Personal Training: How to Build a Lucrative Personal Training Department, Part 2

In last month’s blog I talked about how the first step to building a lucrative personal training department was hiring the right people. This month I will discuss the importance of training and developing your staff once you hire them. If the people you hire have the right education and certifications, an outgoing personality, the right answers in your interview and at least a little experience, then they should be ready to begin your staff development system.

At our club, Baptist Health/Milestone Wellness Center, we found that most trainers fresh out of college were lacking a few skills that needed to be taught once we hired them. Most trainers are great at writing programs for their clients, but they have very little business sense and have no idea how to motivate an unmotivated client. We came up with a curriculum of information that we “highly recommend” our trainers attend once they’re hired. We don’t require it because we want to see which of our trainers are willing to learn and will put the work into developing themselves. We call our training and development curriculum Trainer University.

Trainer “U” lasts around 12 to 13 weeks and covers a variety of topics including marketing, wellness coaching and public speaking. Over the course of the next several months I will go into detail about the topics on our Trainer U curriculum. Following is our (loose laid) outline. It can change from time to time depending on how many people attend and important topics that may come up along the way.

After you come up with a curriculum for your staff that is specific to your club, you should run through it, but allow room for growth or change. We have fine-tuned our curriculum several times over the course of running Trainer U for our staff. Stay tuned next month for more detailed information.

Lisa Jo Groft, BS, ACSM-HFS, is the co-director of fitness at Baptist East Milestone Wellness Center in Louisville, Kentucky.