In this instructional video, the presenter outlines the legal responsibilities of fitness business owners, emphasizing the need for clear terms and conditions and staff contracts. He details the essential client documentation: a general information form, a comprehensive medical history form (including injury diagrams and medication questions), a waiver that acknowledges inherent exercise risks while clarifying that negligence is not covered, and a concise business terms and conditions agreement covering fees, cancellation, refunds, and expectations. The speaker stresses the limits of waivers, the importance of appropriate liability insurance, and provides practical advice on obtaining it through an insurance broker. He then explains best practices for recordkeeping—maintaining both hard‑copy and digital versions, storing files in a structured Dropbox system, and retaining all records for at least seven years to protect against potential lawsuits. Throughout, he frames these steps as preventative measures rather than scare tactics, underscoring that legal compliance rests on the business owner, whether a sole trader, freelancer, or employee.
Chapters
So this is the third video of Module 5, which is understanding sound business structures and legal responsibilities. So it is a legal responsibility to have terms and conditions for your clients and also if you're hiring staff to have contracts in place for them as well. So the contracts, I'm going to be talking about the contract side of things for staff Certificate 4, but let's now focus on the T's and C's, the agreements, the legal responsibilities that you have with your client. So what I would recommend is you're going to have a few different forms that you're going to need. So the first form you're going to need with your client is a general information form, which basically just documents their name, date of birth, address, maybe their goals, some marketing information like where they came from. Was it Google, Facebook, word of mouth? That's one form on its own. The next form you want to have is a medical history form. So on that medical history form, what— and we've got some models on the website and the PDF that you can look at. They're not complete. You know, take it with a grain of salt. It's not legal advice. Implement at your own will. There might be some of it that you really just, you know, can copy and paste. Other, you might need to change for your business. But on the medical forms sheet, you want to— the way we do it is we've got a picture of a body, anatomical picture, and basically says circle anything that's been injured or surgeries or basically any medical things that have happened. So, you know, if they've had an operation in their heart, they circle it, you know, had operation when I was 14 years old on my heart. Or if I broke my leg, they circle, you know, left leg, broke left leg, fell off a horse, whatever it is. So that's very important to have. You can also have questions associated with that just so you have an understanding, such as, are you on any medication? Does this medication affect your health and fitness? Has your doctor ever specifically told you that you shouldn't work out? Do you have medical clearance? If yes, do you have medical clearance from your doctor? So you can include those questions. You know, if the answer is no, then obviously it creates some issues and they're going to need to go back to their doctor and all that kind of stuff. General medical form. The next form is basically, well, there's, there's this one can be combined, but I'll say it in two different ways. The form is basically your Ts and Cs as a business and then also a waiver of sorts. And again, you can look at the PDF. So let's start with a waiver. The waiver is just basically a waiver where they say, I acknowledge that there is a generalized risk that you as a trainer isn't necessarily able to identify. You know, if I pick up this weight and I snap off my arm, you didn't know that I was going to snap off my arm, but there is inherent risk with exercise and I accept the inherent risk of exercise and it's on me if I hurt myself. Notwithstanding, if it is negligence, say for example, you're my trainer and you know, you tell me to do squats and you put 200 kilos on there and I've never squatted a day in my life. Well, that's, that's just straight out negligence, right? That's not going to— there's no waiver in the world that's going to save you there. Right. So negligence will always be negligence. So people talk about having insurance, right? And that's the thing. Like you can have a I forget the exact legal terminology, but if someone, you know, again, they pick up a bar, right? And they've picked up a bar for 10 years, right? And for this day, whatever, when they're with you, they pick up a bar and they do their back, right? Well, there's reasonable belief that they were going to pick up the bar and not hurt themselves. And whether it was with you or by themselves, they were going to hurt themselves. But again, negligence, it doesn't cover you, right? So that's where your insurance is very important. Now, there's a few ways to to get that insurance, what I'd recommend is to speak to an insurance broker about the right insurance that you will need. The other part of the agreement that I was referring to earlier was your business terms and conditions. So in this agreement, it should basically also state your cancellation policy, how you accept money. If they want to cancel their whole package, is there a cancellation fee on the total training? What they're committed to basically. So what, and this can be very short, it doesn't have to be long and legal speak. In actual fact, I'd recommend that you write it in a way that just, this is what I expect, right? So it might be, these are the fees, this is what you're paying for. This first session's gonna be a lifestyle assessment session. The second session, I'm gonna give you your program. The third session, it can be very matter of fact, dot point. And this is what I expect from you. Here are my terms and conditions of Cancellation, refunds, and complaints. Right. And then on the flip side, there's the waiver. So they're the main forms that you need. Medical history is very important. Now, legal responsibilities in this is, you know, this is where an ounce of prevention is always better than a cure. Right. So you want to— I would recommend that you scan. I mean, there's a digital way to do this. You can do it digitally. You put on the format on an iPad. We don't do that in enterprise. We actually print everything. we fill it out by hand, we get our assistant or our admin staff to then scan it. She then will put that in the Dropbox. So we have hard copies and we've got digital copies. And the reason why we do that is we want to have backups as well. So it's not just about doing these forms for kind of lip service. You actually want to file these away. You want to keep them for 7 years because if someone does want to say sue you or take you to court, anything like that, you need record of it for at least 7 years. So you keep that for 7 years. And then keep a digital copy of it as well on like a Dropbox or a cloud service. So it's there, it's there. And then in your filing system, you want to have all your clients put their file, their name, anything like programs. So you have all their forms in their file, all their programs, any before or after photos that you're doing, any dietary advice that you've given, any supplements maybe that you've recommended or they've taken, any notes on the client, right? You want to have all the information on the client in that Dropbox there accessible. Because in the worst case scenario, what will happen is the client, maybe 12 months from training with you, might say, well, you, you who's watching this, you hurt me, you hurt me. You told me to do a lat raise and, you know, it hurt my shoulder and now I can't move my shoulder and it's your fault. And you haven't seen this client in 12 months and they now want to sue you. And I say this and you might be thinking, That's a really weird example, right? As if someone does that. Well, we've actually had it, right? And we won. But the point that I'm getting at is the reason why we won. We had all the records on file and we had to, you know, we looked at our system and we leveled up our game. So you want to make sure you have those records. You've got records of your clients. You know what's been said, you know what's been done. The training programs as well, they're all in there. So you can back it up and say, you know, this is— they came in with a preexisting condition. You know, you you said you hurt my shoulder, but in the first session they've circled, you know, my shoulder was already sore before I came to see you. You know, you didn't hurt my shoulder. And people can blame you for something that is completely not related to you and they've done on their own at their own gym. You want to back yourself. So that's your legal responsibilities. And I don't make this video to scare you or to put you off or anything like that, just to make sure you understand that once you enter into a sole trader, into a business, you do have responsibilities, and these are fundamentally your responsibilities as the business owner to do, or the sole trader to do, or the freelancer to do, or as the employee to do. It doesn't make a difference. It's always going to be on you when you're working one-on-one with clients.
