As a personal trainer, maintaining your own health and well-being is necessary. Efficiently manage your schedule to balance work and personal time, and set clear boundaries with clients to prevent overcommitting. Refresh your training routines regularly to stay motivated, and prioritize self-care through enjoyable activities, proper rest, and good nutrition. Constantly expand your knowledge with the latest fitness trends and connect with fellow trainers for support. These strategies help you succeed in your career while avoiding burnout.
When you’re a personal trainer or any kind of fitness professional, your job is your entire life.
Your dedication is unreal and it’s never-ending. For as much as you love it, though, you’ve started to feel it hitting you hard lately. You’re feeling tired all the time. You dread the idea of taking on a new client (an idea that would have had you elated last week,) you can’t keep yourself on your own fitness track. You’re nearing personal trainer burnout.
You’re feeling pushed to your breaking point, and it’s starting to affect your personal happiness as well as your professional well-being. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
There are hundreds of different steps, techniques, and strategies you can implement in order to save your sanity (as well as your business).
If you’re feeling this way, remember, you’re not alone. You can still love your job, make a difference, and keep fighting the good fight, you might just need a little help combating the dreaded burnout.
Read on to get a glimpse of a few of our favorite tips to help combat personal trainer burnout.
What Is Burnout?
Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. It occurs when you feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to meet constant demands. As the stress continues, you begin to lose the interest and motivation that led you to take on a certain role in the first place.
Burnout reduces productivity and saps your energy, leaving you feeling increasingly helpless, hopeless, cynical, and resentful. Eventually, you may feel like you have nothing more to give. The negative effects of burnout can extend into all areas of life, including personal and social relationships.
What Makes Personal Trainers Feel Burnt Out?
Personal trainers deal with many factors that can lead to burnout, including:
- High Emotional Labor: Personal trainers invest emotionally in their clients’ journeys, which can be draining, especially when clients struggle with motivation or progress.
- Long and Irregular Hours: Many trainers work early mornings, late evenings, and weekends to accommodate clients’ schedules, which can interrupt their own work-life balance and lead to exhaustion.
- Physical Demands: The job is physically demanding, involving demonstrations, spotting, and sometimes participating in workouts, which can lead to physical fatigue.
- Financial Stress: Income can be unpredictable in personal training, especially for those who work on a freelance basis or are dependent on client bookings and retention. See our blog on personal trainer salary for more information.
- Lack of Professional Growth: Without clear pathways for advancement or opportunities for professional development, trainers might feel stagnant or undervalued.
- Client Dependence: The pressure to retain clients and consistently attract new ones can create significant stress, especially in competitive markets. Check out our blog on attracting new clients for more information.
- Inadequate Self-Care: Failing to reserve time for personal care, recovery, and relaxation can exacerbate stress and lead to quicker burnout.
What Are The Most Common Burnout Symptoms?
The most common symptoms of personal trainer burnout include:
- Exhaustion: Feeling physically and emotionally depleted. Physical symptoms might include tiredness, headaches, and muscle pain.
- Cynicism and Detachment: Losing interest in work, feeling disconnected from one’s job and colleagues, and having a cynical or negative outlook.
- Feelings of Ineffectiveness and Lack of Accomplishment: A sense of futility and frustration with one’s achievements at work, often accompanied by declining job performance.
- Reduced Performance: Burnout affects everyday tasks at work, including managing workload, interacting with clients or colleagues, and performing job duties efficiently and effectively.
- Lack of Motivation: Having difficulty getting started, finding little joy in your work, and having trouble seeing the value of your effort.
- Withdrawal: Withdrawing from responsibilities, isolating oneself from coworkers, and participating less at work.
- Decreased Satisfaction: Feeling unhappy or dissatisfied with your job, leading to negative feelings about your work environment and your own capabilities.
- Health Problems: Over time, chronic stress from burnout can lead to more serious health problems like high blood pressure, heart disease, and increased vulnerability to infections.
Tips To Avoid Burnout
1) Don’t Be Afraid To Say No
Listen, we get it.
It can be hard to turn down clients, especially when you have a burning passion to help people become the best versions of themselves. Helping people, putting them before you, and boosting people to success can become incredibly addictive, and while doing those things is never bad, it can sometimes make you put yourself and your needs on the back burner. Though you want to be as busy as ever, whether for benevolent reasons or because you want to put money in the bank, it’s never a good idea to bog yourself down or overload your schedule.
It’s hard to set limits, but it’s important to remember this simple sentiment: you’re not a bad trainer if you tell someone that you’re not available to train them.
It simply means that you’re just too busy. It can incredibly hard to say no to someone, especially if they’re asking you face to face and you know that you could help them, but if you’re not taking care of yourself first, you’re likely going to be useless for your other clients.
How Do You Combat This?
Take an objective look at your schedule.
Do you have built in block that allow you time to relax and unwind before your next client? Are you actually available to train more clients? Get a clear, unbiased understanding of your schedule before you take on any new clients, and if you find that you’re genuinely unable to do it, don’t feel bad for saying no.
2) Make Time For Your Other Passions
Fitness is a great passion, but you don’t have to allow it to be your only passion.
One of the best ways to avoid personal trainer burnout is to give indulge in your other passions. Don’t allow fitness to entirely consume your life. For your sanity, and your body’s sake, give yourself a break from the fitness world. Whether it’s a few hours every day, or a few days every week, make sure you’re doing something you love that isn’t fitness related.
This includes taking a break from your fitness friends, too. Scheduling time for yourself, or for your friends who work in other industries, will allow you to take a full break from the industry and get your brain focused on something else. With fitness friends, no matter how much you love them, it can be difficult to not slip into talking about work, the latest exercise fads, and totally stressing your brain out during your off-time.
Talk to people who aren’t trainers for a change to get a change of pace. Read a book. Paint a picture. Go to the beach. Do something you love that has absolutely nothing to do with the fitness world. This will give your brain and body a rest, allow you to relax, and rejuvenate your fitness passion to help you come back fresher than ever.
3) Keep Your Goals Alive
Sometimes, taking a deep breath and taking an even deeper look at the goals you’ve set for yourself can be the ultimate refresher. Take a morning for yourself, sit at your favorite coffee shop, sip a latte you love, and ask yourself a few of these questions: “am I doing all that I wanted to reach these goals?” or “am I allowing myself enough free-time to refresh and rejuvenate in order to allow me to reach these goals?” Check out our blog on tips to achieve success as a personal trainer.
Take a look at what your goals are. Do you have room to update them? Have you met your goals? If not, what’s stopped you?
Taking a good hard look at the goals you have for yourself and don’t be afraid to adjust, reorganize, and set new ways to help you reach your goals.
4) Recognize Burnout Before It Happens
Oftentimes, there are tell-tale signs of personal trainer burnout that are happening before the full-fledged burnout begins, and if you catch them in time, you can save yourself some heartache and drama. But recognizing those signs is going to be key in helping you maintain a level head.
So, how can you recognize these signs?
One of the best ways is to sit down by yourself and evaluate exactly how you’re feeling. Ask yourself, “am I feeling overwhelmed? Do I constantly feel tired? Am I feeling unmotivated and uninspired?” If this is the case, it’s possible that the burnout is setting in.
Once you’ve established these feelings, try to get to the root of the issue. Ask yourself what’s stressing you out and evaluate if you’re in a position to change it. Then, determine if you can change the way you’re reacting to these stressors. This kind of evaluation and self-reflection can help you stave off burnout and lengthen your career!
5) Schedule Time For You and Make self-care a regular practice
This sort of goes hand in hand with the idea of building out time for you and saying no to other clients, but this should go far beyond just your schedule at work.
When you’re looking at your weekly schedule of clients, meal preps, and more, are you blocking out time to do things you want to do? Did you schedule that once-a-week lunch with your best friend? Did you leave some time of the weekend to read the rest of that book you’ve been dying to finish? Did you schedule time to train yourself this week? Did you schedule in enough time to sleep this week? Check out our blog on mental tools for success as a personal trainer.
When you’re building out your schedule, it’s important to fit clients in, but it’s mostly important that you’re fitting in time for yourself.
6) Manage Your Client Load
While necessary for income, an overly large client list can overwhelm you and disrupt your work-life balance. Determine a manageable number of clients that allows you to maintain both your health and service quality.
7) Set Achievable Goals
Aim for success with realistic goals. Assess the feasibility of your ambitions by comparing them to what others have achieved and evaluating your skills and resources. Setting attainable targets helps maintain motivation and reduces stress. Check out our blog on how to be a good personal trainer for information.
8) Make Sure To Get Enough Sleep
Sleep deprivation exacerbates burnout. Establish a consistent bedtime routine that includes activities promoting relaxation, such as reading or listening to calming music. Avoid sleep disruptors like late caffeine intake, heavy meals, and alcohol before bed.
What Are The Consequences of Trainer Burnout?
Burnout for personal trainers can lead to many consequences that impact both their professional performance and personal health.
The quality of your service may decline as trainers become less energetic, potentially lowering client satisfaction. Professionally, burnout can result in reduced punctuality, preparation, and attentiveness, negatively affecting a trainer’s professionalism and reputation.
Physically, the demanding nature of the job combined with burnout can lead to injuries and chronic fatigue. Burnout significantly increases the risk of mental health issues such as depression and anxiety, affecting a trainer’s emotional well-being.
Economically, burnout might cause high job turnover, leading trainers to feel dissatisfied and potentially prompting them to leave the profession, which in turn affects their financial stability.
The irritability and stress associated with burnout can also strain personal relationships, causing conflicts with family, friends, and clients. Recognizing and addressing the signs of burnout early is crucial in mitigating these impacts and maintaining a sustainable career.
Avoid Burnout As A Personal Trainer
To avoid burnout as a personal trainer, manage your workload and be comfortable saying no to additional clients when needed. Balance your life by engaging in non-fitness activities and regularly reassess your personal and professional goals. Recognize early signs of burnout, such as constant tiredness and a lack of motivation, and take proactive steps to address these issues.
Make sure you schedule personal time for self-care and sufficient sleep to maintain your well-being and effectiveness as a trainer.
