For many people, being in lockdown has provided ample opportunity to try new things, whether that’s a new hobby, pastime or exercise programme.
Along the same lines, it’s also given many of us food for thought with our jobs and careers, particularly if we’ve found ourselves working from home and falling out of love with what we’ve been doing.
If you’ve been contemplating a career change for a while and the current situation has accelerated those plans, we’re here to talk through some of the options that lie ahead in the fitness industry. Maybe you’ve been spending time doing lots of online workouts and you’ve been inspired by your experiences or maybe with gyms slowly reopening, you’ve seen first-hand just how beneficial exercise can be. Regardless of your motivations, we’re here to help and it really couldn’t have come at a better time.
In the UK alone, over 10 million people are now a member of a gym, health club or fitness studio, and there are well over 7,000 health and fitness premises currently operating. The industry itself is worth in excess of over £5bn and all this points to one word, opportunity.
When it comes to making the right choice for your future fitness carer, we’ve identified three of the most popular routes currently available to you. In no particular order, here they are:
Group Exercise
In a given week, 4.86 million people take part in some form of group exercise. Those are staggering figures just go to show how popular it is. Amongst the most popular styles you’re likely to find on a studio timetable are yoga, Pilates and aerobics. If you’re looking to launch a career in group exercise and you’re confident you can teach a dynamic, interesting and worthwhile class, simply ask yourself what interests you the most.
You might have a passion for high energy freestyle aerobics classes and the creative flair to create your own choreography. If so, exercise to music might be for you.
Alternatively, you might be more interested in yoga, a universally popular form of exercise that focuses on achieving a union of body, mind and spirit.
There’s also Pilates. While there are many similarities with yoga, many use Pilates for its restorative and rehabilitation purposes. For example, combating back pain or improving balance and flexibility. If Pilates is a particular area of interest for you, your first port of call will always be to formalise your knowledge and get qualified. You can do this by enrolling on to a leading Pilates instructor course.
Personal Training
You’d be hard-pressed to a gym floor nowadays that don’t have at least a few personal trainers working with their clients. There are many reasons to explain why personal training is so popular, but one of the most apparent is that the service PTs provide just works.
Gym goers often turn to a personal trainer because they need help with something and they don’t have the expertise, knowledge and sometimes motivation to achieve their goals. Those goals could be anything from running a marathon to losing weight before a wedding, or just something like eating a little healthier and just generally feeling better.
Personal trainers are there to help us achieve the things we can’t do on their own. They’re able to make such a massive difference in peoples’ lives and it’s this that makes the role so attractive.
If personal training sounds like the perfect career move for you, just like with any role in the health and fitness industry, getting qualified is the all-important first step. First, you need to find an organisation who delivers personal trainer courses. From here, you’ll be taught everything you need to know about working with clients, using gym equipment, how the body works, what effective nutrition looks like and so much more.
Sports Massage
Sports massage is an area of health and fitness that has seen tremendous growth in recent years. Part of the reason for this is our global slide into sedentary lifestyles and patterns of behaviour. We’re all spending far too much time sitting down and not moving, both at work and at home. This inevitably causes imbalances, aches, pains and injuries.
On a similar token, for those who really embrace exercise and working out, overdoing things and training too much can also cause significant strains of the body that, at times, can’t just be overcome by a few day’s rest. The beauty of sports massage is that it can be combined with other areas of fitness. It’s highly common for personal trainers and other fitness professionals to get qualified in sports massage and offer than as a service.
Hopefully, this article has provided some useful guidance about how to launch a career in the fitness industry and the best route to take based on your interests.
