CaptainAwesome wrote: ↑Mon Mar 20, 2023 7:41 amI'm wondering why gyms hire up lousy trainers over better ones.
I answered that.
The trainers who stick around long enough to get decent at their job will demand higher fees from potential clients. And the thing about training is that you don't know its value until you've had it. Only about one-third of the people reporting their SS novice linear progression results had any coaching at all. "Oh, I can do this on my own." Even those who want to push themselves a bit harder tend not to pay for it. So the typical trainer has no real incentive to go beyond the bosu ball.
In other words, the gyms have to hire shitty trainers because there aren't enough good ones, and most gym members won't know the difference anyway, and if they do won't care. As a gym owner, why would you wait 6 months to find someone good when you can find someone mediocre today, and pay them extra when most of your gym members don't care?
Earlier this year I had someone enquire with me about training. They decided to go for the "boutique PT" gym across the road from their place. I followed up today and asked how they were doing - a healthy 42yo was "stuck" (their words) at 22.5kg RDLs (yes, with a barbell, not a one-legged dumbbell version) after 6-8 weeks. This "boutique PT" place is able to pay the rent with fees from people like this. Not the fault of the various clients, they don't know any better, not their job to.
Gym owners hire shitty trainers because there aren't enough good ones, and most gym members don't know the difference and don't care.
I still think it's because they make more money if the clients quit.
No. Gyms actually get more value out of PTs when they act as gym instructors, showing new people through the place. As an example, the two basic models in Australia are rental and percentage. With rental, the PT pays (say) $300pw and then charges whatever they like directly from the client. With a percentage, the gym charges the client (say) $100ph, and takes about 50% of it; the more successful trainers do 10-15hr pw and so the gym gets $500-$750 from them, but that'll just be 1-2 out of 10-12 trainers, the rest do a few hours here and there, so it comes to about the same $300 or so on average.
But when the PT acts as a gym instructor, it's different. At one place I worked the place charged about $1,200 annually, with suspensions for holidays, old age and student discounts etc that averaged to $1,000. When people just signed up and did their own thing, about 40% were still members 12 months later, and so each new member was worth about $400 on average. But when people did the initial gym instructor appointment and programme showthrough, this jumped to 80%, or $800. So the 2hr the gym instructor spent on that they were paid $50 for, and the gym made $400, for a net $350.
Thus, the gym instructor showing
one person through a programme each week was worth more money to the gym than their rental, or the percentage of any but the most successful trainers. If they did (say) 10 people over 20 hours, they'd be paid $500 and generate $4,000 in income for the gym, a net $3,500 - $182k annually.
And that's even if they just did treadmill and bosu nonsense.
The real financial value of a trainer to a globogym owner isn't teaching someone to squat in a personal training session. It's having them take newbies around the place, talk some shit to them and make them feel comfortable in the place. For that you don't need to be the world's best trainer. Just don't be a social retard, and don't actually injure them in their first session.