Is the the PT industry saturated and pushing wages down or are there alot of opportunitys out there for PTs?
You have three basic career pathways as a PT,
- be self-employed, build a gym in your garage, etc - nice to be in control, now where do I get clients? Typical charges $40-$100/hr for individuals (lower end in outer suburbs or rural, upper end in inner city) , or $10-15/hr for each person at a bootcamp, etc.
- join a mainstream commercial gym, this is just like being self-employed, they pay you no wages, you pay rent, you get a chunk of the client fees - but you don't have to work as hard to find your own clients, and you don't have to do as much paperwork. Easy to get into.
- join a community gym, do some general gym instructor shifts, and PT, group fitness or whatever on top of that - harder to get employed here, each job will attract 30-100 resumes, though most of them will be discarded quickly and whittled down to 10 phonecalls, 5 interviews, and 2-3 practical interviews
A community gym will pay around $25/hr for the gym shifts, and $35/hr for the PT sessions, it's $40-$60/hr for group fitness. Somewhere like the YMCA will pay a bit less, but the hours will be more steady. A council-run place will pay more, including +25% on weekends, +150% on public holidays, etc - but the hours will be less steady, most councils would be hard-pressed to organise a piss-up in a brewery.
In most cases, it'll be a part-time job to start with. You may have 1-2 x4hr regular gym instructor shifts each week - and then every couple of weeks someone will be sick or on leave and there'll be another 2-3 shifts to grab.
As for the PT side, if you can get a new client every 1-2 weeks you're doing alright, allowing for some drifting off or having only short-term goals (weddings are common), after 12 months you'll have around 20 clients. At 1.5-2 half-hour sessions a week each, that's 15-20hr PT.
By that stage the manager will have given you more gym shifts. So you'd be looking at a week of,
3-5 x 4hr shifts = 12-20hr GI x $25 = $300-$500
15-20hr PT x $35 = $525-$700
for $825-$1,200 weekly before tax
That's assuming that you put your hand up for the extra shifts, and you're active in finding PT clients. If you're a lazy slug who stands around the gym desk chatting to your mates, or if you're shy, well you'll be stuck with 1-2 GI shifts and no PT clients.
Thus, many GI/PTs have two or more jobs.
Mainstream commercial gyms pay more for your PT sessions, but you have no other hours to fall back on, making the first few months pretty rough financially.
Rottee said:
In the UK there are ALOT of 16-18yr olds doing it as they can get the courses free so the wages are going down and down unless you specialise in an area
Here no-one under 18 will be employed by gyms. There are a heap of young clueless ones, they get put on by the mainstream commercial gyms, paying rent, and in six months they're trying to squirm out of the contract, they walk away and never come back to the fitness industry.
They do badly, because quite simply nobody is going to listen to someone under 25, unless of course that person has a strong athletics or sports background which is well-known in the gym. For example, Markos (PTC), his son Max, if he wanted to he could do well in gyms, he is young but he's set world records in lifts, and he has a good physique, so people will listen to him. But the typical 18-25yo has NFI - no fckin' idea.
As moons says, you can get a warehouse job for roughly the same pay. It's a matter of what you enjoy, your work or your money. If I'd been in a warehouse for the last three months I'd've walked under a forklift by now to end my misery, and any extra money I'd earned would have gone to the pub to forget my sorrows.
I enjoy my job, working with people, making them more aware of their own bodies, helping them reach their goals. It sounds cliched but it's true. People become confident because they did difficult things they thought they couldnt do - and I helped that, that feels good.
Money's a secondary thing for me, I was making more in my last job.
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