Rethinking “Safe” Careers In Fitness

What if the “safe” healthcare career isn’t actually the smarter financial move?

In this episode, we break down the real numbers behind becoming a physical therapist versus a personal trainer. Tuition costs, certification timelines, starting salaries, raises, student loan interest, income caps, and long term take home pay.

We compare a $250,000 Doctor of Physical Therapy path (with 6.8% interest and $3,000 monthly loan payments) against a $1,500 personal training certification, and examine what happens over a ten year window when one career starts earning immediately and the other spends seven years in school.

This isn’t about bashing physical therapy. If you’re called to clinical rehab inside the healthcare system, PT can be the right choice. But if you care about speed to income, lower debt risk, transferable skills, and scalable opportunity, personal training deserves a serious look.

We also unpack:
• how raises actually work (not just on paper)
• why early income compounds harder than higher starting salaries
• realistic salary caps in both careers
• ownership, management, and online coaching paths
• the myth that personal training “isn’t a real career”

If this breakdown helped clarify your path, subscribe, share it with someone weighing these careers, and drop a comment telling us which route you’re choosing, and why.

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting Up The PT Vs Trainer Debate
• 0:40 Cost And Time: Schooling Vs Certification
• 2:38 Starting Salaries And Raise Structures
• 4:10 The Weight Of Student Loan Interest
• 6:20 Ten‑Year Take‑Home Comparison
• 8:10 Career Caps And Lifetime Earnings
• 9:50 Opportunity Vehicles And Advancement
• 12:05 Transferable Skills And Sunk Cost
• 13:40 Challenging The “Not A Career” Stigma
• 14:05 Closing Thoughts And Invitation

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Personal training truly could be a career. And a career here at Radifine Fitness because we're paying this. The skills you learn as a personal trainer are way more adaptable in the real world than it is for physical therapy. Physical therapy is gonna make you more money and is the more stable career. It's false.$250,000 it's gonna cost you to go to school to be a physical therapist. To the majority of people, personal training just isn't a career. Hello guys, and welcome to another episode of the Anthony Eamon Show. This is something that's always been top of mind for me when I have conversations with people. It's always, I'm gonna be a physical therapist, I wanna help people. Well, let's break down today what truly is the difference between becoming a physical therapist and becoming a personal training. All facts, no nonsense, let's dive into it. So as you see behind me on the board, we have two very distinct tracks: physical therapy, personal training. And I'm gonna break down all of these stats for you right now. Please feel free to proof me, check my math, but let's dive into it. So, first is debt. So, how much money does it cost you to become that specific thing? So, if you look in the personal training size, we go roughly$1,500 to get a NASM CPT. Obviously, there's one's a little cheaper, one's a little more expensive, but that's a good run-of-the-mill number. On the physical therapy side, this is where it gets complex. You have four years of undergrad and three years of a doctorate of physical therapy program. With average integrated costs for New York State SUNY schools, because that's where most people would end up going, you break it down to$25,000 per year for undergrad and then$50,000 per year for the doctorate of physical therapy program. And like again, this is with no scholarships, this is staying in state, going to a SUNY school, and it's including room and board because most people do have to live on campus, and obviously those things can be subject to change. Now, how long does TV to complete that specific certification or school? As we talked about with physical therapy, seven years. Personal training, a weekend, a month, three months at best to finish that course, depending on your knowledge inside of that. Great. Now we have a good baseline of what debt is gonna cost us. So all in debt of personal training is$1,500. All in debt of physical therapy,$25,000 times 4,$100,000,$50,000 times three,$150,000.$250,000 it's gonna cost you to go to school to be a physical therapist. So where do you start at? Because that's what everyone looks at. What is my starting salary? That's what matters most for me. Obviously, there's different career paths. You can go work for different hospitals, you can go work for small mom and pop. Personal training, same thing. You work for a big box, you can work for us. I'm gonna use our numbers because this is what I truly believe in. I try to convince people to work here at Redefined Fitness. So if you are interested in a job, here's the math about what we offer. Broke it down for you already. So physical therapies start at roughly$85,000 a year here in the lovely state of New York. Redefined fitness, we start you at$50,000. Every single person into baseline offer at$50,000 a year. Raises. I was talking to a couple of physical therapist friends I have. On average, they give you about a 5% year-in-year raise. For us, it's a little unique. Instead of ambiguous, here's a raise, just because it's the end of the year and you did a great job. We do 2% raises every single quarter based upon specific metrics we monitor and follow. So you can actually make your own path and get 2% raise every single quarter. So that would be 8% year on year. But we're gonna want to go in the world of realism and make people feel like it's possible. So the numbers calculated behind me, just for future references, are assuming you get two raises per year, and so you get two out of the four. Time frame we broke down, seven years, three months. The real killer something called interest or annual percentage rate, aka. When you go to school and the government loans you money, right? Because you're not paying cash for it, you gotta pay that back plus interest. Just that quarter of a million we talked about, you're paying 6.8% roughly on those student loans integrated out over 10 years. Absolutely wild. When you look at that number now and you look at the time frame you have to pay back your student loans, your monthly payments after you graduate are roughly$3,000 a month.$3,000 a month. That's$36,000 a year. Weird. So when you start to be a physical therapist, it's not$85,000. It's$85,000 minus the$36,000 that you're truly making, meaning you're now below where we start people here after you're finished, seven years is cool, and added all that debt associated. Student loans aren't forever though. Some must pay it off between 10 and 15 years, but for the first time frame, that's what you're looking at with your monthly payments. Now, total after 10 years. So we have rough numbers of what we're actually paying back included in interest. We're looking at$367,000 you're paying over a 10-year loan, which includes the interest payments. It shows you how important it is to track interest on specific things like credit cards or line of credits, all that stuff really important to look at. So you're paying an extra$167,000. Sorry,$100,000,$117,000 you're paying extra in interest on top of the student debt. Obviously, the personal training side zeroes across the board unless you take an interest loan out of$1,500, which don't do. Work for it, then pay it off. All right, now let's talk about pay. How much money are you netting profit after 10 years? We want to look in the long run, right? What's going to give us the most paying for our buck in the long run? What can I say? I made this amount of money off of this. So let's look 10 years out, right? So we're gonna assume not 10 years from graduating, 10 years starting from the point when you a person could start being a trainer. So if you pick that as your baseline, it's seven years of school and then three years of working for physical therapy, and then for personal training, it's straight 10 years of work. So when you break that out and we give the assumption that you're only getting two of these raises per year, we're making roughly$74,000 a year as personal training and making roughly$93,713 annually as a physical therapist. Now you start looking and you say, am I making more money as a physical therapist? No, we gotta deduct that crazy awesome student loan debt off of that amount of money. So that$36,000 deducted off of that, and you're way below. Now we're talking about take home. How much money you actually could take home after you pay out your loans, how much money is in that pocket of yours? I did this, full disclosure, pre-tax. So just note when you're looking at it, it's like that money's in my pocket. None of the government needs to take their share, federal, state, depends on where you live, depends if you're single, married, all that stuff. So take home after 10 years as a personal trainer, roughly$610,000. Take home for physical therapy,$77,000 after 10 years. Wow, we're really going off. All right, Anthony, but what about when I retire? Right? Think about retirement. Think about um done with work, I'm sipping a margarita on the beach. To me, that matters more than anything in the world because then I got my free time and I got my bills, and this was the route, or this is the route. Well, it gets a little harder to figure out the math, but let's look at some things we could talk about. Caps. What are caps? Realistically, the top 1% of earners in those industries get capped at a certain salary range. This isn't gonna be infinity of these races. You're eventually gonna come to a point and you're really not gonna make it more and you can hit that ceiling of working that job. Ceilings in both for physical therapy caps roughly$140,000 a year. Personal training caps roughly$130,000 a year. So it's not much of a difference when you're looking at cap rates. Now, when you integrate that over retirement age, so assuming you're 50 years from the point you started school to when you retire, or straight from working for personal training all the way through, what's take home in your pocket pre-taxes? Almost roughly the same. We got 5.90 million for the physical therapist side, and then 5.92 million on the personal training side. So what makes the most sense? Well, it depends. Where do you want to go? What's impactful to you? You can see the math. The argument stating that physical therapy is gonna make you more money and is the more stable career is false. It's flat out false. All those people and all those applicants that are going to college and putting in for a DPT program, they get a thousand applications on most schools and they accept 60 people. That's wild. So you're talking hundreds of people that don't even get the opportunity to go that route because they don't even understand that personal training truly could be a career, and a career here at redefined fitness, because we're paying this. I know this is true. I know what my employees are making. They're making a killing, doing great, helping people, and not getting suckered by the insurance companies, by the someone doctor that works for an insurance company saying, do this stupid work out when really the client needs a lot more work. We all know what I'm talking about. We won't break it on to another episode. Now, the real caveat difference is opportunity vehicles. What's an opportunity vehicle? Well, what's the next step, right? Sometimes people don't want to be a personal trainer forever. Sometimes you don't want to be a physical therapist forever. You can scale up the ladder, as we like to say. So, how is scalability on both ends? Let's talk the physical therapist route. Scalability, I gave it a medium rating, so like a five out of ten. Meaning you work your way up to like a clinician physical therapist, where you're running a team of physical therapists in a bigger hospital, you could probably make a hundred and eighty, two hundred thousand dollars a year. That is some type of scalability measure in working up the career line. The real money made inside of physical therapy is being an owner. There's not much opportunity outside of owning a practice of a physical therapist business than there is working your climate goes, you kind of capped right about there. Whereas the personal training side, this is where it gets interesting. For me, I try to hire from within. Opportunity vehicle here, scale up the ladder, just ask my fitness manager. He worked for me for eight months before he got promoted. Eight months. He went and almost doubled the salary, worked his way up. Fitness manager then goes to COO. COO, eventually you can run your own redefined fitness. I give my employees the opportunity to make a name for themselves here and grow. As we grow as a company and as the company starts expanding nationally, we need to fill holes. We need to fill regional, we need to fill directors, you can work your way up. Or let's say you don't want to work for redefined fitness, let's say you want to do your own thing. You can open your online coaching business, work from home, and make this kind of money. So doing it on your own, getting clients, filling workouts online, harder to do because there's a lot more competition. Or you could rent space inside a gym, work up your opportunity vehicle that way. Or you can work for these other gyms and fight to get more money per session and scale up that way. Point being, the skills you learn as a personal trainer are way more adaptable in the real world than it is for physical therapy. Like, think about this: working with a client on the floor, you're learning customer service, you're learning sales, you're learning operations. There's so many tactics you're learning on the floor and so many connections you're making with these people. Whereas physical therapy, because you have so much sunk cost into school, sunk cost meaning you feel like you spend so much time and effort doing it, you're not gonna deviate your skills and go off into something else. So truly I ask you, when thinking about a career, why is the first thought when it's in this realm, physical therapy over personal training? I have yet to be convinced that 90% of people should go the physical therapy route. I do agree, some people should go. Don't get me wrong, but this is never a thought. This is never talked about. To the majority of people, personal training just isn't a career. I've talked to some of my employees that made jokes that their parents, when they say, I want to be a personal train, they laughed at them because they were like, oh, that's not a career. That's your step-through job. This is something you're gonna do for now. Or when we interview employees here that all the time, well, this is my for now job. No, no, this is your forever job. This is where you're gonna stay, this is where we're gonna let you learn, this is where you're gonna grow, you're gonna adapt. It's gonna be amazing for you to come here. I wanted to just share this. I think it's super awesome to see comparatives like this. I am a numbers person if you guys haven't figured that out by now. So, if this is the kind of episode you like and you want to learn more stuff about this actual base, especially inside of this industry, please feel free to let's reach out and let us know. And I'll see you next week on the Anthony Eamon Show.