A personal trainer should think of themselves as a generalist teaching physical culture, not just exercise. That means covering mental health, nutrition, sleep, rehabilitation, and strength. Learning multiple modalities like powerlifting, CrossFit, and kettlebells lets you serve clients more completely without constant specialist referrals.
Module 2: Defining your scope of service. So in this industry, you can find a great career as a personal trainer, a coach, or a fitness instructor. So the thing is that often when the term personal trainer is given as a label, there are a lot of very highly qualified and very talented people as personal trainers, and they don't like to define themselves as so. For me, I love the term personal trainer. I'll tell you why, because I have a different definition of it. But personal training has such a huge scope, huge scope of services of what personal training, training can provide. It can provide people with mental health. It can provide people with getting stronger. You can be someone's strength coach. You can improve rehab. You can help people with their diet. You can help people improve their supplements. As I said, this personal training, it does have a huge scope. And this is where the lines sometimes get blurred because sometimes trainers they do like a weekend course and then they think they're a fully qualified hormone specialist, which is, you know, absolutely ridiculous. I look at personal trainers as generalists and, you know, through small tweaks of advice and lifestyle habits, people are able to really make huge improvements in their life without going to see a doctor or someone who is a specialist necessarily in that area. They're able to just implement preventative measures which personal trainers are more than capable in helping people do. So my definition of being a personal trainer is to teach physical culture, and that also goes for being a fitness instructor. It's to teach physical culture. Now the question then becomes, what is physical culture? And I'm going to read the definition to you from the Oxford Dictionary. As the Oxford Dictionary defines it, Physical culture is the sum total of society activities and attitudes connected with physical development and education. Now, the reason why I love that definition for personal training is because it encompasses what we do as personal trainers. And I'm going to highlight the key words there, right? Societal activities. So it acknowledges that gyms and studios, personal training studios and outdoor settings, whatever you do, like boot camps, for example, they are community centers. Even if you're doing one-on-one, if you're in a gym or someone's coming to your place of service, they are community centers where people come to, and it's a societal activity where people are using physical activity to connect. The other thing I love is, is, well, the word connection, but it's around physical development. So there's the physical development aspect of it. So we're teaching people and educating people how to be better physically, but also bringing that community aspect in. So that's my definition of a personal trainer. And that definition is, it is, you know, it's quite broad and it does encompass if you're a kettlebell guy, if you're a CrossFit girl, if you're just a strength coach like myself or a bodybuilder, it speaks to all those people. So it doesn't say that you can't do rehab or you can't, you know, and the other thing with physical culture is that it makes sense to optimize someone's diet and nutrition and supplementation and sleep. It relates to everything. That is being better physically. That's why I like that definition. So as a scope of service, it's to teach physical culture. And I think as personal trainers, we take on that definition. We don't attach ourselves necessarily to being what we enjoy. And what I mean by that, for example, is I used to be a bodybuilder, right? And the reason why I say that, I used to do the comps, I used to have the protein shakes, you know, the Bible was the Muscle Mags. And I used to do everything that a bodybuilder would do. I was part of that cult hook, line, and sinker. And how did you think I trained my clients? Well, like a bodybuilder, because that's who I was. But it's the same thing if you're a powerlifter. Often you see the world as every client is a powerlifter. Instead, someone who teaches physical culture goes— and this is exactly what I've done in my career— is hang out at the weightlifting clubs, hang out with the powerlifters, do strongman, do bodybuilding, look at what the kettlebell crew are doing, understand some of the movements and stuff that they're doing in CrossFit and some of the I suppose, WODs that they're putting together, they're really intense that you could bring back and utilize. It's being a fan of everything that is physical. And yeah, you might have your stick, right? You might have bodybuilding or powerlifting or CrossFit as your stick, but when you go across and you learn all these modalities, it makes you a much better trainer and encompasses in your service and your scope of service grows because you understand rehab, you understand nutrition, you understand supplementation. And this is where the client is the one who benefits. So coming back to my definition of teaching physical culture, when you're really going to utilize and take on that definition, the world of physical activity is your oyster.
