Legality of starting my own outside personal training business

joshclem

Hi there.

I have been an avid athelte for a few years and would like to take the step to training other people.

I do not have any qualifications although i can outperform 99% of those that do.

I have a few questions for some of you who are hopefully in the know about this!

1 - Do i need qualifications or a first aid certificate to train people in the park?

2 - Do i need insurance or can they just sign a disclaimer? I will only be using a sandbag and some grass, no crazy equipment.

Thanks

lincroft1710

As you're only 19, I'm going to go easy on you. I take it the the sole trader business isn't working.

Without proper qualifications or insurance you should not be thinking of going down the route of "training". Expecting people to sign a disclaimer is naive. If I was asked to do this I would immediately suspect that the trainer didn't really know what they were doing.

Lomcevak

Definitely need insurance; find out the cost and factor it in to working out whether it's worthwhile. Bad news is that it's likely to be more expensive if you don't have qualifications.

All sorts of legal risks in a disclaimer anyway - as a 'professional' you're viewed as having a duty of care to your client, and a disclaimer isn't worth the paper it's written on if you are negligent. Without decent insurance you'd be up a creek if someone decided to put in a personal injury claim.

As for qualifications, they're not necessarily about performance, they're about learning to teach too. The bloke who runs the gym at work is over 50 and a bit 'well fed' these days, I could easily out-run or out-ride him, but he's a great teacher.