I’m in charge of operations for a kids sports center. Gymnastics is our main sport but we offer gymnastic, tumbling and trampoline, taekwondo, ninja warrior, dance, basic sports skills, soccer, piano, guitar, video production, swimming, and an academic preschool.
About 50% of my job is operations and the other 50% is coaching
Seems like a pretty rad gig, thanks for sharing man!
The gym. My degree is in Exercise Science and I still maintain my strength & conditioning certifications. There isn’t a lot of money in the field around here and the hours tend to be like Jack’s.
This sounds like my schedule when I worked at a sports performance gym. On summer days I’d work from 5:30a-5:30p or 7:00a-7:30p with downtime in the middle of the day. During school we basically worked from 3p-8p but I had to be there more if I wanted to get paid.
I made $1800/month before deductions and had to put in 40 hours a week. I couldn’t support a family like that.
@jackolee, it’s awesome that your wife is right there with you and your kids are involved. I don’t know how I’d do that. I’d just be away from my family right now.
I felt like I had to choose between doing the fun job or finding a job that actually paid the bills and allowed me to be with my family.
I was hoping to use my fitness background at my current job but no luck yet.
That’s pretty much the ideal situation for a job isn’t it?
No potential to start freelance as a sideline until more opportunities come along?
I honestly don’t think there’s another job like mine in the country. The going rate for someone like me in our industry is about 40-45k. Our owner basically made the decision to pay us better in order to keep good solid people around. He comes in to do payroll and marketing here and there but if he wants to blast off to Hawaii for a few weeks he knows that we’ve got everything covered. I work with bonus structures and such but average around 75k. I could make more in operations somewhere else but would be bored to tears. I also have a fine art business that I do on the side. I do oil paintings and sculptures for both high end residences and commercial spaces. It’s inconsistent but can be fairly lucrative. My best year for art was 2017 and I made about 60k. So between my job, my wife’s, and my art business we are able to live a comfortable life. At the end of the day though I’m finding that time to do what I want is the real commodity.
You could get your personal training certificate and train out of the house. Would give you an excuse to build out a kick ass home gym and have it be a tax write off as well
No. Gyms and personal training are saturated markets here. The turnover is high for a reason. The biggest problem is that people don’t value the service of a strength coach. We charged $40/hr at my old gym and people complained about that. We sold packages of sessions that would get the price down to $24/hr and still struggled.
I worked at the Y and 1 on 1 sessions were $40/hr but you could get it down to $20 if you had a couple friends come for a group session.
I also suck at the business side of personal training. There are two types of long term clients. One is the uppity trophy wife who has a trainer for the sake of having a trainer. The other is the person who’s been convinced that they need a trainer to exercise.
I can’t trick people. I want them to succeed and that means learning and being able to do this on their own. That doesn’t keep them coming back though.
I worked with a trainer who had over 40 sessions a week. His approach was to show them super difficult stuff during their consultation so they felt like they needed him to work out and make progress. I can’t do that.
I need a job that pays me to be me. I actually want to help people. I don’t need money to train people, write workouts, or offer advice. But I do need money to pay the bills!
I just can’t withhold information because people won’t pay me. I’m a softy.
Dude get out of my head. I was a personal trainer, and a terrible salesman. I just couldn’t bring myself to get people to make long term commitments, or make them feel like they needed me forever. I have come to realize, though, that most personal trainers suck ass, and that there’s a difference between a coach and a PT.
I feel exactly the same way. Seriously considered it as a career and realised I couldn’t make a living coaching people the way I would want to coach.
Maybe I would feel different if it wasn’t a health & fitness thing. Like, if I could play an instrument and offered to give lessons then I’d have no problem requiring money for my services. No money = no lessons.
But with the obesity epidemic and mass nutritional ignorance I just can’t do that with this stuff.
There’s a reason I’m on here all the time. I enjoy it. I enjoy giving advice to beginners (who will listen). I enjoy the interaction with like minded people.
I actually work in sales (software). I’m not a fan really, but the money is hard to walk away from right now, and I don’t know what the hell else to do. Selling folks on personal training actually seems like it’d be pretty easy compared to what I’m used to haha. Thing is, there’s so little residual value in it that you’d be constantly hustling for new heads to pay your bills.
You’ve gotta remember that it took you years to build the depth of knowledge that you have. Feeling like you can’t keep clients around because you want to teach them to do it for themselves isn’t really true. People will learn a little at a time but you will still have the expertise to help them tweak their plan to optimize progress.
I’ve been talking to Jack for months and I’m still not ripped. And T3hPwnisher for years, and I’m still entirely human.
Haha! Point made
I could use a trainer right now to help motivate me to finish this dang leg workout. I’m spent and only half way done. Better eat a good lunch before shoulders this afternoon lol
Better get moving Jack. Next year that 1st place need to be yours.
I could FaceTime you and just yell at you and call you fat, if you like…
I have gained 15lbs since stage day. But nah I got this. 3 sets of hamstring curls, calves, squats, dead’s, and quad and jam finishers
Typo or the weirdest post workout ever?
You got this