Choosing Between Physical Therapy and Personal Training | The Real Costs, Career Insights, and Networking Secrets

Deciding between a career in physical therapy or personal training is no joke, and trust me, I've been at that very crossroads. I'll walk you through my own twisty path, where the tough demands of PT school, yes, even physics, nudged me towards the dynamic world of personal training. We'll also peel back the financial curtain, discussing the real cost of student loans with therapists who've been there, and giving a shout-out to those for whom the doors of PT school didn't open, but who've since flourished in the fitness realm. Plus, I've got some global perspective for you, comparing how PTs operate from Canada to Australia.

Let's talk shop about personal training—a field where consistency is king and a steady paycheck is the kingdom, particularly for those supporting families. I'll introduce you to the innovative 60, 30, 10 income split we've crafted at Show Up Fitness, tackling that pesky variability in earnings head-on. We'll cover the importance of diversifying your revenue with cool stuff like guides and merch. And because image and networking matter, whether you're a PT or a PT, I'll share tips on boosting that professional clout. 

Now, who doesn't love a success story or a bit of industry inspo? I'm shining a spotlight on the trailblazers like the Prehab guys, who've mastered the art of collaboration and innovation. They remind us of the power of networking and of building a business from the ground up. And as the fitness industry evolves, with trainers making waves outside traditional gym settings, we're here to support that journey. That's why we're rolling out our premier certification program, fanning the flames of passion and proficiency for a fulfilling career in fitness. Join us for this ride as we tackle these topics, celebrate milestones, and share insights that empower trainers everywhere.

Want to ask us a question? Email email info@showupfitness.com with the subject line PODCAST QUESTION to get your question answered live on the show!

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to the Show Up Fitness Podcast, where great personal trainers are made. We are changing the fitness industry, one qualified trainer at a time, with our in-person and online personal training certification. If you want to become an elite personal trainer, head on over to showupfitnesscom. Also, make sure to check out my book how to Become a Successful Personal Trainer. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review. Have a great day and keep showing up. Howdy everybody, and welcome back to the Show Up Fitness Podcast.

Speaker 1: 0:32

Today we're going to be talking about if you should go to physical therapy school or not. Should you get that DPT? Should you become a trainer? Guess what the answer is? It depends. That famous answer means nothing if there isn't clarity behind the why. You got to ask yourself why do you want to become a physical therapist? I'm not a physical therapist. I know a lot of great coaches and strength coaches, trainers who weren't able to go to PT school or med school, got into training and are absolutely killing it. Are you doing it because someone told you to do it? Maybe you have someone who's going to give you money.

Speaker 1: 1:10

We're going to dissect all that today, but first let's talk about, and just begin with, what it even takes to get you to green kinesiology. So you need an undergrad in kinesiology, science, biology it's essentially the same as a pre-med degree, which focus a ton on the sciences. So you got to do anatomy, physiology, biochem, organic chem, regular chem and then the killer a year of physics. And that's what just gave the foam roller to my rear end because I wasn't able to pass physics. First time I took it, I failed. Second time I got caught cheating, so they gave me an F. And the third time I got a C minus. I had a buddy who had all of the homework from the prior year and your homework was like 70% of the grade. So I got A's on all the homework, but then on the test I failed. So my professor was like we know you cheated, you had homework and we're going to fail you. I'm like shit, I'm trying to take it again. You can barely get a C minus in there. And so, unfortunately, I wasn't able to go to PT school. That really crushed me because that's why I wanted to go to Texas. If you know me, a lot of people think I'm from Texas, but it's because I'm mentally committed to going to Texas. The University of Baylor has one of the top 10 programs, as does USC, pittsburgh, iowa, washington and St Louis. Those are all top five 10 PT schools. And so I wanted to go to Baylor. I didn't like Baylor football, though I like Texas, and so I just kind of committed mentally, started watching Texas football. I knew I was going to get my DPT, so I was super excited about that. But then when I finished up my undergrad I had to take physics again. So I had my degree in kinesiology but I have to go back and take another year of physics. So I did. What you should never do is take a year off of school Because you're never going to go back.

Speaker 1: 2:57

I moved down to the Bay Area and I started training, enjoyed that and then got hired at Bank of America. And then when I got let go of Bank of America this was like five or six years into my training career I wanted to go back to PT school or get my physics done. But the undergrad prerequisites is you had to have them current within five years. So I would have had to go and take anatomy, physiology, chemistry, organic chem and regular chem and then a year of physics and I was just like I don't want to do this. I had all the internship requirements. They suggest it's like 500 or 1,000 hours. Don't quote me on that. It's been literally 20 years and so they may have updated it for the current requirements. But the more decorated your resume. I did a cardiac rehab internship. I volunteered all over the place.

Speaker 1: 3:46

I worked as a technician for numerous years, so my resume was literally flawless, minus that D in physics, and so that's always been my motivation, because that's like my dark, closet secret. It always kills me thinking I'm not good enough, I couldn't go to PT school. I'm a dumbass not smart enough. All these fuckers out here kicking ass with this physical therapist and I'm the dumb shit who couldn't make it. And I know other trainers have had similar stories. In a Dean Somerset he wanted to go to med school, but kind of similar. There's a class that he couldn't take or his grades weren't good enough. So it's awesome to hear these stories of people who weren't able to make it as a physical therapist because of the prerequisites, but then we've been able to have successful careers later on.

Speaker 1: 4:33

If you were to get accepted to PT school, you're looking at three years pretty much nonstop to get your now doctor to physical therapy. Back in the day, like in the early 2000s there were still some schools that had their masters not so much anymore which would be two years Pretty much. Every program out. There is three years, pretty much nonstop. And the big hang up with all of this is the amount of debt that you're going to accumulate If you were to go to USC. You're looking at close to 200,000.

Speaker 1: 5:03

I've done a lot of great podcasts with physical therapists and, as we are actively seeking a clinical director of physical therapy for our gyms as we continue to expand into new markets, I've really enjoyed having conversations and picking the brain of these therapists because the common denominator is I wouldn't go back and do it again, which I find is really interesting. I did one with Noah up in Canada and he's a physio and the process up there is significantly different. You don't have nearly as much debt. Did one with the golf physio in Australia same thing, not that much debt. I know Arash and I from the prehab guys have had that conversation. You're looking at a beginning salary on average about 69. And no, that's not one of my dad jokes, even though I got some really good ones recently. Why do you think I love gardening so much? Because I love getting down and dirty with my hose. Oh, that's a good one. I love seeing that smile my client's faces when I give him my daily dad joke.

Speaker 1: 6:03

$69,000, that's how much you're gonna make If you have a student debt of $200,000, pending on how long you spread that out. If you have $2,000 in student debt, you're making barely $6,500 per month. You're not living large, and so a lot of therapists will get into an insurance-based facility, whether if it's a hospital like Kaiser or some other type of insurance-based physical therapy clinic. You're going to be seeing 10, 15, 20 plus patients per day, and so the quality of the care is just not there, and it's easy to point a finger at our medical system. It is true it's not the best and we'll talk about the solution later on, but it's really challenging for these therapists to go out there and start making a lot of money because they're not given the tools in physical therapy school. Not much with business, not much with people skills. So you could be an amazing therapist. So if you try to start your own clinic and you don't have the business and people skills, you're going to fail. So what's your comfort zone? You go to one of these insurance companies and you start moving up the ladder. Your max may be like 125, something along those lines, and that's your comfort because you don't wanna leave that security. You're paying off your student loans, you have that nice monthly paycheck. You don't have to worry about any fluctuations in your pay. It's very consistent. And so that's really who I think should become a physical therapist people who like that comfort.

Speaker 1: 7:37

One of the biggest elephants in the room with personal training is the fact that there's not consistency. That's something that we're changing at. Show up fitness and we focus on our 60, 30, 10 split, because right now I would be screwed. I have a client who's leaving to Florida for a month and he is paying me a good amount of money training five times per week, and so if I depended solely on him and then he were to leave, see, I made 10,000 in January and then 9,000 in February, cause it's a little shorter of a month. Then we have that week in Valentine's Day, people take off, and now March, it shoots down to 3,000. Those fluctuations from high to low is not sustainable in a family setting. If you're a young hunk or hunkette, those fluctuations don't matter that much, cause you have nine roommates and you're eating fucking top ramen. But if you have a family, you need that sustainability and it lacks in the industry, something we're really focusing on with our level two and level three and four learning the business sides.

Speaker 1: 8:39

You have a stream of revenue. We're lucky at show up fitness. We have numerous streams of revenue coming in with our guides and our different levels and our in-person, our seminars, our swag that we're getting out there. Make sure to do your pull-ups, do your push-ups. Tag show up athletics. We're gonna be giving out a ton of free swag as we get the new line of clothes coming in. We have our leggings. We're gonna be getting more guy stuff. Four trainers by trainers. That is the tag line to show up athletics.

Speaker 1: 9:09

Listen to that podcast with the rim and I. He is my business partner and that all stemmed from him showing up and being a hungry entrepreneur. And the reason I did that little pitch right there is because in my book I talk about help, nick, and it applies to physical therapist as well. How badly do you wanna be successful? That aspect of therapy doesn't apply due to the comfort of the insurance aspect. So you have a monthly check coming in. You don't have that hunger to go out there and to be entrepreneurial one because of the fear you don't want to fail. And so your education is there. Looking the part doesn't really matter. You have the degree, and that's a conversation I've had with a lot of therapists. If you wanna crush it as a physical therapist, get jacked. Look at Dr Russon, look at everyone who I've interviewed, and I've interviewed over 20 therapists on this podcast. They're in great shape and they're doing really well independently. So if you don't have that look component, then it's gonna be a lot more challenging.

Speaker 1: 10:14

Personality is huge. Do you have the ability to network with people? Are you innovative? Are you concocting? Do you have the knowledge and the ability to build something from the ground up? That is something that is not taught. That entrepreneurial spirit isn't there, like it was 100, 200 years ago, where you had to be the sole provider and you had to count on yourself. Today, it's so easy just to depend on a company to pay you, and then you point a finger at big brother and say it's not fair to take all my money, point, point, victim, victim. Come on, life isn't supposed to be easy, but we strive for that comfort. A lot of us do. There's nothing wrong with it.

Speaker 1: 10:57

And so the question I get asked all the time should I become a therapist? And instead of saying it depends, I ask them why? Why do you want to do this To help people? Sure, you can help people as a personal trainer and you're not going to have that debt. Another common one I get is I want to be respected, and that one hurts, but it's also the most motivating factor, in my opinion, because trainers aren't respected. Dave was a trainer at Equinox and a cool story not cool, funny, not really but he was at a bar talking to a girl in Houston and they're hitting it off and she asked him what he did and he said he was a personal trainer. She put her beard down and walked away. Trainers aren't respected, rightfully.

Speaker 1: 11:39

So you read a fucking textbook. You don't have any hands-on learning. You want the respect of a physical therapist because they go to school and they're going through applied sciences at USC. You're dissecting cadavers and you understand movement to a degree that no one else does within reason. And then you have an internship. You're getting mentored by people in the profession. It's a respected career. Top 10 least respectful professions Personal training the joke in California.

Speaker 1: 12:11

You go to LA to become an actor. What do you do? You work at a bar, become a trainer or get into real estate, because that's what every person does on the side, because it's super easy to do. It's so hard to pass this NASA race. No shit. You read the whole entire fucking textbook. Be like me reading the Bible in Spanish, like I don't understand this. It's really difficult. And now I got to take a test on it. Cristobal no habla español, muy bueno. I'm going to fucking fail that. And then I'm going to say it's the hardest test in the world. But if I were to go to a tutor, if I were to immerse myself in the environment, guess what? I'm going to succeed. And so the funny thing that I hear from trainers they want to go and become a therapist. I ask them why? Because I want to be respected. Who gives a shit what people say? You're not respected because of the path you took.

Speaker 1: 13:03

So if you focus on the three fundamental aspects of becoming a medical professional, it's the trade. You go to med school. You got to go through the internship, the mentorship, all those grueling hours in the books. You can talk the part, the business side of it. You don't learn that anywhere else. You got to do it, you got to get into a mentorship or an internship, learning the business side, and you have to know people. And if you have the people skills, the business skills and the trade skills or, in layman's term, you look the part, you talk the part and you know the part you can absolutely fucking crush it as a trainer. When I say crush it, I'm not trying to be a tool or salesman, but I'm talking making $120 plus thousand dollars. And so the ironic thing is, if you go to PT school, nothing wrong with that, it's just very expensive and you're looking at starting out around 70,000. What is your cap? Maybe 125.

Speaker 1: 14:03

I know trainers who've gone through show up fitness in less than two years or making more than $150,000. We had a student recently, 14 months, making over 120,000, moved into management. Those are the stories you never hear of. In fact, we were just at Equinox yesterday and the manager said great question from one of the students, t, I believe, asked him If you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice. What would it be? And he said to learn programming, to come up with systems for programming. It took me five years and I smiled and said that's a great one, by my mind. I'm thinking what the fuck that is your competition. Nothing wrong with it. But that's exciting because if you want to be truly successful in this career as fitness or, even better, medical professional, you need to understand that stuff and that's what we teach you at show fitness. You don't learn that. Nasa, some ACE, issa they don't teach you how to program. Acsm they teach you a really good assessment, american College of Sports Medicine, coronary Arduous Disease risk stratification they have some cool stuff in there, but they don't teach you how to program. And SCA gives you a lot of great programming but they don't teach you the business skills or the people skills. When you have the pillars, you have the skills to learn. You will be extremely successful. And it's a huge pat To our back shelf and is because we have trainers going to equinox in lifetime.

Speaker 1: 15:29

These elite gyms were normally, as I put my book volume, to be out here very soon. Editing process. Amazon is taking care of it all in the back and excited, but just taking a lot longer than I thought. But in my first version, but also the second one, dean and Tony I don't know who it was, but they say Average trainers spend at least three to five years in the corporate setting, and that was true 20 years ago. But now, when you get the fundamentals trade skills, business skills, people skills you can go there for a year and get the same experience as someone who's been there for five years. We're expediting the process. It'll be like saying you have to go to med school, it's going to take you 10 years. A new program comes out and they make doctors better, more efficient in five. That's what we're doing at show fitness trainers are coming through and they're getting the confidence to go out there and leave these gyms, because the gyms aren't treating them well in the sense.

Speaker 1: 16:27

Only way you can make more is if you trade more of your life for money. One of the top trainers in the OC do almost 200 sessions per month. That's 50 per week, manageable for a couple months, maybe a couple years if you're younger, but not if you have a family. Not if you want to go and travel, because you take a couple of weeks off, you come back in your paychecks and it be a cut in half. And if you want to get security, what do you have to do? Go into management. And the irony when you look at the juxtaposition of a therapist and a trainer. Trainers get into the corporate setting. They don't like the fluctuation, so they get into management. It's almost the same thing with physical therapy they get out, they go to insurance company, they stay in their comfort zone. The ones who are doing really well with the cash based businesses they look the part, they talk the part, they're confident, they put skin in the game. They understand that the risk is going to be there, but the reward is going to outweigh that risk.

Speaker 1: 17:27

I come from a family with higher education. My dad's a PhD in psychology, his dad was a doctor, my mom has her masters, and so I always look at success and I base it off of degrees Not right or wrong, but that's just. You know, we're all fucked up from our parents. And so me not getting that DPT I always look at myself as a failure. But a couple moments in my life that really shed light on what we're doing here at Shelf Fitness. One of them was 2014 or 15 and I had a student who was going to USC getting his masters in business One of the top business schools in the nation and I took him out to the Sonoma wine bar, got some drinks and I said I want to pick your brain about what it's like at USC.

Speaker 1: 18:10

I want to go back to school and get my masters. Because I was at an ISSN conference and one of the doctors there was like oh, chris, you got to go back, get your masters. The more credentials you have, the better you're going to be respected more. So I was highly considering this at the time and he looked at me, said Chris, don't do it, because you know what my professors at USC are telling me, that I need to go and work.

Speaker 1: 18:31

For someone like you, someone who's doing it, the credential isn't going to do shit. You're actually in the trenches learning all about that as you go, and that's superior than to learn from a textbook with a bunch of fancy professors. It's not to knock higher education. I think that more of a should strive for it and not have that negative mindset and just pointing to a debt, debt, debt, debt. There's going to be debt. When you get a house, there's going to be debt. When you buy a car, there's going to be debt. Life is fucking debt. Get over it. If it gives you an opportunity to network with other people, that positive mindset is going to separate you from that victim mentality.

Speaker 1: 19:10

I got nothing against higher education, but that was a fork in my life where I was highly considering it and I chose not to Got back in the trenches, opened up another gym, learn from the mistakes of that gym. But then recently in the last year, I was at a party at the prehab guys. They had a million follower party. It was all physical therapy dpt's. So I show up with a $500 bottle of bourbon for Craig, mike and a rush and drop that sucker off.

Speaker 1: 19:37

I'm double fisting, walking around with whiskey, not able to fit in with a bunch of therapists and start chatting with them. And it was such a humbling experience because one I was one of the most jacked dudes there, but also everyone that I talked to. When I asked them about their business and where they want to be in a couple years, they said which therapy company do you work for? I said I know I own a gym here. That's how I met the Russian, the guys. They came and used it. If you look at them, the app that they have in the exercise library we still have a deal for that 300 bucks you get access to the app for a year in the exercise library for a year, which is normally like three, fifty or four hundred dollars. That app is monumental for your success as a trainer because it gets you into that realm of therapy and you can talk the talk and your clients will respect you a lot more.

Speaker 1: 20:24

But any whom I let them use our gym in Santa Monica, and so we've just constantly been working hand in hand, learning about their business model, our business model, and I love working out with a rush and picking his brain. I learned more from those guys than any textbook corrective exercise, bullshit, certification. You're learning from the people who are doing it, and so when I told these therapists that I have my own gym, like, oh man, that's awesome, that's what I want to do one day. I want to have my own clinic and I just started thinking like holy shit, like these therapists are looking up to me. How cool is that? I'm the one who's insecure because I didn't get my DPT. But I have these therapists now with two hundred three hundred thousand dollars in debt wishing to do something that I've already done and we're not even close to being done. We've just started and we've been doing it for 10 plus years. I'm so excited about the future and as we bring on more therapists, so our model is something I've taken from Arash's.

Speaker 1: 21:26

When working with expensive business coaches, I'm just kind of hiding in their coattails, taking information from them, what they're learning from their coaches and, like you, need to have a very, very strong hierarchy for your company who reports to who and you need to have meetings, but they need to be efficient. Especially today, I have all these entitled Gen Z, millennial fuckers, whatever they're called, and they're entitled. I even heard someone at the airport. I cracked up. I spit out my beer. I'm like, holy shit, I wish you could punch someone. I didn't, though, and the conversation between these two venting about their job is that they got on their boss because they didn't have an agenda for the meeting and they had the audacity to say you're wasting my time. So, therefore, I'm not going to be in this meeting. It's terrible. Today, you couldn't fire those fuckers because you get some lawsuit. It's like what have you done? Where's your skin in the game? You're about to learn from someone who's done and doing what you eventually want to do. The opportunity to be in their presence is enough. So shut the fuck up. I hate entitlement.

Speaker 1: 22:31

People today come in. They want to be making all this money from not doing shit. Or, even worse, you have the credentials and you don't put in the work you have to build your career capital. It's a constant learning game. Are there meetings that are stupid? Absolutely so. You need to have a purpose for them. I don't have agendas for our meetings. This is what we're going to talk about for 11th minute to the 13th minute. If you want to be structured like that, so be it. But if you came to one of my meetings, they're brainstorming sessions and we are thinking on how to become better problems that we have.

Speaker 1: 23:08

I've never once had a trainer or instructor say these meetings are pointless. Maybe they don't have the balls to tell me, but we're getting something out of it, and so I think it's really important to look and reflect on what you're doing with your time as an owner, as a manager. To have a meeting every single day for an hour, that's overkill. When you do have your meeting, have intent, get your message out there, have a plan of attack, have a plan of attack and then execute it. So when you hear that story I just told real quickly, you may be thinking I'm a dick, but what this individual wanted was literally a summary A to Z of what today's meeting was going to be about. And if you're working for a startup, it's not going to happen. You have to bootstrap it. You have to be thinking on the fly, innovative, fail fast so you can learn from the mistakes and implement a new strategy and keep on winning some shape or form that came from Mark Zuckerberg.

Speaker 1: 24:06

So, as I dial in the hierarchy, one of the positions I've been trying to fill for a long time is having a director of personal training and talking to people at Equinox and Lifetime. What I've learned and going to implement this is all on the record because it's a podcast, but it's off the record, not things I talk about openly. But what we're going to do is we tried having a trainer move into a trainer management position. Didn't work, so I constantly rack my head on who can fill that position, because it's getting the right people into the right places. If you have a great person but they're not in the right place, you're not going to succeed and it's not fair. So, as I've learned through the evolution of our company, a lot of things that I've designated or delegated to individuals didn't work and that's my fault. I have to take ownership for it and say I fucked up. I either didn't have a great onboarding process, I wasn't clear and communicated in my mind I'm thinking you're going to be like a mini Chris didn't work.

Speaker 1: 25:09

I like to give people the autonomy, but what I've learned from a rush is you can't do that in the beginning. You have to give people the structure. This is what needs to be done. Do it and then let them exceed your expectations. It's a great quote from famous general. I forget what it is, but don't tell people what to do. Have them do it and then exceed your expectations Something like that. But you need to then allow for them to restructure their days and their time to make it more efficient with innovation and their uniqueness.

Speaker 1: 25:42

So it just kind of hit me, interviewing all these therapists, that our head trainer needs to be a therapist, because the trainers will respect the therapist, because most of us want to become therapists. So imagine learning from a therapist as your boss. That's, in my opinion, the key to success for changing our healthcare system. You need to have boutique gyms with the right players on your team, the right people on your team who are educated. When I say educated, I mean having a shelf in a CPT because you're competent, you're able to regress progress, understand what a therapist is talking about. Can only imagine if you got some textbook trainer and put them in front of a couple of therapists. They're talking about external rotation or this is what the gemelis muscle does, and there's what the heck is that I don't know what's going on.

Speaker 1: 26:34

See, the average trainer isn't respected amongst medical professionals, like therapists, like doctors, like dietitians. So that's why they try to be a jack of all trades. That's also why so many fail, in my opinion, because they seek respect by getting more certifications, which don't get you respect. You need to be able to talk the talk with these medical professionals to gain their respect. So when you have a conversation with them and you're competent and you're not asking what's the rotator cuff or what is a sprain, what does that mean? Like inflammation. We got to drink this water that's alkaline because we're inflamed. Shut the fuck up. We don't know the basic sciences because they're not taught. So the medical professionals have the basic sciences, trainers don't. So they can't mesh. So then what do trainers do? They use their platform because they're jacked or they have a big ass and they say whatever the fuck they want to.

Speaker 1: 27:34

Freedom of speech is amazing, right, but today with social media, it sucks because it's censored. You have someone with a million followers who makes a claim this is bad for you because of whatever, and then someone comments and says actually, you're wrong. The whole debate argument comment section is stupid anyways. But what individuals are doing today in the fitness industry is you just block them. So you build up this army that's only loyal to what your words are, and the irony is we need to have more healthy conversations. It'd be like me blocking Nassim. I don't block anyone. I am open to conversations with anyone. I got blocked from the bozu ball guy because I challenged some of his stuff. What are your thoughts on the Eric Kressi 2006 study about unstable surface training? Oh, I'm offended because you're challenging me. I'm gonna block you. That's how pathetic fucking people are today. You offend them with some critical thoughts and what do they do? They block you.

Speaker 1: 28:36

There's a great post by the Daily Stoic. We were talking about it on Wednesday's book club call. If you haven't gotten those, come on. What are you doing? You got to show up. Make that brain of yours, which is so awesome, better Read more. We were talking about the Daily Stoic because Ryan Holiday's book is the book of the month. The obstacle is the way and we were going over a post that he did and it's perfect to what we're discussing right now.

Speaker 1: 29:00

It's not things that upset us, it's our judgments about things. It's really powerful. Another one he said I thought was great it's not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Holy shit, that suckers deep. Take a sip of that whiskey and let that set in. So we let things offend us, whereas I love sport, I'm competitive, I like team A, you like team B.

Speaker 1: 29:25

I say your team sucks. You say my team sucks. We laugh, we have a beer, we move on. We don't do that with fitness and nutrition. We get offended. People who are vegan hate everyone else. People who are carnivore hate everyone else. Let's just make fun of fucking vegetables and say they're going to kill you. Oh, everything's inflammatory. Because I was stressed out. I didn't sleep well, I was in a terrible relationship. I have mommy and daddy issues, but I took a magical green tea and this powder saved me. I'm now a gut expert. No, you don't understand shit. You need to surround yourself with an MD who is a gut expert and learn from them, and then you work with a dietitian, and you work with a therapist, and you surround yourself with the best fucking team imaginable, and that's how we're going to change the industry, and that's going to be the healthcare to get away from sick care. It's preventative medicine by creating the best teams, and what, ultimately, is going to continue to happen, though, is sustainability across the industries.

Speaker 1: 30:26

In medicine, in trainers, we are medical professionals, and if you don't think you are, look at your foundation for becoming a medical professional Internships, learning how to program on the fly, learning how to regress in progress, networking with other professionals. If that's not you, if you don't have a medical professional on your team therapist, doctor, dietitian you are not a medical professional. You're not even a fitness professional. You're an influencer, and I know that's going to get a lot of panties and jockstraps in the bundle, but that's what I do. I stir the bees nests because no one has the balls to talk about it.

Speaker 1: 31:08

We're over here talking about oh, look at this fucking overhead squad assessment. It's so great. Your client has an overactive adductor, undirective, wrong-boy, major. Yay, I'm a health performance specialist. Shut the fuck up. We need less stupidity like that and fear mongering. We need to teach our clients how to move properly and how to overcome injuries, instead of tackling every injury yourself. You say, hey, this month you're going to go meet with your therapist, because that's what we do here and I have a therapist on my team and you know your eating is really getting out of hand and I'm not a psychologist. I think it's going to be really great. You meet with our shrink or meet with the RD first, and then you have the referral process to a shrink. That's what the industry needs and that's how it's going to change and show up fitness. We're right there. You can come back and listen to this podcast when it happens, because that's what we're doing Creating qualified level one trainers, one CPT at a time.

Speaker 1: 32:05

Move into your level two. Own and learn nutrition, grow your business. Get into level three. Own programming to an advanced level, bio energetics Programming for elite athletes, and then prehab and rehab. That's working, with therapists being on the same level.

Speaker 1: 32:24

I can't even give you a percentage. In my opinion, how many trainers out there today couldn't have an educated, competent conversation with a dietitian or a therapist? And until we can do that, that's what we have to focus on. So, at the end of the day, if you want to become a therapist, go become a therapist. You can make a lot of money. You can help a ton of people. You're going to have the sustainability. You're going to get that paycheck, but you're going to be seeing a lot of patience. You're going to be doing a lot of paperwork as well. You're probably going to have that itch that you want to start your own thing, but you don't have the guts. You don't have the skin in the game to do it because of the fear. If you want to become a successful trainer, you absolutely can Focus on what we talked about Get into an internship, learn movement, anatomy programming, get the right team members on your team and you can be successful. The upper limit for success when it comes to therapy, I think we're monetarily discussing $150,000 unless you do it yourself. When it comes to training, it's significantly more than that. But you're going to have the ebbs and the flows. You're going to have great months. You're going to have low months until you figure out that second and third stream of revenue. If you need some help closing your assessments, if you need to own sales, a mentorship is what you need. I'm not talking about wasting $7,000 per month on some dipshit who's sitting in front of a Ferrari. Learn from the professional which environment you want to be in.

Speaker 1: 33:49

I have a lot of great podcasts with physical therapists and dieticians. Go listen to those. Let us know which one is your favorite. We're coming up on our 100th episode. Really love doing these and it's an event session for me. I train clients, I'm in the trenches, I have a business, we have gyms, we have the best certification in the world.

Speaker 1: 34:07

Yes, I'm a little biased, but the thing that really pisses me off is when I hear people say personal training is not a respected career. You can't make it as a trainer. That's why I'm doing these podcasts. That's why I'm getting it out there on the waves of the podcast bill, because if you've been told that that trainer is a fucking idiot and they don't know what they're talking about or they're just jealous because they weren't given the right opportunity, they got a bundle of bullshit and they wasted a ton of money and they wanted to be respected and help people, but they were never able to. And that's why we have our certification, because now those trainers who quit now probably real estate agents or bartenders. They have an opportunity to really grind it out with their hunger to become a successful trainer, and that's what we're doing. Remember y'all, having bigger biceps is better than small ones, and keep showing up.