Coaches that train sports athletes value making their sportsmen better. Their success is based on improving their athletes functionality on the field/court/ring. The End is what justifies the means.
Personal training though, you have everything screwed up. The whole industry really wants to talk about how exactly important "results" are. Every ones clients wants results, you are the results delivery people. And how do you do this? You make #%^ up.
Disagree? Run-down a mental list of the non-public trainers you've encountered who use a periodization scheme, who have defined protocols for balance, strength, hypertrophy, and power. Describe your education with Stuart McGills research and Mike Boyles Joint by Joint strategy or the last time you go through anything by Verkhoshanky or Yessis or Bondarchuk. Your knowledge of Grey Make and the FMS or Dave Tate and the EliteFTS corporation?
You know who John Goodman is? Thomas Plummer maybe?
"Um, John Goodman is just an actor. I have no idea plumber is, is definitely he an actor too?"
... you sorry sorry fellow.
I can tell you the solution, and its going to be considered a long list of NOs.
None of you know anything. Your "education" starts and ends together with your training certification textbook that you hardly ever read. Your "workouts" are whatever the hell you entirely on YouTube that looked hard. Your own schooling is the stuff you like, and you've neither gained significant lean mass nor improved your athleticism within the last 10 years. You became a trainer because you "liked training and working in a fitness center seemed easy", and that is a direct quote incidentally.
Everyone reading this will probably swear they aren't this sort of trainer, but they do know at least twelve trainers that match this best personal trainers near me description perfectly though.
You'll argue that you do know your stuff though. Your argument will be based on the truth that all you clients tell you that "you're my shrink/psychologist/life coach". You'll eat that junk up and think that you're amazing because you understand the condition of everyone's marriage. After that you'll argue that their spending money on guidance because they're unhappy and its own your job to make them happy.
Boy oh boy it really is. Its also your task to get their BMI below 30 and lower their risk factors that come with being truly a deconditioned fatass. That's your first work. That's what they employed you for, lest you ignore.
"All my customers get outcomes though!! Except the types that don't and stop after their starter bundle or tell me they cant afford teaching."
That makes a lot of sense. In the end, obesity bears with it no higher healthcare costs during the period of a person's lifestyle. Neither does seated 10 hours a day, eating a diet plan of Costcos frozen meals, and implanting your ass to your sofa. Those https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/?search=New Jersey things all lead to happy existence and by no means is a coronary attack of type II diabetes in your own future.
So what kinds of system is your training based around?
Don't answer, because that probably simply confused the hell away you. And please god don't state you're P90X certified. JUST, DON'T, SAY IT
I actually tire of encountering trainers that boast of their results based teaching principles, but haven't any system for making stronger/skinnier/fiter clients beyond the program they pulled away of their certifications text book/FLEX magazine/bodybuilding.com. This drives me bloody crazy.
And to answer the question "whatever your qualification textbook/mens health/bodybuilding.com/form magazine said" is just about the answer.
That's lovely, it truly is. I'm glad that individuals who entrusted you with their wellness are being trained using workout routines of the week from Bodyrock TV. (on a side notice, I would worship that girl's body till I collapsed by from exhaustion and dehydration, but I digress).
Ive heard arguments against trainers periodizing their clients training. Ive heard arguments that most fitness workouts don't value the program, they simply want to take pleasure from the workout.
Ive read all of this, and then I look around at a US inhabitants that is 2/3rds over weight, 1 in 4 are obese, and the prevalence of low back pain, joint problems, and a generally inability to MOVE is rampant.
And fitness trainers don't want to check out any kind of progressive programming scheme, because the client could easily get bored.
So I'm calling out the whole fitness industry then. That is utter ridiculousness, and you all understand it. Lucky for you if you train nothing but hypermotivated athletes and versions. Those aren't the training market for the next decade though, the 100 million people who are overweight will be the market.
These people will demand a progressive system for ridding their bodies of the excess bodyfat. They will have to understand the difference between bodyfat and lean mass. You will need to find out about hormones and how their insulin sensitivity is totally fucked up.
You'll need a system to revive normal joint mobility. You will need to find out about fascial patterns and higher and lower cross syndrome and movement engrams and imbalances and how exactly to fix these things.
You will have to know about nutrition and be able to make coaching advisements that border on being truly a psychological prescription to improve.
You'll need to be able to improvement someone through defined stages of training that encompass joint stabilization and mobilization, that encompass the basic movement patterns of squat hinge pull press push. You'll need to train them why these things are important.
And you'll need to do this for old people too, because geriatrics are overweight too and baby boomers are just getting older and more immobile.
You'll need a system for each one of these points. A teachable, defined system.
And you'll need all of the education that comes along with it.

Therefore get smarter dammit. And if all of this sounds unappealing, after that get the hell out of this industry. I'm sick of personal training being seen as a joke job that's done by college students and exercise addicts.
Were medical researchers, and we need to become it. And most of all, we need to BACK IT UP.