Come June and it means goodbye freedom to many parents. This group of gym-goers anticipates the fact that once the school closes for the summer, their freedom would be clipped to painful proportions.
Don’t blame the parents. Any personal trainer can tell you that it’s true. June is the month when parents push on their training as if it was going to be their last time that they would see a treadmill or the weights again. This drive comes from their realization that they would not see their gym for the next couple of months, unless they do live a lavish life and can afford maids and babysitters.
Personal trainers notice that their clients are making good use of their personal training coupons. Some parents come to the gym until they run out of them. Others just let the coupons expire. Yet, this is the month when a typical gym meets its quota for personal training sales. It helps when everyone seem to use their sessions at around the same period.
Personal trainers know that this golden period would end once the summer vacation starts in schools. They feel the pinch when gyms see a huge slump in sales. This is a period when the gym-goers try to adjust to their roles as baby-sitters, a reality that had taken a detour while the school was in session when the parents had blissfully relegated their baby-sitting role to their child’s teacher. Now that the overworked, underpaid teachers have taken their vacation alongside their students, the parents and their trainers suddenly realize how miserly they had been in appreciating the role of teachers.
This is a time when many parents rely on community pools to keep their children busy. Some parents with deeper pockets send their kids to camps. Some others do not have this luxury to send their children to these, should we say, more expensive baby-sitters. They stay home.
Whether the children are at the pool or their homes, they have been able to keep their parents from going to the gym, much to the dismay of personal trainers whose survival, it seems, depends on the numbers set by the management of their respective gyms.
So while the clients are gone for an indefinite amount of time, jobs of a personal trainer suffers from greedy repercussions of the management. Quotas are not respected. The trainers try to seek new clients in order to meet their monthly sales, but to no avail. They get slapped in the wrist by management because they didn’t bring the amount, say, $1500 monthly sales for Level 1 (personal trainer), $3000 for Level 2 (Pro Trainer), and $6000 for Level 3 and 4, so on and so forth.
The management of other clubs works in the variation of the above example. They are more or less the products of the same greedy machinery that places burden on the trainers to maintain a certain number of clients for their gyms.
When the personal trainers work for a company, they are protected by insurance if a gym member or client gets injured while being trained by the in-house personal trainer. A personal trainer has to be extra careful if he is working as a subcontractor. He is his own responsibility, especially if his client was injured because he was, say, staring at a beautiful gym member passing by and not paying attention to his client.
On the other side of the spectrum, personal training as a profession is pretty enjoyable. The trainer is his own boss. He makes his own schedule. Or rather, his clients pick the time and the trainer makes himself available to help this client. Appointments do not always take place as scheduled. Cancellations happen, especially during the winter season. This is when certain policies have to be enforced, such as a 24-hour cancellation policy, in which a client has to tell his trainer 24 hours in advance that he will be not be able to make it, sick or not. If not advised, a trainer can charge the client for the missed session.
Certain gyms have a monitored system when it comes to personal training session to evaluate quotas from the trainers. If the trainers do not meet the quotas they stand on shaky ground–they better start looking for employment at another gym. For this reason June is a month that it hard for the trainers to hold in high esteem.
Although the gyms see a drop in their sales, there would always be a faithful or two of regular gym-goers especially for the fact that this is also a month when many people head towards the beach for fun and relaxation. Extra reason to perfect their abs or their curves.
It is hard to determine how important it is to have some kind of relaxation. The West Coast, it seems, definitely knows how to relax. They seem to spend their whole lives relaxing. The East Coast, however, seems a bit uptight. It must be the weather or something more serious. Whatever be the cause or the difference in approach to relaxation, everyone – be they at East Coast, West Coast, or anywhere in between –seem to be in a mood to unwind, personal trainers including.
In this time of the year, even the personal trainers are likely to consider vacation for themselves. This is true especially when considering the fact that most of their client-base is doing the same. If one notices a decline in the number of personal trainers in the gyms, he’s not mistaken – the trainer is either on vacation, or is pumping iron in a gym next door.
Strange as it may sound, a trainer rarely does his workout at the same gym where he actually works. So if he works at one gym, he probably is not there when he does his workout. This explains his reduced presence in any given gym. Some trainers believe that they will lose the effect of a good pump if they workout in the same gym that they work. They feel the urge to change venues.
Changing venues can be expensive for the trainers too. But the trainers can turn this odd in their favor if they choose a gym that has branches in other locations. When a trainer — or a client for that matter– buys a membership, he can go and workout in the different gyms within the network. If the network has gyms outside of the given State so much the better for the members. This is a boon to frequent travelers who also wish to keep their workout schedule wherever they travel. If only more people shared this idea, America would be a healthier nation: obesity, for example, would surely lose its weight.
Leave a Reply