It’s been a year since I made the decision to venture into the world of fitness and personal trainer. Although before I have been coaching both kids and adult football for a couple of seasons, becoming a PT seemed to be the next logical step in developing my career.
Sport and fitness has always been a massive part of my life, but anyone that has ever done or looked at a Level 3 personal training course knows how much of a financial commitment it can be. So it was a slight leap of faith on my part. So after a lot of serious conversation with my wife (brains of the operation) I decided to sign up n the August bank holiday.
I must admit other than football course, which are mostly practical assessments, I haven’t studied since I left college 10 years before so that was my first challenge to overcome was setting myself some study time and actually trying process all the content in the course. I was finally starting to get my head around it and luckily I had a great motivational tool in the form of my tutor, Paula Ralph a South African, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, ass kicking tutor I may add. Paula was an amazing tutor and taking aside all her in depth knowledge of Personal Training and all her insights into the trade, it was her passion for PT and fitness that I found most infectious and found it easy to feed off Paula’s enthusiasm to push myself.
The next step was to get some hands on experience in the industry, unfortunately that proved harder than I thought to gain, as it seemed a lot of PT’s weren’t interested in helping me develop at all, but luckily Andy Collins at Tri4fitness gave me that opportunity to shadow him with some clients in the evenings. Andy is a much different individual to Paula with completely different interests in the sport and fitness industries being more of an endurance man and triathlete competitor. One thing did remain the same as Paula though, the in depth knowledge and passion for the industry . Having these 2 as my mentors was a real boost for me that spurred me on and helped increase my own knowledge beyond the books I was studding.
Fortunately I passed my exams and assessments (phew) and after Andy not only being kind enough to allow me to shadow him then also offered me a job with Tri4fitness. So know the real learning has begun and is always continuing, a few months into it and I’m absolutely loving it. I still have more courses to complete and every new client is a new unique story for me to adapt to and tailor my training programmes and techniques to suit them.
All in all I’m glad that I came to the decision to start this journey last, and feel lucky to of had 2 awesome mentors. This is only the start of a career I love and I’m just getting started!!
By Dean Connolly
