Give Your Fitness Career Ambitions A Work-out
The Age
Saturday April 28, 2007
THE fact that Australia's obesity rate has more than doubled in the past 20 years is nothing to celebrate. Yet the news isn't bad for everyone. The fatter Australia gets, the harder it becomes to ignore the virtues of the fitness industry. And that means personal trainers are reaping big rewards.
Personal trainers were once considered exclusive to elite athletes, the famous and the wealthy, but there are enough of them these days to cut a good deal for anyone. You can even become a personal trainer under the Australian Apprenticeships scheme.Thirty-year-old Jodie Spencer, who was a manager of a fruit shop and a convenience store before she began her certificate IV in personal training in 1999, says it wasn't the gold rush that attracted her to the industry. It was the opportunity to help people achieve their health and fitness goals."I do a lot of rehabilitation work, so I work with people with injuries or postural problems," she says. "I also do weight loss and train a lot of athletes, too."Shortly after completing her qualification, Ms Spencer started Inside Out Personal Fitness, along with Military Mania, the latter offering group outdoor military-style training. She says that knowing how hard to push clients is a challenge of personal training."It's not hard to know now, because I have the experience," she says. "But when you start out, you're not quite sure. And that's when you need to step up and ask clients how they're feeling and how their session was. You have to ask for a lot of feedback. But as the years go on, you start to know when people are working hard or not."Ms Spencer agrees that there is potential for personal trainers to make a lucrative career. But not everyone who completes a course can expect to don a leotard and make a line of fitness DVDs."There's good earning potential for personal trainers if they want to put the work in," Ms Spencer says. "I work for TAFE still, tutoring in the certificate IV and diploma courses, and we have 100 students go through every year, and all those students are looking for personal training work when they leave, but a lot of them probably don't put the effort in that's required to make a really big business out of it."If you want to make a big business out of it, you do have to put in a lot of hard work."Ms Spencer was a finalist in the 2004 Sunshine Coast Businesswoman of the Year awards. Today she runs a company called V Fitness with Brad Jobson - whom she met while studying at TAFE. She's currently using her business acumen to expand the pair's brand with a new fitness studio."Brad and I are fairly busy and we don't have many more time slots to offer people, so we've been employing more staff," she says. "I want to set up a couple of studios. Once we get this one up and running, we're going to look at putting another one around and then another one. We're not sure how many yet, but basically we want to have a few studios around the Sunshine Coast and Brisbane areas." -- JOSH JENNINGS
© 2007 The Age
