I’ve been asked by a couple of people over the years about getting into personal training. Each time, I look back to my first year doing it and tell them two things: don’t make it your full-time job right off the bat and you better love the process of training people. I don’t say that because I hate what I do. I say it because you start at literal zero and it takes quite a while before you make it out of the basement.
Social media clouds people’s judgement. You get the full spectrum of BS on there. You’ve got the mixture of young kids just out of college and mediocre powerlifters telling you to “DM them for online training” even though all their posts are just them lifting and they’ve never trained a soul. Then, there’s the social media coaches that even other coaches follow who claim to have trained thousands of pro athletes, but there’s not a single post of them with an athlete. On the other end, you can’t forget the “coach of the coaches” that claim you’ll make $10K per month with them even though they have no real success stories. There’s so much garbage out there and you don’t learn that it’s garbage unless you’re in the business long enough and around the right people.
People see all of this online and think it’s easy. I’ve even been asked by people, who had good intentions, why don’t I try to be like so-and-so. I have to explain that the person isn’t a real coach and most of their followers are fake. If posting shirtless selfies and videos of me working out were all it took to be successful, I’d do it. Trust me.
If you’re patient, in it for the right reasons and have plans on growing as a coach, you’ll make it for whatever your long-term goal is. For me, my goal was to always make this a successful job after school where I worked with athletes of all ages. I wanted to be able to help people and have the stories to back it up. I don’t like having to sell to people, so a referral-based business works much better for me.
What worked in my favor in the beginning was that I am patient. I’m also pretty optimistic. I always believed that you need at least one goal that people think is crazy. I get down on myself plenty of times, but I always believe that if you’re in the game you have a chance. It’s not something that’s going to happen right away, but if you stay in it and keep working towards your goal, you’ll be rewarded eventually. Patience and optimism was necessary because the clients weren’t rolling in for me in the beginning.
My first client wasn’t a paying client. It was my brother, James. He’s always been my biggest supporter and would do whatever was needed to help me out. He did enjoy training and willingly volunteered to do whatever I asked during my sessions to get better. If I saw something online that a pro athlete was doing, you better believe I had him trying it out for me. He was willing to do whatever was needed to succeed and I don’t know where I would be without him.
A moment I look back on was a few years ago, before I started training, when he first walked into a gym with me. I didn’t know any better, so I was going to have him just join in with a program I was doing. Some things were hard for him and I didn’t know how to coach him besides saying just do it like I was. Fast forward to 2014, to be able to actually show him the right way to do certain exercises was a nice boost for me. I could actually give him the cues to perform an exercise better instead of just saying “do it like this.”
(As a sidebar, those moments with my brother before I started coaching come to mind whenever someone tells me they just need one session and then they’ll show their kids the rest. I will oblige and show them, but then I think to myself: you don’t workout or know anything about training and progressions, but you’re going to train your kid now? Do you go to a tutor and say just show my kid how to do three problems and I’ll take care of the rest? This is where people think they can just grab stuff off of Instagram and that just leads to more problems.)
Eventually, I was able to land my first paying client, Theresa Folino, on my first sales pitch, but she was the only person that I could convert for a while. I hated the selling process, mostly because I was terrible at it. I closed like Aroldis Chapman in an elimination game. For the first month I didn’t think much about it. But, then, after a couple of months of not landing anybody, I did start to question if I could actually do this.
On top of not being able to sell, the other issue is I really didn’t know what I was doing outside of what I learned in the textbook. Theresa was perfect for me because she was coming off an injury and wanted to slowly get back into training. I’m glad that was the case because I couldn’t offer her much more outside of the basics anyway. She was a trooper and made my life easy as I tried to figure things out.
The only other client I picked up during this time was a lady named Leigh DeFazio, who was given to me by Kim Kehoe. Leigh’s schedule changed and Kim was unable to train her because she worked at a school. Leigh was willing to do whatever I programmed for her and she gave me the opportunity to go outside the box as I was learning more. This helped me gain a little confidence as I was trying to get clients and would be one of many nice things Kim has done for me. Kim is another one who has always been good to me and my family and somebody I trusted to train my mom. You know Kim is good when my mom followed everything she said.
Fortunately, when I was able to finally connect and land some people, they were gems in Jennifer Imperatrice, Jene Romeo, Jess Livan and Camille Faccio. Picking up these ladies was huge for me because there was really a point in time when I didn’t know if I would ever get another client. Things were looking bleak for me. What made it even better is that they were awesome people. There’s nothing worse than getting a client that makes the time drag. All of these ladies were a pleasure to train.
Jennifer, like Theresa, wanted to get back into the gym and she loved the weights. She didn’t care if it was a machine, a free weight or the trap bar, she wanted to try it all. Jen would ask me questions about the different pieces of equipment and wanted to try everything, in a good way. She loved wrestling, too, so we would keep each other up to speed on what was happening because she knew I loved going to events with my brother. She would come around 7 or 7:30 p.m. after work and was always in a good mood and a bright spot.
Jene was in her 70s and used to be an archeologist. Her goal was to build the strength to be able to go on one more dig. We started off slow, but as she gradually got better, she wanted to increase things and started trap bar deadlifting and even flipped some tires. She came into the gym wanting to keep things basic, but, as she got stronger, she would stare at that tire and tell me that she wanted to be able to flip it. In addition to being a hard worker, she was the social butterfly at the gym who made friends with everybody and lit up any room she was in with her personality. Within two months, she had more friends at the gym then I did.
Jess came in and challenged me a different way. She had either a dancing or gymnast background (I always get the two mixed up) and I had to up my game. She was an athlete and she can move, so I had to go into the bag to come up with different ways to challenge her. It was a fun process for me because she challenged me as a coach. People don’t realize this now because things have changed, but there wasn’t many women at our gym at this time. She made me feel pretty cool because here I had this woman pushing sleds, working with a barbell and doing things you weren’t accustomed to seeing a woman do frequently. In between, we would share school stories and those were always entertaining.
Camille will always be special to me because she wrote the first testimonial for me. She came in focused and worked out like a savage. She went to a nutritionist, trained with me three times per week and then worked out on her own. She is somebody that I would say made every single minute of a session count. She wound up losing 49 pounds in six months and she gave me a huge spark. Before I started working with her, I kept wondering if I would ever be good enough to actually help anybody. My clients were making progress, but I didn’t have that before-and-after picture to show that I was really making a difference. Everything was just based off of what clients told me. I’d see these before-and-after pictures online with these drastic changes and didn’t think I’d ever actually be able to get one of my own. Camille showed me that I had some hope. It certainly didn’t hurt having a woman like Camille who was not letting anything get in the way of her goal.
I did get some push-back because I do live on Staten Island where if people have the opportunity to take you down a peg they will. I’d get comments from other members about my training and someone even asked if anyone makes any progress doing training or do I just take their money. Now, I understand I was a new trainer and didn’t have the most experience, but it wasn’t like I was putting my clients through these wild exercises. Somebody told me squatting to a box was not a good exercise.
Those comments were relatively small in the grand scheme of things, but I have a tendency to hold grudges and not forget things. They stung at the time because my confidence was already pretty low and it just gave me another reason to question myself. But, even though I wasn’t loaded with clients, I did have a nice roster of people who made the job fun for me. There was a lot of work to be done, but at least my client roster was greater than one.