For many TRAINFITNESS graduates, being a personal trainer or fitness professional is not a full-time role – it’s their fitness side hustle.

A side hustle runs alongside full-time employment but relates more closely to your passions and brings greater job satisfaction as well as additional income. A side hustle can also act as a springboard into a full-time business, helping you learn the skills and get some experience with the relative security of full-time employment.

A guide to switching careers

If you’re less than happy in your 9-5 job, then a fitness side hustle can help you to maintain your current role whilst allowing you to do what you really love doing. In the case of a personal trainer, yoga, Pilates or exercise to music instructor, that would be helping people by creating and delivering great fitness Training sessions. A side hustle can help bridge the gap between what you want to do and what you need to do.

Benefits of the Fitness Side Hustle

Have a Positive Impact on People’s Lives

In your current job you may not feel like you have much of a positive impact on anyone’s life. Perhaps you aren’t creating the change in the world you’d hoped to. Speak to any personal trainer or fitness professional and they’ll tell you one of the greatest rewards of the role is helping people achieve their goals and seeing the positive impact training has on their clients lives. Delivering exercise sessions before and after your regular 9-5 job is a great way to achieve the satisfaction you crave. Regardless of whether you deliver in-person sessions or virtual ones, seeing your clients progress, lose weight, gain muscle or achieve any of their fitness related goals gives you a feeling you won’t get in a regular/non-fitness job.

There’s a Social Up-side to the Fitness Side Hustle

The fitness industry is one of the most social industries there is, while for many people, their 9-5 doesn’t give them the social atmosphere they really enjoy. Coaching fitness is a person-to-person activity, you have to be social. Not only does being social help you, but also helps your clients achieve their goals and improve their overall wellbeing. A study on the effects of physical activity on social interactions showed those that exercise have more trust and are prone to more “prosocial” behaviours than those that don’t. If you are a social creature, then the fitness side-hustle will not only help you see improvements in someone’s fitness, but also in other aspects of their life as well.

Adds Variety to Your Life

If your day to day is filled with the “same-old-same-old”, offering a variety of fitness services in your side hustle is a great way to spice things up. Whether it be a one-to-one workout using body weight, a yoga or Pilates class, or even a T3 HIIT workout, the variety of workouts you can offer is limited only by your qualification and skills. Your clients will also benefit from different types of training, and they’ll appreciate the variety as well.

You Choose When You Side Hustle

This benefit is true for all fitness professionals regardless of whether they’re doing it full or part time. When working in fitness, you have a lot more flexibility in choosing when you work and when you don’t. You can decide when you train clients or deliver your classes, which makes it easier to fit the rest of your private life in and around your career.

If you only want to earn a little, then you can just have a couple of clients. Or if you’re saving up for your next big purchase, you can take on more clients and classes as your time permits.

You Can Do It All From Home

The COVID-19 pandemic has made virtual training sessions the norm. Analysts believe the virtual fitness market will continue to grow over the coming years, hitting a global market value of over £49 billion by 2027. Research has also shown that many clients expect to incorporate virtual training into their regular schedule when things “return to normal”. Offering a virtual fitness side hustle will allow you to maximize your time, as you don’t have to travel to a gym, and allow you to keep everything you earn as there is no fee to pay the gym. If you teach group classes as well, you get to keep the fees you charge from each participant, making the more the merrier. Virtual is definitely the way to go.

A Great Earning Potential

A good side hustle should ultimately lead to additional income. Even if money isn’t your main motivation, you should still charge for your services, time and efforts. If you’re not sure what to charge, shop around and see what others in your area are charging. Read our article on how to make a good income as a PT here.

Is the Fitness Side Hustle For You?

A side hustle isn’t meant to be a burden or a drain. It should compliment your current commitments and enhance your situation, financially and emotionally. Whether a part time career in fitness is similar to your full time career or takes you into an entirely different field, you should enjoy the work and never find it a chore.

For a fitness side hustle to work, you need to schedule your commitments and make sure you aren’t overdoing it. Personal training &/or delivering workouts to clients is all about giving; giving your time, patience, skills and stability to clients. It can take a lot of energy to be a successful PT and fitness professional, so you have to make sure you are looking after yourself. Get plenty of rest and watch out for the effects of burnout. When you find the right balance, a side hustle can be extremely rewarding and can put additional cash in your pocket.

To effectively add a fitness side hustle to your schedule, go easy at first – coach a few mornings or evenings a week (not every morning and/or evening). Factor in plenty of rest time while you get used to the swing of things.

Regardless of your approach, you must enjoy the process and not allow yourself to get overwhelmed. In time, you may even find that your side hustle is actually the career path you want to take full-time!

#FitForPurpose

Further Reading

How to Study From Home
Don’t Forget About CPDs
The TRAINFITNESS Experience

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