Personal Trainer

On a personal trainer apprenticeship course, you’ll help coach clients towards their health and fitness goals.

As a personal trainer, you will motivate clients to make positive behavioural changes and improve their overall health by planning and providing personalised exercise programmes and instruction, nutritional assistance, and general lifestyle management.

You’ll be trained as an expert in offering and delivering individualised programmes within your area of expertise while also recognising when to send clients to appropriate experts for specialised information and assistance, such as physiotherapists, licenced dieticians, and medical specialists.

You’ll also need a solid understanding of business, finance, sales, and marketing to build and maintain a solid client base. After completing your training, you might work for a fitness or leisure centre or be self-employed.

What you’ll learn

On a personal trainer apprenticeship course, you’ll learn to:

• Employ appropriate techniques and processes to assist clients in achieving their targeted physiological goals.
• Assess clients’ preparedness to modify their behaviour and utilise effective change techniques, communication methods, and motivation to assist them in establishing healthy habits that will help them achieve their goals and stay on track with the programme.
• Recognise recurring issues and provide clients with information, advice, and support as required.
• Promote wellness counselling and demonstrate an understanding of how the client’s present lifestyles influence their health and well-being, sending them to competent professionals as needed.
• Create, personalise, and teach an effective training programme that uses appropriate equipment. Continuously monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of the exercise programme to ensure that it is interesting, varied, and progressive to the clients’ needs and goals during the following training and exercise science principles.
• Create and teach exercise courses to individuals and small groups outside the club. 
• Examine and evaluate the performance of different fitness programmes, and make any necessary modifications.
• Show a range of workout programmes correctly, conduct assessments and advise customers on their performance, and make necessary adaptations for persons of varying fitness levels.
• Examine the client’s eating habits to identify areas for improvement.
• Use nutritional considerations while developing training and lifestyle programmes for clients.
• Ensure that appropriate IT solution are utilised to support and manage all aspects of a personal training business, such as record keeping, sales and invoicing, client and group administration, class scheduling, retention levels, and session reminders.
• Manage the effectiveness of a client’s fitness programme using relevant and accessible ways.
• Plan and review firm performance regularly to achieve corporate goals and targets while identifying areas for improvement.
• Use a variety of effective marketing strategies to engage prospective clients.

Entry requirements

You’ll usually need:

• Relevant, active experience in the fitness sector and fitness instructing level 2 qualification.
• Apprentices without level 2 English and maths will need to achieve this level before taking the end-point assessment.

Assessment methods

The End Point Assessment consists of three distinct assessment methods: 

• Practical observation with questions and answers 
• Presentation with questions and answers 
• Interview 

Duration, level, subjects and potential salary upon completion

Apprenticeship standard

More information about the Level 3 Personal Trainer Apprenticeship standard can be found here.

Apprenticeship end point assessment

For more information about the End Point Assessment Process, please read the Institute of Apprenticeships’ information page.