845 1 90 90 90).

I found out that while the full-time course involved studying and training solidly for around ten weeks, 9-5, five days a week (no good for me, I have to work!), and the part-time course spanned around ten months, and involves attending a couple of evening classes a week and two weekends a month, the Blended part-time course spans eight months and requires you to attend the fitness training center for only one weekend a month, in addition to studying at home (more details of this in future blogs).

Bingo! It looked like I’d found the course for me! Because although the structure of the Blended part-time course means you do require a bit more discipline with your studies because you’re doing it at home by yourself, you can choose when to fit your studies in – within a framework of time, of course. This was really important for me because, as a journalist on a magazine, I do have lots of deadlines to meet and events to attend out-of-hours. If I have to make a choice between finishing my work so the magazine can get out to the printers in time to reach our readers, or attending an evening lesson after work, then work would win everytime. I guess this theory applies to people with kids too – if you can’t get a babysitter one night, you might miss a potentially important lesson, while with the Blended course, you do most of the studying from the comfort of your home.

So perhaps unsurprisingly, this is the course I have chosen to do. I’ve just finished my first week and am really enjoying it. If you want to find out how the studies are going, come back each week to find out!

Related links

Crossfit Gym near me 

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