Why some personal trainers have confidence, and it has nothing to do with believing in their own programme

The short version

You have a product, and it is invisible. You cannot hand it over, you cannot put it on a shelf, and nobody can hold it up to the light. A programme gets judged on a feeling. Feelings are personal, which sounds like a problem until you realise you can learn to read them.

Key Takeaways

• A personal trainer's product is a programme, and it is invisible. It is rated on a feeling, not on anything tangible.
• If you are looking for one specific response from a client, it is not hard to see whether you are getting it.
• Focus on how confident you feel about what you wrote and you have no chance. That is the difference between the trainers who look sure of themselves and the ones who do not.

Your product cannot be seen

Every trainer sells the same shaped thing. A programme. It is not a physical object, it is an experience the client goes through and then judges on how it felt.

That is uncomfortable at first, because feelings are personal and you cannot control someone else's. But you can aim at one. When you know exactly which response you are going after in a session, you can look for it, and you can see whether you got it.

The trap

Here is where it goes wrong for a lot of people. You focus inward. Is my programme good enough? Do I look like I know what I am doing? Would a better trainer have written this?

While you are doing that, you are not watching the person in front of you. And they are the only source of the answer. Focus on yourself and how confident you are in the programme you have written, and you have no chance.

The other version of this is worse, and you will have seen it. The trainer who is so self-consumed, or just unaware, that they radiate confidence at other trainers in the gym while quietly losing clients. That is the same mistake pointing the other way.

What actually builds it

Three things, and all of them are learnable.

Knowing how to ask the questions that get you the information you actually need from a client, so your research has a target.

Knowing how to research like someone who is not a research scientist, so you get to the real facts without spending your life in papers.

Knowing how to construct a workout where the experience sits as high as the physical result. You can write the best programme in the world, but if the client does not come back, who cares.

Put those together and you have a platform to perform from. That is where the confidence comes from.

What to do next

The Fitness Programming Specialist is the FASTER course built on exactly this: learning to research properly, using it to challenge the passed-down systems the industry repeats without checking, and designing programming driven by experience as well as science. It is £1,800, taught with me directly, with free lifetime return access.

The PT Manager opens the day you sign up, so the programme you design has somewhere to live and something to measure it against.