Downright criminal. I feel embarrassed to have taken this job
Pros
Working in a gym environment, management is not in the gym often to watch your every move
Cons
When I interviewed for this position, it was presented to me that I would be involved in personal training sales, as well as training clients I signed up. This was not even remotely the case. It’s a desk job all in all. I have two degrees in the exercise science field, and was grossly overqualified for this position. My coworkers in my same position were all “fitness enthusiasts” who had sales experience. Even though we spent some time training members, the other PTC’s had little knowledge of the physiologic workings of the exercises they were prescribing to clients, and had zero understanding of how to progress or regress for specific or general injuries. My daily duties included making cold calls to new members (we were expected to begin calls at the start of our work day - 9 am on the weekdays, 8 am on Saturday’s - interrupting many members mornings as they prepared for work, or still asleep on saturdays), as well as “marketing”. LA Fitness’s marketing strategies included walking around the gym and interrupting members’ workouts to give them a sales pitch about personal training. My boss placed me in many uncomfortable situations interrupting people to the point where I was was having breakdowns in the bathroom daily. The hours are extremely long, having split shifts with a break that was not long enough to get in a workout, eat, and finish household chores, but long enough to be bored out of your mind if you simply workout and have lunch. The pay is extremely low. You will make minimum wage, unless you are generating $10,000 or more EFT each month. Meaning unless you are conning at least 10 or so members into buying low-grade personal training each month, you are making pennies. The work is downright criminal. You’re essentially using used car salesman tactics to get people (mainly older folks with money to spend) to purchase training packages. The sessions themselves are only 25 minutes long, and the prices are high compared to market rivals with longer sessions. You set up “sets” with people, spend about 30 minutes degrading their current lifestyle choices, then knowing very little about their background or history, put them through a workout too difficult for their population to make it seem like they desperately need training. One of our “lessons” in training was on a topic they called sleeping giants. Essentially, if someone has not been in for their training sessions for more than 2 months or so, we were instructed not to call them to bring their attention to this, in order to continue receiving their monthly payments under their nose. This was a huge tipping point for me. My second week there I began applying for positions as a trainer elsewhere. After about a month at LA, I received an offer during my lunch break, came back to work and quit on the spot. Best decision I ever made.