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 have the young kids barely out of college 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, you have all the “coach of the coaches” you 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.
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.
What worked in my favor in the beginning was that I am patient and I am an optimist. I always believed that you need at least one goal that people think is crazy and I’ll get into my reasoning about that in another post. Now, I’m not an “everything is always sunny” type of optimist. Trust me, I doubt and question myself often, as you’ll see from reading these posts. But, I’m persistent and believe that if you’re in the game you always have a chance to figure it out. Patience, optimism, persistence and everything in-between was needed in the beginning because the first few months were rough.
I was fortunate that I was able to land my first 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.
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.
Jenn, like Theresa, wanted to get back into the gym and, unlike most women, 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. 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.
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. 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.
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 picked up on things so quickly that the basics weren’t going to be enough for her. I had to raise my game and it made it a fun process for the both of us.
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 wound up losing 49 pounds in six months and she gave me a huge spark. I kept wondering if I was good enough to ever actually help anybody. I saw that there was some hope for me. It certainly didn’t hurt having a woman like Camille who was not letting anything get in the way of her goal.
Those ladies helped me get through the year. As much as I am an optimist, I’m also hard on myself. On top of not being the best salesperson, I’d have to deal with hearing things from other members of the gym. I was a new trainer, so I guess that gave them the right-away to question what I was doing in front of clients and while I was working out on my own. There was even a time where someone asked me while I was working out if anybody I train actually makes any progress or do they just give me their money. It was like every time I started to feel good there was somebody ready to chop me down.
Now, through having enough conversations with people, I understand that most of the people in the gym don’t really have a clue of what they’re doing and follow garbage online. At the time, I was only half-sure of that and started questioning what I was doing. I felt like I was viewed as a joke. The only thing that kept me going was training those ladies and keeping their best interests in mind. I didn’t know if I’d be able to sell another client, but knew I’d at least be around as long as they needed me.