Leaving the fitness industry

This week was my last week as a fitness instructor.

This is the room where I taught my last class!

Several decisions contributed to my decision to leave. I got a raise at my full time job. I’ve been at it a year and a half and I love what I do. I’m no longer worried that it might suddenly vanish. I’ve also been diving further into writing. I’m narrating for a podcast, and a friend of mine and I have been offered brand ambassador positions with an editing company. All of this requires time outside of my full time job.

Then there’s the writing.

So, something had to go.

It’s bittersweet. Knowing that I’m able to leave is great. But letting go of an industry I busted my ass to succeed in is difficult. It took a lot of ‘signals from the universe’ for me to let this go.

And I won’t lie, the pandemic did change a lot of things.

From my stint as manager.

2020 was stressful as hell for anyone in my industry. You had to do your best to haul your product online and then hope that someone would pay you for it. Some people did this well. I did alright with personal training clients, but group classes suffered, and those had always been my bread and butter. 

I was also managing a gym part-time downtown. It didn’t pay much. The expectation was that you would make that up with your personal training commission. Well, since I was in a downtown office building, guess how many people were coming in to use the gym? This was made more difficult by the fact that they put time limits on when people could come. There were a lot of barriers to personal training. And when you make something that already requires a bit of willpower more inaccessible, you get a lot less people wanting to do it.

When I was offered a work-from-home part time job, I jumped at it. I eventually dropped the management job, but kept my online clients, and the one fitness center I was working at in the mornings. As things progressed, I gradually dropped my online clients. It ended up working rather mutually. A lot of them had their own routine set up by now, and since they were already at home, it was easy for them to just bang out a session without waiting for me. I was happy that they had progressed far enough to make it a habit. I still have coffee with one of them occasionally.

When I was looking to move to Nashville, I researched all the gyms in the area. In my mind, I had worked for the best gyms in Chicago, I wanted to audition for the best gyms in Nashville. Not only did I find out that the Nashville scene is much different than the Chicago scene, but there was only one gym that was anything like the fitness clubs I had worked at in Chitown. 

But I eventually managed to land an audition. Eventually got a class. Then eventually got the exact schedule I wanted. It went well for a couple of years.

But recently I haven’t been feeling it. 

For whatever reason, numbers are dropping off in all of the classes. There were more and more times when I would show up, hang around for ten minutes, then go home. I still got paid the base rate, which isn’t anything to sneeze at, but when I started actually looking forward to no one showing up… when I started making plans to snag that ‘surprise’ Starbucks on the way home to my ‘real’ job, that’s when I started to question what I was doing.

“I worked hard for those certifications, I paid all that money…” And as I’ve always told other people, time and money invested does not always justify more time and money invested. Those certifications served me well and I don’t regret the knowledge that I gained. 

“This keeps me fit, it forces me to actually do some yoga/kickboxing/etc. I might not do it otherwise.” Since I’ve started thinking about giving this time up, I’ve been considering the yoga studio up the street that offers both in person and online options. It might be fun to be a student again. In fact, with how things are going now, it would be amazing to give my brain to someone else and just follow their lead. And I might just enjoy it more.

“I worked so hard to get here.” One hundred percent true. I worked harder in the fitness industry than any other job I ever had. In most places, the work and education that fitness instructors put into their careers is not reflected in their paychecks or in the respect they get from the general population. (There are, of course, exceptions.) And I don’t regret doing it. I wanted to live that life and I got to live it for a decade. And I will approach any fitness class I take from here on out with a different appreciation and admiration. 

I’m glad that as a society we are getting away from the “one lifetime, one career” mentality. And this is nothing against all the people who know what they want to be from the get go and are happy staying in it forever. But for people like me who want to explore a bit more. Who already feel like their life is going to be too short for everything that they want to cram into it. Who want to do all the things, but also do all the things well. And I encourage anyone reading to do what they love for as long as they love it. If you’re not having fun or getting paid, what are you doing? (And hopefully you’re doing both, at least some of the time.)

Well, it’s impossible. I won’t get to do everything that I want to do. But I can do everything that I can. 

Fitness was fun. It nourished and sustained me for a decade of my life if not more. Climbing that mountain was fantastic. And I’ll take all that I learned with me into the next chapter.