A Roadmap For a Successful Career In Fitness

Rick Mayo, Alloy Founder/CEO, and Matt Helland, Alloy’s VP Programming, describe Matt’s journey from part-time trainer to VP of Programming for thousands of Alloy studios worldwide. Rick and Matt describe a roadmap for a successful career in fitness.

They describe the skills needed to grow in the fitness industry, and the path for a uniquely rewarding fitness career as you genuinely get to help people attain their health and fitness goals.

Matt started as a part-time trainer with LA Fitness for 5 years, then came to the mother gym, Northpoint Fitness, that eventually became what Alloy Personal Training Franchise is today.

The fitness industry continues to grow as society emphasizes healthy living, especially coming out of the worst public health crisis we’ve had in decades.

Tips For a Successful Career in Fitness

✅ Get a Mentor

If you are a personal trainer/coach now and really want to get better, the first step is to find a mentor. A mentor is someone who’s doing what you want to be doing. You should reach out and see if you can buy some of their time or see if you can work without pay for a short time to gain the education. That is what Matt did when he first came to Northpoint. He traded his time to help around the studio, set his ego aside, and dug in to learn what we did different.

Matt said, “I tell people this day, I learned more about that mentorship in two weeks than I learned in my entire five-year career at LA Fitness. I really learned the right way to approach a career and how to run a business to scale.”

After that trial period, Matt had a full-time job at the end. It took him from being a C level coach and brought up his skills to be an A minus coach. He learned how to train people properly and what good fitness programming should be. He also learned what customer interaction should look and good solid coaching cues from coaches who had been coaching a long time.

✅. Learn From Other Fitness Industry Experts

To get better at your craft and gain more knowledge of the fitness industry, take advantage of outside educational and networking opportunities with other fitness experts.

Whether it’s a kettlebell class, kettlebell certification course, TRX class, or a functional movement screen, it’s any of those things that will make you a better coach. Find someone who’s done what you’ve done and learn from those people doing really high-volume coaching through an online course.

✅. Skills Needed

Also, look for opportunities to improve your skills around the tools in your fitness toolbox. Learn the sales process. Listen to different people speak about the sale and fitness process. Learn from unique books, different podcasts, and other resources to pump up your A game. It’s like you’re literally stacking skills to get better and better at your craft.

✅. Overcoming Imposter Syndrome

In learning, as you kept leveling up, there is always discomfort with each step encountering new ideas and making it part of your success process. Imposter syndrome makes you question if you are good enough all the time. Once you grow in new knowledge and stepping out of your comfort zone, you question your ability to do the new things. You need to force yourself to step up your game and gain confidence in yourself to know you can do it and believe you can do it. Once you get good at it, it’s somewhat of a game, but it’s a skill and you have got to practice it.

✅. Understand Business Metrics

Learning business metrics is a unique skill set. To learn how to manage other people is a big deal, and it’s very difficult. There are also business systems, sales processes, and operational metrics you must know to run a business and people. You need to learn it and practice it. Learning business metrics is important for many reasons. Maybe you’re in a profit share situation. Not only do you have to drive sales, but you also have to know how to budget. You don’t want to spend more than you make because you’re rewarded with a profit, not just top line revenue or gross sales.

✅. Understand Human Behavior

We spend a lot of time on creating a great customer experience and human behavior. It is difficult to learn how to keep people motivated and on the path to accomplishing their goals. Study buying behavior to understand what makes people buy and what motivates individuals to work towards their goals.

✅. Continuous Learning and Improvement

Education and continuous improvement is how you grow your ability to go from trainer to owner. Keep stacking relevant skills at every stage of your growth.

Get the important tips that Matt and Rick disclose in this episode. If you’ve ever wondered what the career trajectory of a trainer looked like, this is the episode for you. Tune In!

Podcast with: Rick Mayo and Matt Helland