Zarkov said:
When you say recognized does that mean there is now a set government standard or would it be up to the individual gym to recognize it?
I guess from what you have said previously you might mean the latter.
There is a set government standard for qualifications, same as for all TAFE or uni courses. Seems like in many cases it's just an excuse to charge foreigners some extra money for tests, but there it is. As I said, there's no regulation of the gym industry; but there is regulation of the qualifications which just happened to be related to the gym industry.
It's up to the individual gym, most will think of their insurance. Gyms like any place of work, place of selling products or providing services, they have a
"reasonable duty of care" towards the people there. If something happens, the victim may sue; the place then has to try to demonstrate that it did take a reasonable duty of care towards the person.
Part of that reasonable duty of care is ensuring that the people doing the work or providing the goods or services have appropriate qualifications and/or experience. "Did they know what they were doing?" the court will ask.
For example, let's say that someone injured themselves during an exercise, they weren't performing it safely. Let's say there were no witnesses, and an instructor had previously showed them through the exercise. The gym says, "we showed the person, not our fault if they ignored what we said." The person says, "I did what they showed me, what they showed me was wrong."
If the instructors are qualified and registered, the court is likely to find that on balance of probabilities the gym did show the person the right way to do things, and so they did indeed show a reasonable duty of care. If the instructors are just some muscular guys the gym hired off the street, the court is less likely to find that they showed a reasonable duty of care - they just hired meatheads.
You or I might be sceptical of the usefulness of the qualification and say that some particular other guy who's unqualified but experienced actually knows better, but that's not the way courts and insurance companies tend to see it.
Sometimes enough experience will be viewed as a qualification in itself. But courts will tend to say, "if you're so experienced, a qualification should have been easy to get, why didn't you get it?"
So with risks of court action, and insurance against it, in practice mainstream gyms will hire only qualified people. Small-scale gyms and self-employed people might not care. That's small business, they're more about personal relationships and trust than official procedures and bits of paper, as the business gets bigger things get more formal, that's life.
Plus, there are so many qualified people running around, why would you hire unqualified ones? A gym I know of was hiring 3 PTs, they got 300 applications. You're running a multi-million dollar business, you get 300 resumes for 3 positions, the first thing you'll do is bin all those without qualifications.
Again, a small place will be different, and it'll be much more about who you know and how much they trust you. Markos is not going to look through 300 resumes unless they have pictures of hot women on them, and it doesn't matter how many certificates, diplomas or degrees you get, he is never going to let you train his lifters unless you've squatted at least four plates a side
