Personal training has become an ever more popular career in the last decade. In the UK, there are said to be around 22,000 qualified personal trainers as of 2021 and with this there has been a rise in the affluence of boutique gyms, budget gyms and niche fitness products.
With personal training being a more in demand career option, it’s important to understand the costs and different types of courses available. In this article, we’ll explore the cost of personal training courses across the UK industry and what you get for your money. I’ll break this down into a few key questions.
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How much is a Personal Trainer Course?
Personal Trainer Prices - Level 3 course Qualification Cost
For this question, I am going to refer to the Level 3 Certificate/Diploma in Personal Training specifically. This is the benchmark qualification that legally allows gyms to employ you as a personal trainer in the UK.
Typically, these personal trainer courses will range from £750 to £1800 depending on the training provider and their delivery model. Online only courses will likely be on the lower end, whilst full time courses will be on the higher end, with hybrid models being in between.
Pros and Cons of Course Types
One thing to note with this qualification is that you will need to have completed a relevant Level 2 qualification such as Level 2 Certificate in Gym Instructing or Level 2 Certificate in Exercise to Music to be able to be enrolled onto the Level 3. This is a pre-requisite for all awarding bodies and training providers and even a degree will often not be enough to get you around this. The reason is mainly because a degree doesn’t always teach you the people skill side of the qualifications so that leaves a gap to be bridged.
How much is a Personal Trainer Course Level 2 Qualification?
Level 2 qualifications cost between £450 and £900 depending again, on the provider and model. Exercise to Music qualifications are more suitable for those who want to go into Group Exercise or a mainly class based focus in their career whereas the Gym Instructor pathway is more about learning to teach gym inductions and showing people how to use equipment. The qualification you should go for, depends on what your desired outcome is at the end of the qualification.
What's the total cost to become a Personal Trainer?
In total personal trainer prices, you’re likely to spend between £1200 and £2000 for your Level 2 and 3 combination course. You may find courses cheaper than this but often if it’s an established company dropping prices, be mindful that they are probably just trying to make a quick buck. Several training providers have gone under in recent years, often leaving students in the lurch without a qualification or opportunity to move their qualification elsewhere, without having to re pay the fees. Due diligence is important when searching for a training provider and be mindful of those who are telling you what you want to hear, rather than those who are being authentic and truthful. Transparency is the key to ethical selling so take your time and ask lots of questions!
Who’s the best Training Provider out there?
This is hard to answer without being biased. I have worked for many of the more well-known fitness providers in the UK and each have their strongpoints but let’s just say, there’s a reason why I’m not there anymore and it’s simply that I didn’t believe in their ethos or even lack of it!
The attitude amongst many fitness training providers is that they are mainly interested in getting the sale but often leave you with buyer’s remorse by not delivering on what they promise. One provider even went as far as coercing students into writing five star reviews for them otherwise they wouldn’t give them their certificates. Yikes.
The best training providers out there all have a common set of attributes such as clearly defined mission statements, core values and a strong team culture. This is something Redefining Fitness has been built on with our core values being Quality Driven, Inclusivity, Value for Money, Innovation and Integrity.
We put the interests of our students first and have a recruitment policy that all of our tutors are still practising and successful personal trainers. This may sound normal but sometimes in the fitness industry, the tutor you are learning from may never have been a successful PT, so they may not be the best person to learn from.
Everyone in our team has a minimum of a degree or equivalent vocational qualifications, five years’ experience and most of the team has international experience, so there’s plenty of credibility when it comes to knowing you’re learning from those who push themselves to set the standard high. We won’t say we’re the best because it’s an overused term that’s based on opinion, so we’d rather leave that for you to decide ☺
When making a decision, you need to find out about your personal training course tutor, just as much as the training provider because your tutor will make or break your experience. There are some fantastic tutors out there across most companies and some terrible ones, so to give yourself the best chance of success, you should find out who your tutor(s) will/would be and search them on Google, Linkedin and Instagram. Here you will either find nothing or streams of high value content for free before you’ve even started your course! Check out our Redefining Fitness tutor team.
The best providers will also provide support for students outside of their course and build a relationship with their students to help them get ready for their careers. One of Redefining Fitness key unique selling points is that we offer to help students to build a client base in six months after graduation, taking them from zero to hero.
With this we allocate a personal mentor when you start in your first role who will help you with business planning, lead generation strategies and building your brand. Not many providers do anything like this. We humbly believe that no one does it better than us, because we spent a number of years refining this through our own personal and professional experience as a team.
There’s also some room to make the business element your own and put your own personal stamp on the project. We believe this is invaluable as you can build your business the way you see it whilst saving yourself lessons, pain and mistakes by learning years of mistakes from your mentor in a matter of months. See our personal training course options.
As a company, we have confidence that we deliver many components of the qualification better than our competitors. A standard qualification for the personal training course has six units and is naturally quite basic. Our course is designed for those who want to excel and be the best, so when we wrote the qualification, we added in areas that we felt were missing such as Sleep Science, The Immune System, Medical Condition Management, Common Injuries, Corrective Exercise, Myofascial Lines and Meridians, Game Based Fitness, How To Build a Successful Business and Tri-Planar Training.
All of these extra lessons are part of our Level 3 Personal Training qualification because we believe that to be a successful trainer and get ahead of your competition, you need better tools in your toolbox along with better understanding of how and when to use them.
Our overarching mission is to better prepare personal trainers for the fitness industry and with a bit of luck, improve some of the industry itself, because we see the need for better and are willing to do everything within our control to get there. Part of this is the understanding that not every student will be right for us because if you’re doing this for just your own training or want a quick piece of paper, we won’t be a fit. Our version of the Level 3 Personal Trainer course is quite a bit of work. That being said, it’s very rewarding for the right people, particularly those who want an edge on other graduates.
With that in mind, we won’t be the best provider for everyone but if you want a first class service, access to cutting edge content and first-rate tutors and want to save time, money and travel by working through a mix of online learning and local tutoring, then we may just be the right provider for you!
If you would like a prospectus or more information, please reach us at [email protected] – we’d love to hear from you.
My names Christian Roach.
I’m the Education Director at Redefining Fitness. We deliver internationally accredited fitness qualifications for aspiring personal trainers across the UK. Our internationally experienced team of tutors help students to go from enrolment to graduation to successful business in as little as six to twelve months.
We’re known for delivering exceptionally high service and for producing industry ready fitness professionals, leaving our students feeling inspired to be the best version of themselves.
