From being an approachable person to having the knowledge needed to help clients thrive, there are many skills required to be a personal trainer.
Below, we break down the most important personal trainer skills, explaining which ones you’ll build during your course and which qualities you might already have that will help you thrive in the industry!
Contents:
- 9 Soft Skills Needed to Be a Personal Trainer
- 5 Hard Skills You’ll Learn During a Personal Trainer Course
- FAQ
While having the right skills is important, becoming a personal trainer also requires an accredited qualification! Learn more about personal training diploma or download our course prospectus now.
Soft vs Hard Personal Trainer Skills
The skills a personal trainer needs can be split into two categories – ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ skills.
Soft skills are generally personal attributes, character traits and qualities. They are mostly based on emotional intelligence rather than knowledge.
Hard skills are more concrete skills such as industry-specific knowledge and expertise. These skills are generally gained through practical experience, such as a personal trainer course or on-the-job training.
So, what skills do you need to be a personal trainer? The truth is that both are equally important!
Hard skills give you the technical knowledge to train clients safely and effectively, while soft skills help you motivate clients and build long-term relationships. The most successful personal trainers develop a strong balance of both.
Soft Skills Needed to Be a Personal Trainer
While these soft skills are essential for long-term success as a personal trainer, they aren’t entry requirements. Completing a quality personal trainer course and gaining hands-on experience in the industry will help you develop these qualities over time.
1. Motivating
Arguably one of the most important skills for a personal trainer is the ability to motivate your clients. After all, this is one of the main reasons that people decide to get a PT!
As a personal trainer, you should be able to see the potential in your client and push them to reach it. A good PT is fully invested in their client and wants to see them achieve their goals.
During a PT session, you should be confident enough to give words of encouragement to your client as they are performing the exercises. If they are close to giving up before the final rep, it is up to you to help them make that one last push! This is all part of having good personal trainer leadership skills.
As well as motivating your clients during a session, creating an interesting and dynamic programme for them is a surefire way to motivate them to carry on. If the programme is too easy, they will lose interest. But make it too difficult, and they could feel like they are failing. Finding a balance between the two is therefore a key skill of a personal trainer.
2. Empathy and Compassion
Perhaps two of the most overlooked personal trainer skills are empathy and compassion.
When people think of personal trainers, the stereotype is someone who just shouts at clients in the gym – but this couldn’t be further from the truth!
In fact, personal trainers should be sensitive to their client’s emotions and adapt their training style to each individual. This can be harder than it sounds, especially if you have lots of different clients in a single day.
For example, empathy is a good personal trainer skill to have if your client is struggling to complete a workout. Whilst it can be easy to put this down to lack of motivation or disinterest, a good PT should instead think about any other reasons that may be affecting your client’s performance. Is there something on their mind? Have they had a particularly stressful day at work?
Simply asking your client a few questions such as ‘how was your day?’ or ‘how are you feeling today?’ before you start a session is an easy way to demonstrate this personal trainer skill.
3. Communication
Personal trainer communication skills are essential for building a positive and trusting relationship with your existing clients, as well as attracting new ones.
Clear communication between you and your client is particularly important when guiding them through an exercise during a session. Although this can be shown by a demonstration, you should also provide verbal guidance whilst they are doing the exercise itself.
A good PT can explain even the most complicated of exercises in simple terms. This is a skill that simply requires practice, as well as personal trainer leadership skills.
Communication is just as much about listening as it is talking! An important aspect of personal trainer communication skills is the ability to listen to feedback from your client. For example, if they say that they are finding the programme too easy, you can then make the appropriate changes to make it more challenging.
A good PT should keep up communication outside of the gym too. Whether it’s arranging your next session or checking in with your client in-between sessions, it all contributes to maintaining a positive relationship with your client!
4. Positivity
One of the most important skills needed to be a personal trainer is positivity! Making your sessions a positive experience is an easy way to make sure that you are getting the most out of your clients.
As a personal trainer, your clients will feed off your positive energy. There will be times when they are feeling unmotivated or they are struggling with the programme, and having a positive and optimistic attitude is key for helping your client get through these times.
Essentially, if you are really passionate about fitness, this should come across to your clients. Positivity really is infectious!
5. Self-Development
As with any job, it can be easy to get set in your ways and get too comfortable. However, one of the most important qualities of a personal trainer is self-development.
Self-development is simply about wanting to progress and add new skills to your repertoire. This is not only beneficial on a personal level, but it also means that you can expand your client base to reach more niche clientele.
In the fitness industry, self-development is one of the best personal trainer resume skills you can have. As one of the fastest-changing sectors out there, employers will want to see how you are keeping up with the latest trends and changes in the industry.
The best way to practice self-development as a personal trainer is to add more skills and qualifications to your CV. For example, completing an advanced sports nutrition course or an obesity and weight management qualification can help you stand out and gain new skills.
6. Being Friendly And Approachable
As a public-facing role, being friendly and approachable is a particularly good personal trainer quality to have.
Many clients come to personal trainers because they are uncomfortable or inexperienced in a gym environment. So, the last thing they need is a personal trainer who is just as intimidating!
Your client should feel comfortable asking you questions about anything they don’t understand, no matter how obvious the answer may be.
This soft skill can be easily developed through your own self-development or from observing other personal trainers and how they interact with clients.
7. Commitment and reliability
Like any job, a personal trainer must be committed and reliable. This is especially the case if you are a freelance or self-employed personal trainer, as you essentially determine your own hours.
When you take on a client, you have a responsibility to always deliver only the best service to them. This means always turning up on time and giving your all to every single session.
A good personal trainer would encourage your client to commit to the training programme, so you need to practice what you preach!
For employers, commitment and reliability is one of the most important personal trainer skills they are looking for, as it determines how you will be as an employee. They may ask for references from your previous job to vouch for how reliable you are.
8. Creativity
When wondering ‘what skills does a personal trainer need?’, you might not have thought of creativity. But in fact, whilst it can be a very technical job, creativity is a good personal training quality to have.
When it comes to keeping your client engaged, having a creative and varied programme is a great way to do this. A good personal training session should achieve a balance of being fun and creative as well as effectively working towards your client’s goals. Check out our guide to how to plan a personal training session for more tips.
As well as making the sessions more enjoyable for your client, another reason why creativity is such a key skill for a personal trainer is that it helps you stand out as a business. If you are known as being a fun and creative PT, potential clients are much more likely to choose you than a PT who follows a more traditional teaching style.
Using social media as a personal trainer to express your creativity is a great way to build your brand, for example you could make content that incorporates graphic design, photos, videos, reviews and so much more. This ultimately helps to attract clients. In fact, having a strong social media presence is one of the best ways to stand out as a personal trainer.
9. Flexibility
Another important skill to have as a personal trainer is the ability to be flexible in terms of your working hours.
Personal trainers certainly do not have a conventional 9-5 working pattern. However, your clients probably do! You should therefore be prepared to meet clients early in the morning before work or late in the evening- and everything in between.
If you are employed by a gym, you may have more regular shifts, but they may still be during unsociable hours! Flexibility is therefore especially important if you are working as a freelance personal trainer.
In fact, the flexible nature of the job can actually be a great benefit of being a personal trainer. Since you are mostly in control of your own hours, you can schedule a long weekend or a midweek day off if you want to!
Hard Skill You’ll Learn During a Personal Trainer Course
Whilst the soft personal trainer skills we have discussed thus far are important, they are irrelevant unless they are backed up by in-depth knowledge in areas like programme design, client assessments, and an extensive knowledge of exercises.Â
You’ll develop hard skills through a Personal Training Diploma, where you’ll gain extensive knowledge across areas such as human anatomy, physiology, nutrition principles, how to deliver training sessions and more.
It’s important to compare personal training course providers as you’ll need to be trained to industry standards. Specifically, you’ll need to take factors such as course accreditation, how you’ll study and reviews from past students into account.Â
The best training providers will ensure you establish these hard skills, in order to set you up for future success:
 1. Client Assessment and Goal Setting
Learning how to conduct fitness assessments is one of the vital hard skills you’ll develop on a personal training course.Â
Here you’ll learn how to assess a client’s fitness levels and abilities, monitoring factors such as their body composition, cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength and flexibility.Â
The data collected from these assessments is incredibly valuable and can be used to set SMART fitness goals tailored to your clients’ specific needs and abilities.Â
Assessments aren’t just a one time thing either. While they are used when a client first signs up for your services to establish workout programmes and goals, they can also be implemented to track progress and develop future targets later down the line.
2. Programme Design
Arguably one of the most important skills required to be a personal trainer, if not the most important.Â
Programme design is one of your largest responsibilities as a personal trainer, as you’ll need to know how to create tailored workout plans that help clients achieve their specific goals – which will be established following their assessments.
When creating workout programmes, you’ll need to take into account several training variables, for example ask yourself questions such as: What workouts are my clients going to do to meet their goals? How frequently should they workout? What are their physical limitations? Should their eating habits also be changed to support their progress?Â
Even when creating general workout programmes for holistic goals like weight loss or muscle gain you’ll still need an in-depth understanding of how a client will reach this end point.Â
This is an example of the skills a Personal Training Diploma provides. With this course, you’ll develop a deep understanding of how to create custom programmes to meet a wide range of abilities and goals.
Without developing this personal trainer skill, you’ll find it incredibly difficult to be taken seriously in this profession, in fact many employers and clients won’t even consider you.
3. Health and Safety
As a personal trainer the health and safety of your clients should be your top priority. You are responsible for ensuring they don’t get hurt during the session or following any advice you provide.
This links back to programme design, as you’ll need a deep understanding of how to create safe workout plans that are suitable for a client’s abilities. For example, you wouldn’t ask someone to lift a heavy weight outside of their limitations, because that could result in an injury.
You also need to train clients to safely workout independently, without your supervision. This will ensure that they can remain on track towards their goals outside of your scheduled sessions.Â
When becoming a personal trainer you’ll learn key safety guidelines for training clients, including those in specialist populations like the elderly, children and vulnerable adults.Â
You should also understand potential environmental risks that the gym could pose, such as tripping hazards and damaged equipment to name a few. Learn more about this topic and how to combat any potential challenges with our full article on ‘How to Conduct a Personal Training Risk Assessment’.
4. Extensive Knowledge of Exercises
This one may sound obvious, but as a personal trainer you need to have an extensive knowledge of how to perform exercises safely, the benefits they impart, how frequently to do them, and any potential risks they could involve.Â
This is one of the most vital skills needed to be a personal trainer, as it affects all of the aforementioned points in this entire section.
Without extensive knowledge, you won’t be able to create effective workout programmes for your clients, offer alterations, provide feedback, conduct safety assessments, the list goes on and on.Â
In short, you won’t make a good personal trainer taking the time to actually learn about different types of exercise.
5. Marketing Skills
When questioning ‘what skills do you need to be a personal trainer?’, your first thought might not be marketing. But in fact, it is one of the most important aspects of being a PT.
Once you’ve developed extensive fitness knowledge, you need to know how to get clients as a personal trainer – to be simple, you need to develop marketing skills!
The term ‘marketing’ covers a lot of different areas, for example you could use social media as a personal trainer. Here you could post content like client testimonials, videos from your sessions, and workout tips to give prospective clients a sneak peak of your style of training.
Likewise, you could create a personal training website and utilise SEO and paid Google Ads to ensure your brand ranks favourably for phrases like ‘Personal Trainers in (Your Location).
That’s just scratching the surface, you could set up a Google Business profile, run ads on META, start a client referral scheme, or the old fashioned method of promoting via word of mouth. Check out our full article on ‘Personal Trainer Marketing Tips & Strategies’ for a detailed breakdown on how you
FAQs
What skills should I focus on developing during my personal trainer course?
During your personal training course you should prioritise developing your ‘hard skills’ such as how to conduct client assessments, the programme design process and advancing your knowledge of exercises. These will be covered by your tutors in-depth in order to prepare you for a career as a personal trainer.
What skills should I have before starting a personal trainer course?
You don’t technically need any prior skills to enrol on a Personal Training Diploma, as the course is entry level. During your course, you will develop the necessary skills to succeed in the industry, however, having a basic understanding of exercises and a passion for fitness will certainly help you get started.
What personal trainer skills should I list on my CV?
It’s essential to include your Level 3 Personal Training Qualification on your CV. This is the minimum requirement employers ask for and will signify to them you hold the necessary skills and knowledge to work for them. For more information on what to include, check out our article on ‘How to Write a Personal Trainer CV’.
How can I build specialist skills as a personal trainer?
Level 4 Personal Training courses will help to develop your specialist knowledge and skills in areas like sports nutrition, lower-back pain relief, weight management and more. These qualifications will advance your career by expanding upon the services you’re able to provide.
Before You Go!
If you think you have the skills to start a career in fitness, get started with our Personal Trainer Diploma! You can also download our free prospectus here for more information about all of our courses!
