'No Joining Fee'. The Fitness Industry Epic Fail.

Fourteen years ago the first health club I worked for had a leaflet offering 'no joining fee'. Last week I got a leaflet through my door from Virgin Active, and guess what the offer was, yep, 'no joining fee'. In over a decade the fitness industry hasn't moved on, its still churning out the same unimaginative, trite messages that have been proven to not work.

Even a company like Virgin Active that must have whole teams of marketing personnel and more money to spend than the average club regurgitates and persists with a failed strategy.

In this article, I'll look at what the fitness got wrong and continues to get wrong and may be come up with a few answers and suggestions for a better way. I don't pretend to have all the answers, but there just might be a better way.

(Note: this is a long post, if you don't feel like reading the whole thing, I've done a handy summary at the end, though you will miss out on some top notch info and references).

Why is there a joining fee in the first place?

Whether you call it a joining fee, an admin fee, a starter fee or whatever, most clubs which contract you in can't come up with a good reason why they have one. Probably twelve years ago, no joining fee offers seemed like good value to the public and consumers. The industry was still expanding, everyone was following more or less the same health club model and it seemed there was money to be made.

The joining fee is no more than a sales tool now, the public got wise to it. Joining fees and price presentations are the tactics of double glazing salesmen ten years ago. Everyone now knows that as soon as the sales advisor/person/ manager panics about not meeting their sales target for the month there will be a no joining fee offer. Sure enough, last weekend of the month, the offer banner will go up, no joining fee weekend, the text messages will go out to the prospects, a few people will join and the cycle will begin again.

Here's, the first thing the fitness industry can do now. Have transparent pricing. Have faith in your product and pricing. Stop discounting. If people know you discount, they will wait until you discount to join.

These days, everyone is fond of using Apple as a model for success (unless you happen to be one of the people working in their Chinese factory, then you probably don't feel so great about it, see here ). So throughout this article, I will post the question every so often, what would Steve Jobs do? Well, firstly, as you've probably noticed, Apple rarely discount products, ever. Their products aren't cheap to begin with, and often cost much more than their rivals products, but they still don't discount, because they have faith in the quality of their product.

If the customer wants your product, then price will not be the barrier.

Never forget Steve Jobs also came up with the $10,000 folly that was the Apple Lisa

Transparent Pricing

In a recent Fit Pro business (fitness trade magazine) article a company that does mystery phone calls said that the number of calls being answered in 5 rings or less was down to 60% and worst of all, most operators were committing the cardinal sin of telling the enquiry the price over the phone. In the same magazine, the open comment article says that the fitness industry's market penetration is still only 10%. And in the Editors commentary we find out that management expert Nic Jarvis believes a customer-centric approach will be the next big thing (hang on, no one thought we should be customer-centric before-hand?!)

Anyone, see the disconnect here? We treat our product like a secret organisation, putting up barriers. Oh, you actually want to know how much our gym costs? Oh, we couldn't possibly do that, we have to get one of special Sales Advisor guides to show you the secret room first, the secret room full of machines.

Obscure film reference: on the way to the room in the zone in Stalker, when they get there the room is a cardio theatre

You can go online now and buy just about everything, whether it be Amazon, or booking a holiday or hotel, the price of the product is there and plain to see. But for some reason, the fitness industry is still appallingly bad at this. (It also still thinks phone call mystery shops are valid, when most customers go to the internet first or come into the club, in fact, the only people who really enquire by phone anymore are mystery shoppers!).It was only a few years ago that some of the budget clubs changed the game, by giving customers the opportunity to join online and by actually stating what the price was. Despite this, very few health clubs or gyms actually show you what their prices are on their website, and even fewer allow you to actually part with your cash and join online.

In his book Winning, Jack Welch outlines the key behaviours of a company called Bank One (who lets face it are probably owned by the tax payer now, but the statement still holds true)

"Always look for ways to make it easier to do business with us"

 If you think about the fitness sector, we actually make it very hard to do business with us. In most cases, you can't join online, no one will tell you the price unless you book a secret tour of the special room of machines. And even if you do turn up to have a look at the gym , there's no guarantee that anyone will actually let you look at it. For example, me and my colleague tried to mystery shop a Virgin Active in the city of London, except we weren't actually allowed to see the club. We were told by the receptionist, that the sales advisor was in a meeting (no doubt discussing with his area manager how he was smashing targets but still needed to do a no joining fee offer that weekend) and couldn't show us around. Could anyone else show us around? No. that was a negative, no one else had the magical powers to say 'look. here's a treadmill'. Could we just go and have a look ourselves, again, that was a negative, there was no way we could be let into the secret citadel without a sales guide, what the hell were we thinking?! Now, if I was a real customer I would have probably gone and joined Bannatynes down the road, because at least they gave us a tour. However, at Bannatynes, the sales advisor had taken the museum tour concept to a whole new level, at one point he said 'here is a water fountain'. Thanks buddy, good to know that my £60 a month entitles me to some tap water. It might be owned by a dragon, but it doesn't mean they are any better than the usual suspects.

Most of the public don't consume our product and don't want our product, and yet, when they do, we actually make it hard for them to do business with us.

We must put ourselves in the mindset of potential customers. I find it very hard to imagine what it would be like to walk into a gym for the very first time, because I do it all the time. So I have to think of a scenario where I wasn't comfortable. I have been to Selfridges on Oxford St in London but once, if you've never had the misfortunes to go into Selfridges or Primark on Oxford St its like a cross between a shopping mall, Bladerunner and the Tokyo subway, in short I wanted to get the hell out of there, stat. And that's exactly how most of the public feel when they enter a gym.

You don't have to be a Six Sigma black belt like Jack Donaghy to figure this stuff out

Most high end health clubs are rubbish, in fact, 99% are.

Most high end gyms are crap. You pay £80-100 for one crappy program written by a guy making minimum wage, and despite the fact you are already paying £100 a month, they try and sell you personal training immediately, and if you're not interested you are persona non grata, just waiting for your 12 month contract to end, so you can leave, join somewhere else and get treated exactly the same all over again.

Don't be fooled into thinking higher price means better service, the fitness industry doesn't work this way. In the same way that the most exclusive clubs don't necessarily have trainers any better qualified than the guy working with his clients in the local park.

But don't worry, at least you get to have Molton Brown when you use the showers.

And nearly all health clubs have followed the big room full of machines model...

All watched over by machines of loving grace

Okay, Adam Curtis didn't have treadmills in mind, but you get the idea

This paradigm was set in the 1990's, and for the commercial fitness industry it hasn't changed that much. Get a room and fill it with cardio machines, and some resistance machines, and minimal free weights. Hopefully this will attract the 'right type' of clientele. This is also a minimal coaching model, because you don't need much coaching ability to show someone how to press quick start on a bike, therefore the company then saves money by paying staff minimal amounts because you don't need a strength and conditioning coach to be in the gym making sure people do something that might actually work.

I've been to a few brand new facilities, and they still get the model the wrong way round. Rather than thinking what does the customer need, and then choosing the equipment and then designing the appropriate space for this need; they still get a big room and see how many bits of kit they can fit in it. These facilities have had impressive swimming pools, and tennis courts and studios but the gym space was poorly designed; still almost an afterthought in terms of layout, size and flow. Just the usual depressing regimented rows of machines.

What would Steve Jobs do then?

In another article entitled Think Different in the Apr/May/Jun 2012 Fit Pro business magazine a guy called Derek Barton rightly states

"The health club industry has not figured out how to deal with the fact most people don't want its memberships. Even when people do join, many don't come back after 30 days."

But then in saying what he thinks Apple would do I think he misses the point. Barton thinks that Apple would build fantastic, cool, easy to use gym equipment that would attract people. He confuses the equipment with the product. Yes, Apple do control all aspects of their product from the machines, to the software to the Apple stores they are sold in. But, they don't control the music of the musicians that go on the ipod, and the computers used at Pixar were just a tool so a creative vision of film making could be realised. In the fitness industry, the machines and the equipment are just the tools.

If we followed this idea, then why don't Life Fitness and Technogym open their own gyms?

They already build the machines. And to be honest, if walking along on a treadmill while playing sudoku is your thing then they have done a pretty good job. (And don't get me wrong, some people want to come to the gym and plug in and watch TV while doing 40 minutes of cardio). Current cardio machines have touch screens, and TVs, and games, and ipod docking stations and internet connection. They've ticked all the boxes.

Probably, the main reason that Technogym and Life Fitness don't open their own gyms is that they are not stupid. Operating a health club is low margin business. The current Technogym top of the range treadmill costs over £11,000 off the shelf without discount, even with a 50% discount, that's a £5000 piece of hardware. A large chain gym can have 20-40 treadmills, so spending over £100,000 on treadmills alone is not uncommon. Set up costs are high, and margins are low in this business model.

Room full of treadmills: That's a 100 grands worth of treadmills right there

 And for a while everyone was happy

When the health club expansion first happened everyone happy, the equipment companies were selling warehouses full of machines, the clubs got to fill their big rooms with a cornucopia of machines to dazzle the public with, and the public got to do their 20-30 minutess of steady state aerobic exercise that everyone had told them to do. The clubs got to control the flow of people in their big rooms,, if someone is on a cardio machine for 20 minutes and the another one for 10 minutess and then another, there is a perceived value to the experience because of the length of time in the gym. Whereas no club was ever going to buy 20 latpulldowns or 15 chest press machines, that would be ridiculous. If members only did the weights circuit workout they were recommended they would be in and out in less than 20 minutess, no perceived value; also too much queuing for the resistance machines if that was emphasised. As resistance machines were built along the lines of one machine for one body part. Unless you were a serious weight trainer then it was all about the body part splits.

Cardio machine, fat loss machine, ab machine & conditioning machine for less than £50

But then, the health clubs became unsure of themselves. They weren't get anymore members and some of the big ones closed down or got taken over. And the companies didn't know oif they were giving the public what they wanted or what they needed, but they couldn't change. And the members of the public who had grown up in the health club boom and had always been told that they needed to do cardio, and lots of it, and you needed machines, and resistance machines too. And the disconnect happened, the public wanted health clubs with machines because it had always been so, and the health clubs kept building them. 

Because the health clubs had become confused, they had turned into showrooms for Technogym, Life Fitness, Cybex, Precor and all the others. The instructors were merely custodians, pointing the public to the best machines for their aerobic workout or their chest day.

Strength machine. Unlike a resistance machines that costs £3000, this one can do multiple things, but it takes up a lot less space in the big room, so the room may look a bit bare, but hey, maybe people could run up and down in the room

The machines weren't inherently bad, they were after all just machines, they more or less did what they said they would do, but the cult was over.


The members, in general, weren't getting results. And like many things in the 21st Century the industry started to fragment, and smaller PT gyms opened, and some people were getting results and they didn't have any equipment and some of them didn't even have a room. The old paradigm was starting to falter.

However, in recent years a couple of examples have shown that another paradigm is possible. British Military Fitness and other bootcamps have shown that people are willing to pay to train when in fact you have no equipment and you don't even have a gym space. (see my thoughts on bootcamps here). Zumba, has done the same, the instructors and the public realised that they didn't need to work in a gym or join a gym, all you needed was a big village hall and some music. Overheads are basically zero, and you target a specific market.

Don't try and be all things to all people

Health clubs have tried to be all things to all people, and in essence have failed to do this. Yes, there is a wide price spectrum, but you can write the mission statement for all of them by re-arranging the following words 'fitness, fun, family, service, customer focused, flexible, personal, blah blah', its all generic and doesn't mean anything in reality. In trying to attract everyone, they weren't really sure who they were attracting.

They have to attract as many people as possible, because they've got a problem,  the set up cost is high, running a facility with swimming pools and saunas and steams rooms costs a fortune, and people keep leaving.

I think it was Mark Rippetoe who said this industry doesn't make money. If you open a power-lifting, olympic weight lifting, hard core lifting facility, even in a relatively large town there won't be enough people to support the business. And in a small town it will be you and 10 of your friends lifting weights, while your business leaks money. Rippetoe says, you need that person who comes in and pays there dues every month, may be you don't like the fact that they just sit on a bike or stroll away on a treadmill, but at least they are doing something unlike most people, and they are paying for the business. Large commerical facilities rely on this idea to a much greater extent.

Both LA Fitness and Fitness First have garnered a lot of bad publicity recently in the UK via twitter, print media (see here) and TV because they make it hard for people to break contracts. This moment has been a long time coming, the sales and contract procedures in the fitness industry are so amateurish and poorly thought out I'm surprised it took this long. But the companies need these contracts, because they know most people are going to drop out, they need to compel you to keep paying.

And other sectors don't get the same level of bad publicity for a simple reason, because people perceive they need the product, that 2 year mobile phone contract, it's open to fat and lazy as well as fit and motivated people. Mobile phones, and ipads attract all types of people, and even when people lose their job they still perceive their phone and internet connection as essential.

But there are lots of other products that have to position themselves in the market place. This is why using Apple as a model is mistaken, because in many ways it is an anomaly. All types of social groups, demographics, and income groups are willing to part money for an iphone or ipad. But not all business work like this.

Positioning - Commit to a proposition 100%

All sorts of business have a specific focus, newspapers for example, all aim at specific markets, and newspapers that try to be all things to all people generally fail. Supermarkets, whether it be Asda or Waitrose have specific customers in mind, as do car manufacturers (this doesn't mean that all these business are successful or that they have a quality product).

But the fitness industry, as stated earlier is a bit more generic, a bit less sure of itself. You're just as likely to find a business man in the budget club as you are in David Lloyd.

Much is made of customer service in fitness, but little is done about it. Ritz Calton is always used as an example, because I guess they do have exceptional customer service, which you pay for. But what if your gym is the equivalent of Travel Lodge or Premier Inn, stop trying to be Ritz- Calton when you obviously aren't.

Budget Clubs brought this model to the table. If all you do is go to a room and get on some machines, why pay £80 a month, why not pay £10 month to walk on a treadmill. Or, to take it to its logical conclusions, why not just go for a walk for free outside.

A statistic I recently heard was that 40% of all budget gym users have never used a gym before. Spending £10 a month is a low risk option. As my colleague, Nick, pointed out though, this means 60% of all budget gym users have been to a gym before. For whatever reason the rest of the industry failed them. It wasn't good enough.

'Churn' is common industry term. With few new customers buying the product, most customers are churning between clubs, dropping out, re-joining, dropping out, re-joining.

Health Club Management magazine in a recent issue stated that the most common complaint in the industry was to do with cleanliness. There are two schools of thought on this, either 1) Health clubs really are a health hazard, and people fearing for their lives leave or 2) The member didn't get the results they wanted, needed to get out of a contract, needed to justify why they were leaving and cited cleaning as the reason.

At a recent workshop I was at, the presenter did say something that struck me that most of the industry doesn't do, and that is, have a proposition and then commit to it 100%

Crossfit & budget clubs

Budget clubs have committed to their proposition. And another example is crossfit. Regardless of what you may think about their training methods, they have stuck to their guns and their model. They have thrived on the hardcore image, they have recently garnered features in the British national press. Even things that would be considered to be bad publicity, like the mythical 'Rhabdomyolysis', have been used to create an aura around crossfit and attract people. They haven't tried to be all things to all people.

They found a niche, and now Reebok have jumped on board as well, because crossfit has differentiated itself.

The golden fleece of weight loss

Quite a few people in the industry have been talking about weight loss and how we need to tap into that market. Most people join a health club for weight loss, which the health club normally fails to help them with (normally because as the research shows, for people with a lot of weight to lose, exercise doesn't make much difference, its about what they eat and non exercise energy expenditure in everyday life).

The fitness industry wants to tap into the weight loss market of weight watchers, slimmers world and their ilk, but it still hasn't done it convincingly. The reasons are cultural, as much as they are about the product. I'm sure weight watchers have the same level of churn as health clubs, they just haven't spent £500,000 on a room full of equipment as well. Continuous government campaigns like Change 4 Life, don't seem to have made much of a dent on peoples activity levels or nutritional habits.

The weight loss market is the golden ticket, but the hardest to attract it seems. Could it be that most people are just lazy? Are we wasting our time with it?

GP/ Exercise Referral - a case study

You would think that people who had been referred to exercise by their GP would stick with it, but their drop out rates are the same as everyone else, despite the fact that they are more closely monitored than most other gym members and pay less (Orrow et al, BMJ, 2012).

So even though these people might have high blood pressure, or diabetes or heart disease and they will literally die if they don't start exercising and change their lifestyle, most of them fail to do so. If you can't motivate this group, what chance do you have with the average weight loss client. Now, a lot of these GP referral clients say they can't afford the gym, and as much as I want to believe they are hula-hooping in the back garden with their kids or going for a country hike like a Change 4 Life advert, lets face it, they're probably sitting on their arse eating a pizza.

So could it be time to focus on segments of the population who you can actually affect change with, rather than spending a lot of time and money trying to attract people who will drop out almost as soon as they started. After all, this is a business that has to make money, its not a public service.

Steve Jobs was right- but this is health & fitness - so think different

The fitness industry has been scrambling around trying to please customers. Steve Jobs, didn't believe in market research - 'because customers don't know what they want until we've shown them'. (Of course, Steve Jobs never went to a gym either, he went for a walk instead).

No customer ever asked for an iphone or a kettlebell or a TRX.

We must break the current paradigm, smash it and find a new one that works.

An integrated gym model, where the customer experience flows effortlessly from purchasing the product, to booking their first appointment, to their first entry into the club, their first encounter at reception and their first meeting with a fitness coach. And it should flow spatially once they enter the facility, they should never feel lost or intimidated. The product should make sense to them immediately both in its spatial layout and their experience and the results they will get from it.

The idea of an integrated product is an Apple stalwart. And one that can be applied to the fitness industry. Yes, in computing it does have its drawbacks (and for the record, I don't own any Apple products, but man-alive I want an ipad, damn, that marketing really does work!), but in the fitness business it makes perfect sense. And the final quote from Jobs

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."

In Summary

If you made it this far, well done. This was a lot longer than I expected. If you just skipped from the beginning, these are the key take home points

Integrated gym model

• product driven, not sales driven
• build a results based gym
• transparent pricing
• make it easier to do business with us
• commit to a proposition and stick to 100%
• don't try and be all things to all people
• customers want experts to do things for them, so they can focus on other things, offer three levels of product 1) program writing 2)small group training 3) personal training
• have faith in your price and your product
• stop discounting
• yes, customers want someone to talk to but they all also want someone who knows what they are talking about
• its not about the machines
• its about behaviour change
• its about coaching
• use space wisely
• break the current paradigm

So that's that,  and if anyone from Fit Pro Business or Health Club Management magazine is reading, you can have this for free.

Do I have all the answers? No. But it's a start.

Sarah Lund: You don't need to be a detective to figure this out, so why hasn't any big fitness company?

References
Steve Jobs by Walter Issacson
Winning by Jack Welch
Fit Pro Business Magazine Apr/May.Jun 2012, Various articles & editorials, Fitpro.com
Orrow et al, Effectiveness of physical activity promotion based in primary care, BMJ 2012:344:e1389
Health Club Management Magazine
30 Rock Season 5

Qualifications once the golden rule are now just pieces of paper*

Interlude

Where have I been? In the fitness wilderness, living on protein shakes, intermittent fasting while perfecting power club Kata's. No, In reality I've been busy & lazy simultaneously, so this is my first real article of 2012. It's been a long time coming, so without further ado, here we go.

Fitness Qualifications

This is about fitness qualifications in the UK, if you live outside the UK I have no idea how it works, but having read quite a few American commentaries on their fitness industry, it seems pretty similar.

In the last year I've seen a lot of CVs and application forms from people applying for fitness instructor jobs, studio instructor roles and more recently apprenticeships (finding an apprentice is no where near as exciting as Alan Sugar and Donald 'this really is my hair' Trump make out).

There are a whole host of qualifications including degree level sports science, and I've seen people with degrees in sports coaching and even degrees in personal training. There are level 2, level 3, level 4 qualifications, NVQs, BTECS and all sorts of names I don't profess to understand. Most vocational fitness qualifications are also recognised by an organisation called the Register of Exercise Professionals (REPs, more on this later). There are universities, awarding bodies, Active IQ (whatever that is), private companies, government funded schemes and probably about a million other pathways I don't even know about. In a word, its confusing out there.

So what is the best course to do? What is the best route to take without going bankrupt? And are any of these qualifications worth a damn?

Hard Times

One thing I can say, is the job market must be tough out there, I have received application forms for apprenticeships from people with degrees in sports science and PE (No, they can't do it, they're over qualified) as well as people who have level 2 fitness instructor and level 3 personal trainer qualifications. For another job, a part time fitness instructor there were over 50 application initially, all of which had a recognised qualification. There used to be a time, when you received applications on spec from people with no qualifications, but all of these people had an industry recognised qualification.

This means there are a lot of people applying for a small number of jobs, there are a lot of people with the paper qualifications, and there are a lot of companies churning out people with fitness qualifications.

Certificate = just a piece of paper

As well as seeing all these application forms, I have had the chance to assess the practical skills of candidates with all these different qualifications. And in a word it was disappointing, it didn't matter if they were level 2 or 3 or had a personal training degree, when asked to write an exercise program they were all equal in their lack of imagination. And I don't want to be harsh to the individuals involved, I don't expect people to turn up being fully fledged coaching experts, and after all most were just doing what they had been taught or what they thought was expected of them in a gym setting. It seems, programming hadn't moved on in the 14 years or so since I was first qualified. Regardless, of which imaginary client I gave them, whether it be an old person, a young person, a fit person, unfit, back pain, 99% of the programs were uniform in the template they followed: cardio warm up, static stretching (some rare dynamic stretching), more cardio, some more cardio, machine weights, 3x10, some more cardio, swiss ball crunch and static stretch to follow. Ok, it wasn't 'wrong' as such, but no one thought about doing 5x5, or 10x3 or free weights, or mobility/ activation drills, or not giving the person with back pain crunches. Its not as if this information isn't readily available on the internet or in book form! The average well informed gym user could probably write a better program.

To paraphrase Alwyn Cosgrove, someone comes to us and wants to lose weight, what do we do? Cardio & weights. Someone comes to us and wants to get fit, improve body composition, increase muscle, what do we give them? Cardio & weights. There has to be a bit more specificity, surely?

It also seems practical coaching skills or basic movements really don't feature much in these courses. Asking for a demo of a deadlift, or squat, or press and to coach a client was painful to watch in some cases, it was obviously the first time some of these fitness professional had attempted these movements.

Now there is a school of thought, that says, you can teach the practical skills later and the most important thing is the ability to interact with people. Which is true to a certain extent, but when you do encounter that person with back pain, or someone with real goals it's a good idea to have a vague idea of what to do. Yes, you need to be able to motivate but you also need to have the practical skill and coaching 'eye' to see how someone needs to fix their squat.

Level 2 - write down what you already know

A few people I know recently did their level 3 qualification, but they had to do their level 2 again with the training company they were using. It was following an NVQ model, which as far as I can tell, involves writing down what you already know and what you already do, so you don't have to actually learn anything new, or read anything, you're already doing the job, just write it down and get a qualification. I don't know if this is a uniquely British type of qualification. They also had to answer such questions as what do you do and who do you call in the event of a first aid, what is the procedure after an accident. All useful things to know, but the type of things a company has to tell you anyway on the first day of the job, and doesn't really help you when confronted with the obese guy with a knee injury.

So that's level 2.

Level 3

Level 3 really take it to the next level. A former employee of mine was completing her level 3 qualification last year, when I asked her how the course was going, she looked somewhat disappointed. They had been taught how to do advanced techniques like body part splits, giant sets & tr-sets. As she rightly said, this is not how I train or the women who come to me to get fit, lose weight and 'get toned' want to train. I asked if they had covered anything else like mobility drills, or total body movements, metabolic conditioning, 10x3, EDT. The answer was 'no', the advanced personal trainer course had managed to combine some crazy 'functional training'  and had lifted most of their syllabus from a 1997 issue of Flex magazine.

Level 3 personal training courses use this as a reference, but you don't even get to look at the fitness model centre fold to distract you from the poor information

So again, despite the shear wealth of information out there on training methods, even down to realising that muscle hypertrophy maybe doesn't just occur in the 8-12 rep range, the average fitness qualification will stick with some 'broscience' rather than the evidence.

Level 3 specialist courses

Now you're fully qualified its time to specialise. Exercise/GP referral is one route. I did this course quite a few years ago. The first thing you'll notice on these courses, is that there are very few people from the private sector or self employed personal trainers attending them, nearly everyone works in local authority or leisure trust centres. As these are the only real business's that have exercise referral schemes.

When I attended this course quite a few years ago now, we covered a myriad of conditions. First things first though, we went through the karvonen method of heart rate percentages, then onto working out V02 max percentages, then onto all the medications that people can take that render these heart rate methods inaccurate and worthless, then onto the Borg RPE scale (like an old friend for anyone who has attended any fitness course). Then onto the stages of change, and readiness for change model - which is pretty much useless for anyone working in a gym. And then onto the guidelines for all the conditions, which I can summarise in one line 'do an extended warm up, do some more cardio, do a weights circuit using 8-12 reps following ACSM guidelines, use RPE scale'.

This works fine for your average deconditioned client with anxiety, depression, or hypertension - you can't go wrong if you use common sense. Then you start getting referrals of people with knee replacements, hip replacements and you realise that course wasn't worth a damn. Where was the practical info on how to get people mobile again, to strengthen their hips, get them out of a chair and walking. It wasn't there, you had to go find it yourself.

Again, there is a school of thought, that I have seen quite a few physios subscribe to, that any movement and exercise is equally valid if it gets people moving. Tell that to the cardiac client who can do 40 minutes on the recline bike but still can't get out of a chair without struggling and getting out of breath.

At this point, you start abandoning official fitness courses and go looking elsewhere for the answers.

Level 4 and beyond

I have done two level 4 courses, one for exercise for lower back pain management and one for exercise for stroke.

The back pain was somewhat farcical. The course text was Stuart McGill's book Lower Back Pain Disorders, which I had read before attending the course. It turns out the physio taking the course hadn't read the book. First there was a question paper, where me and my colleague (Nick 'contest ready' Heasman) both had the same question marked 'incorrect' by the physio tutor, in fact we had got the question right (what provides the core with hoop strength? Rectus Abs or transversus? You decide) and the physio was wrong.

Secondly, when demonstrating the bird dog, the physio told us to hollow and pull our abs in, when I asked why we weren't bracing like the course text said, it turns out the tutor hadn't read the text, and gave the usual blah answer that I can't even recall it was so absurd. We then learnt some useful things like, playing bingo (I kid you not, forward flexion intolerant, don't worry a game of bingo will make you feel better) to help people overcome the psycho-social aspects of back pain (tell that to an athlete trying to get on the field or the young mother with kids) and then the usual 'cop out' of its non specific chronic back pain, then any movement should help. To paraphrase Stuart McGill, there is no such thing as non specific back pain, they just haven't investigated it properly.

To add to the farce, it turned out this course wasn't accredited level 4 when we did it, so we then had to go and re-do it, with a case study, practical demo and a heavy emphasis on yellow flags and psychosocial aspects (important, but not the only thing like most of these courses seem to assume). The Active IQ framework for exercise for back pain was the usual - cardio warm up, stretches, pulse raise blah blah. When my colleague pointed out to the assessor you probably wouldn't use this format with a back pain client he agreed.

At this point you may think I was losing faith in the fitness courses.

I also did the exercise for stroke course with later life training. Another level 4 course, this one was all evidence based for stroke. As usual there was only one self employed PT on this course, everyone else worked for local authorities & leisure trusts.

Though this course was comprehensive, the evidence based circuits was literally based on one study. So we had to replicate the circuit used in the study exactly. This is a somewhat problematic approach to evidence based programming, as there is only one source and you are doing things that were done within a limited research setting. If they had drawn on more evidence base and given a template or blue print to follow rather than having to do exactly the same exercises and warm ups and stretches in the same order the course may have been more applicable. Even blending in some clinical wisdom, and common sense with the evidence base may have made the course more practical in the long term.

And it also begs the question, who cares if you are level 4...

REPS

The register of exercise professional classifies fitness courses as level 2, 3, and 4 and its members can be level 2,3, or 4.

Again, showing the bias of level 4 courses, to become a level 4 instructor on REPs you need to have reference from your employer and do some online test on the quality assurance referral framework (eh?). Thus they assume you must be employed, you can't be self employed it seems.

And most strikingly, no one cares if you are level 4 REPs, no one will ever ask you if you are level 2, or level 3 or level 4. Not one client ever has asked me if I am a member of REPs or what level I am.

Much like being a level 45 dungeon master, no one cares if you are REPs level 4.

Craig Feldspar level 45 dungeon master: Much like being level 4 REPs, no one cares

Clients don't really care who you did your course with or what level you are. They look at how you behave and how you train people and what results you achieve.

There is a long held belief by many in the fitness industry that REPs is nothing more than a glorified way of training companies getting you to do more courses. I don't think they're in cahoots or its a cartel or anything, but REPs needs the training organisations and the training organisations need REPs. The REPs newsletter and email bulletins contain adverts for courses by training providers.

Fact is, you don't need to be a member of REPs, no one cares, as long as you are insured, belonging to this organisation wont get you any more business.

And the training courses; I was lucky my level 4 courses were paid for by other organisations. If I was paying for them myself I would think long and hard before doing them, if you are genuinely interested in the subject, then do them, but they won't increase your income potential, you might as well do Zumba or British Military Fitness if you want to do that.

What now? Read a book

At this point I can only echo Nick Tumminello's advice, if you want to do a fitness course, do the cheapest and quickest one you can.

Then forget most of what they told you and go and read a book or two and look for good sources of info on the internet, DVDs etc. When I first started back in the dark ages, none of this was available, you had to do courses, now you can learn more in a week than a year of courses.

I get asked all the time, which is the best course to do, and it really doesn't matter, I don't think any of them stand out. I've learnt more from the internet, books, DVDs, research articles. I would say that 99% of what I do now on a daily basis with clients I did NOT learn from a training course.

If you have a qualification, you will probably get an interview - depending on how much effort you put into your application form. But make sure you can demonstrate an exercise, that you can write a decent program. And most importantly, if you want to work for an organisation go and do some research on member retention, customer service and how to talk to people. For some reason, none of the courses out there cover this.

Feudal Japan

These days, getting a fitness qualification is easy, and without getting too political, most qualifications in this country are now easy. There is no real failure rate, there is no gold standard qualification.

Back in the day, in  Japan, there are the famous stories of a student waiting outside a masters house for weeks in the snow before being accepted and then doing years of menial tasks. They had to show real dedication and commitment to the subject and put the time in. Now I'm not advocating this type of medieval training, but we need to raise the standard. It can't be a free for all, with thousands of people getting worthless qualifications.

If we have no faith in the qualifications, nor will the public.

In the meantime, get the piece of paper you need, but then be true to yourself, and spend a life time learning and mastering your subject, you owe it to yourself and your clients.

A picture of Ava Cowan to make us all feel better: now this article is better than Flex magazine and most training courses!

*The title for this blog was stolen from the Billy Bragg song To Have And To Have Not