Why I Stopped Personal Training

Health and fitness is such an integral part of my life, that I made it my first entrepreneurial pursuit.  I became a certified personal trainer in 2010 while I was studying Exercise Science and Health Promotion in college, and continued to keep my certification active, despite not training anymore. I haven’t trained accepted a client for training in quite some time, and that’s something that I’ve been battling with, and I’ve come to a space to accept that I had to step outside the health and fitness arena completely for a while and we’re about to get real personal and find out why.

Without behavior changes, motivation is useless. 

The main issue with everything above is that you’re relying on someone or something outside of yourself to “motivate” you. Yes my job is to motivate you, but how far and how hard is that “motivation” going to stick when you’re not with me? While I was taking my continuing education credits to keep my certification active, one thing that I lacked focus on was behavior modification and changes, which is the most important thing when making a lifestyle change. Motivation without discipline does not keep progress going.  Even with myself, my motivation has waned because I didn’t set goals outside of the physical.  Once I achieved my physical goals, I didn’t look to accomplish anything else, and my behaviors have gotten out of control since then.

Complacency and excuses.

Once I’d achieve my physical goals, I didn’t think of another goal to replace that and I lost my drive.  As a result, I stopped working out, I started eating different foods that I would not normally eat on a regular basis, and my activity levels just dwindled drastically.  By far, I am the heaviest I’ve been, and I didn’t think it was possible, but now that I have an office job, I really notice how easy it is to get stuck in the rat race of just going to work and going home.  Sitting at the desk for hours at a time without movement starts to break the body down.  Nowadays, I just feel stiff sometimes my goodness.  Nonetheless, it has reinforced my thinking about why consistency matters in everything.

Money was funny honey. 

Another thing that made me stop personal training was the income that corporate personal training provided; which wasn’t much.  I couldn’t sustain a comfortable lifestyle with the income that corporate personal training was paying. The funds were low and the debts were high. Now don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of fitness colleagues who worked in corporate fitness for many many years, and have been able to create a lifestyle that they can live off of, but for me, it wasn’t profitable, so I had to take matters into my own hands and create something different. Even then I still did not know what that looked like, and as a result, I have wasted time and money.  However, with wasted time, comes lots of knowledge that you guys can benefit from.

Information overload

With the advancement of technology, we have all this information at our disposal within a matter of minutes.  I had been studying so much information about the fitness and nutrition industry that I wanted to try everything I learned.  The information overload was real. I’d gotten so overwhelmed with the information, I just stopped altogether.  I have since learned how to compartmentalize the information that I obtain and read so I now can read and fully plan on how to implement something that I have learned before moving on to the next thing to progress my knowledge and experience.

I lost my balance

In the last few years, I’d gone through several life changes. New job, living solo, finishing school, and getting married.  Everything seemed to happen all at once, and my fitness and nutrition took a hit as a result.  How many of you have lost your routines because of life circumstances? I know I’m not the only one.  I tell myself that I need to get back to what I used to do and find my groove again, but haven’t acted on it.  I’m not waiting any longer to get back on it.  I’m ready to grab this bad boy bull by the horns and find my way again, and I’m taking you guys along with me.

Let me know what goals you want to work on or what you’ve been curious about.  I’m a walking book of information and can definitely share.