Fitness pros in England have been back at the gym for just over a month now, and today (31st August) our Scottish counterparts have opened their doors again. However, if you speak to anyone who has been back working for a while, they'll tell you that things are very different now than they were 6 months ago. Even though class attendances are starting to climb in the clubs that I work at, timetables look very different, people are coming in at different times of day and gym me

So you've just passed your level 2 fitness qualification and are ready to start your new journey as a fitness instructor! But, where do you begin? How do you go about securing permanent classes? How do you approach a gym or get some cover? What bits of kit do I need to teach? What insurances do you need? These are the things I wanted to know when I was first starting my journey as a fit pro. I was fresh out of uni, hadn't been studying sport, was moving back to an area where

In a previous post I spoke about why goals are important to you as a fitness professional and how they can help you grow your influence, income and impact your life in a positive way. Today we are going to get a bit more practical and look at how you can set goals for yourself and your clients, and how you can make sure you achieve them. 1. Get SMART If you have done any sort of level 2 or 3 fitness qualification then you know all about SMART goals. This stands for: S - speci

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Although teaching group fitness classes is an amazing and rewarding career, it can often be tough to make a good living purely teaching classes, especially if you only teach high intensity programs. The beauty of a career in group fitness is that you can do as much or as little of it as you like, and this provides you with the freedom to pursue another career alongside teaching fitness classes. As I work in the City of London, a lot of my freelance team have a "normal" office

Most people get into teaching group fitness classes because they love the class style, love fitness and want to share that passion with other people. Not everybody that becomes a fitness instructor has had experience standing in front of a group of people and presenting or performing, and your first few classes can seem like the scariest thing in the world. Lack of confidence can strike even the most experienced of us - sometimes all it takes is a new club, some bad feedback

So it has officially been three months since I introduced Group Fitness Training to the world and 2 months since I launched my first products. Time flies when you're having fun, eh? Launching a new business in the middle of a pandemic was always going to be a challenge. especially when the people my products are aimed at had no real use for them at that current time. Although some of my plans have been halted due the crisis, I've achieved a fair bit since May. So, what are th

There are two types of people in this world; those who think about doing great things and those who actually do them. Often, all that separates them is that one started doing the thing whilst the other procrastinated. I am the sort of person that likes to take action. If I decide I am going to do something, I make sure I follow through with it. This has lead me to doing some great things in my life but also some very silly things. But hey, I learnt lessons from the silly thin

It's July 30th. 5 days ago, I stepped foot in a gym for the first time in 4 months. In these 5 days I have delivered 14 group fitness classes, so not exactly easing myself back in gently. I wanted to share my initial reactions to getting back into the studios both as a record for myself and future readers to look back on and see how far we've come and also to help anyone who's clubs might not have opened yet or may not be teaching yet due to their personal circumstances. Here

Now the gyms have re-opened, us fitness pros have probably jumped back into much higher levels of activity... and you might be starting to feel it a bit! I started practising yoga about 3 years ago when I found myself getting injured a lot and feeling pretty stressed most of the time, and I really feel that yoga can benefit every group fitness instructor. So, I invited Rhianwen Beint, a yoga teacher, group fitness instructor and personal trainer, to share her views on why GFI

This year has single-handedly changed millions, if not billions, of people's lives overnight. We have all been forced to sit down and think how our lives look now and what we want them to look like after this madness is over. You may have decided that you want to take the first steps into a fitness career or you may already be a fit pro and be wondering whether you want to go back to your pre-lockdown ways of working? The fitness industry is very flexible and offers the abili

A lot of people can be put off self-development and self-help materials, seeing it as some hippy thing or corporate rubbish that has no application in real life. This, in my opinion, couldn't be further from the truth. If you want to build a strong fitness business, achieve your goals faster and improve your mindset then self-development is one of the best ways to do it. In my opinion, self-development tools like books, podcasts and seminars have been the driving force behind

As a fitness business owner/fitness professional you are usually a one (wo)man band. When you first start out on your journey as a fitness pro, it’s not uncommon to take every client and class that is thrown your way, and you very quickly end up with a schedule that leaves you approximately 27.5 minutes each day to eat, shower and relax. Before too long you realise that you can’t carry on this way and need to do something about it. And you think about how you can grow your bu

Today marks exactly 13 weeks since the UK was put into lockdown, with an announcement due from the government in three days time as to what the next steps are to get out of it (which we are hoping will include opening the gyms). The last few months have been really tough for all of us and now the end is in sight, I wanted to reflect on some of the things lockdown has taught me personally. The first thing I have learned during lockdown is that I am a lot stronger than I though

The fitness industry will start to re-open in the next few weeks and it will emerge a different beast than it was before all this craziness began. Now everyone can accept there are problems within the industry and it seems like a total reset could be the best possible thing to iron out some of those flaws and improve the industry both for the people working in it and people engaging with it. So what are the things I would want to change about the way the fitness industry oper

Here in the UK, the doors of gyms remain firmly locked for another few weeks at least, however many other countries at different stages of the pandemic have started returning in part or full to working out in clubs. In this post I’ll be looking into the situation in 3 different countries; China (where the pandemic originated and the country that was first to lock down), New Zealand (now COVID free and on alert level 1) and South Africa (about to reopen). This info is correct

The fitness industry has been one of the hardest hit by the pandemic, with gyms in the UK being shut for 12 weeks at time of writing. Whilst opening is on the horizon once more, the hardship faced by many fit pros over the last few months may have made you think twice about whether fitness is a viable career in the post COVID world? What will our group fitness look like? Will there still be a demand for in-person training? Will home workouts remove the need for as many gyms?

This post will hopefully be one of the final posts I have to write on the C word. It is the beginning of June 2020 and we are just starting to come out of the main throws of the Coronavirus pandemic here in the UK. Boris Johnson announced that from June 1st we would be able to meet groups of up to 5 other people outside, providing that social distancing measures were still adhered to. For many self-employed fitness professionals, this was the news we had been waiting for. Sma

We’re getting all the exciting, sexy subjects covered in this series! We’re moving on to maybe the scariest subject of them all, pensions. At the time of writing I am in my mid-20s, so retirement is quite a way into the future for me. However, I look at saving for my future as a form of self-care. Sacrificing some extra money today to give myself the knowledge and comfort that I will be able to support myself into retirement. Group fitness instructing and personal training ar

One of the wonderful things about working in the fitness industry is the ability to freelance and be your own boss. You are in control of your own working hours, what clients and gyms you want to work with and can build a business that suits your lifestyle. However, as a freelance business owner you will have some extra things to consider than a full time employee – pensions, tax and insurance. Some of the dryer and more boring parts of adulting, for sure. However, taking con