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HOW TO GET PERSONAL TRAINING CLIENTS ON THE GYM FLOOR 💪

Most personal trainers struggle to get clients because they don't know how to approach gym members, build relationships, or confidently sell their services.

Getting certified is EASY. Building a successful personal training career earning $10K+ per month? That's a different story.

At SHOW UP FITNESS (SUF-CPT), we've helped trainers get hired at Life Time, Equinox, and other elite gyms across the country.

In Oct...

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Join our skool to pass in 30-days: https://www.skool.com/become-a-successful-trainer/about

20 Muscles You MUST Know to Pass the NASM CPT Exam in 30 Days

Want to pass your NASM CPT exam in 30 days or less? Stop memorizing the entire textbook and start focusing on what actually matters!

In today's episode of the Show Up Fitness Podcast, we're breaking down the 20 essential muscles every NASM CPT student needs to know, including the most c...

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Your “beginner” client might be a former athlete who’s deconditioned, or a total newcomer who’s never learned how to hinge. Either way, the fastest path to results is not flashy workouts or internet-approved lifts. We walk through a practical strength training framework built on movement patterns: squat, hinge, lunge, unilateral work, plus upper body push and pull. When you can see the pattern, you can choose the right starting exercise and the right next step without guessing. 

We get specific...

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A client comes back from vacation with a shoulder that’s “acting up” and the real question isn’t which exercise is best, it’s whether we should be training at all. We walk through the simple screening process we use to decide if something is within a trainer’s scope: quick range of motion checks, a brief strength hold, and the red flags that mean we refer out immediately. No guessing, no diagnosing, just a clear decision tree that protects the client.

Fro...

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Instructor Adam Baldwin breaks down the following article from Dr. Brad Schoenfeld website Look Great Naked:

 https://www.lookgreatnaked.com/blog/does-supervision-during-resistance-training-enhance-increases-in-muscle-strength-and-size/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

If you’ve ever wondered whether personal training is “just accountability,” the data might surprise you. We dig into a Brad Schoenfeld lab study that tests a simple but loaded question: do trained lifters get better strength and muscle growth when they’re supervised during resistance training? The program is basic, the difference is the co...

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How to Program Workouts for ANY Client | $10K/Month Personal Trainer

Want to become a successful personal trainer making $10K per month? It starts with learning how to assess clients, write effective workout programs, and confidently deliver results.

In today's episode of the Show Up Fitness Podcast, we're breaking down how to program workouts for two very different clients: a CrossFit athlete and an intermediate fitness client.

Most personal training certifications teach you anatomy, terminology...

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A trainer's guide to the "I tweaked my hamstring" Monday

By Dr. Rob Letizia, PT, DPT, Owner, Spectrum Therapeutics, Wayne, NJ

Article from Rob on Show Up Fitness Website to become a personal trainer: https://www.showupfitness.com/blogs/blog/when-do-we-stop-when-can-we-train-around-it-when-do-we-refer-out

Your client walks in at 7 a.m., points to the back of their thigh, and says the line every trainer eventually hears: “I tweaked my hamstring.” You’ve got about 30 seconds to decide what t...

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John Pallof Physical therapist, orthopedic specialist and strength coach.

Credentials: PT, OCS, COMT, CSCS.

Graduated from the University of Connecticut in 1997 with a physical therapy degree. Worked with collegiate, Olympic and professional athletes.

Pallof worked at South County Physical Therapy in Auburn, Massachusetts, and collaborated with strength coaches at the College of the Holy Cross. His background combined rehabilitation, manual therapy, biomechanics and performance training.

His credentials include an Orthopedic Clinical Specialist designation and Certified...

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Someone at the gym says, “I’ve got a fast metabolism, I just can’t put on size.” You’ve heard it, you might have said it, and it sounds convincing until you look at the two things that actually move body weight: training stimulus and total intake. We dig into the slow metabolism vs fast metabolism debate without the internet yelling, and we bring it back to what you can measure and change.

We walk through why calories in calories out still...

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Pain can make smart people do weird things: avoid a squat they used to own, chase random mobility drills, or assume an MRI finding is the whole story. We want to cut through that noise with a coaching-first, pain science grounded framework that actually helps clients move again. We start with the biopsychosocial model of pain and why the way we show up matters, from being on time and setting expectations to letting a client finish their story without getting interrupted. That “front en...

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Cortisol gets treated like the boogeyman of modern fitness: the stress hormone that supposedly wrecks your gut, destroys your sleep, and plants belly fat no matter what you do. We’re not buying the oversimplified story. We walk through real-world reality checks like shipwreck survivors, endurance athletes, and classic starvation research to ask a blunt question: if cortisol is the main cause of weight gain, why do high-stress, low-food scenarios reliably lead to weight loss instead? 

From there, we break down wha...

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Programming gets easier the moment the lower body stops feeling like a blur of Latin words. We walk you through the exact muscle groups you need for the SUF CPT and make them stick with clear landmarks, real coaching cues, and a few memory tricks you will actually remember under pressure. If you have ever mixed up tendons vs ligaments, forgotten where the hamstrings sit behind the knee, or wondered why a seated calf raise feels different than standing, you are in the...

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More trainers have been hired and clear over $10,000/ month at life time with their SUF CPT than any other company. 

Most trainers walk into a practical interview thinking they’re being graded on exercise selection. What actually gets judged is whether you can coach a real person, build trust fast, and lead with confidence when the room feels unfamiliar and the stakes feel high. That’s exactly what we work through with Jerry Ramos, a kinesiology student and trainer preparing for a Lif...

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Become a nutrition coach with SUF-NC. Weekly live calls with nutrition experts and RD's. 

If you’re trying to lose weight, get leaner, or just stop dragging through your afternoons, there’s a good chance the real bottleneck isn’t your workout plan. It’s your sleep. We dig into why sleep is the foundation for body composition, energy, and consistency, and why “I get 6 to 7 hours” often doesn’t match reality, just like food logs rarely tell the full story.

We use...

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If you have ever hesitated when a client asks, “What muscle is that supposed to work?”, this shoulder anatomy breakdown is for you. We make the case that the most important skill for becoming a qualified personal trainer is mastering anatomy, because confidence is not a vibe. It is earned, and clients can tell when you have it. When you sound unsure, people default to objections like “It is too expensive” or “Let me think about it.” When you can speak clearly about the body, tr...

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Pass NASM w/ SUF Study Guide $75 showupfitness.com

Guarantee to pass NASM showupfitness.com which includes passing in 7-14 days, $500 worth of nasm material including tutoring AND either a SUF certification or hands on learning seminar.

Failing the NASM CPT exam usually has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with spending weeks on the wrong pages. We’re here to help you pass the NASM CPT 7th edition test faster by focusing on what the exam ac...

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Want to get hired at Life Time fitness and become a successful personal trainer? SUF CPT is the best personal training certification for trainers who want to create a career. Sean Hyson was hired with his SUF CPT in Austin at Life Time. He had a great background as an author and writer for T Nation and Onnit. He went to a SUF Seminar in Houston for hands on learning and then got his SUF CPT. He was hired in March. 

Y...

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SUF-STM LIVE calls helping trainers level up their business and mentorship.

Shoulder discomfort can turn a confident lifter into someone who dreads incline day, and the worst part is how often the “fix” starts with a guess and ends with a scary label. We walk through a clear, trainer-safe approach that starts where it should: keep a physical therapist in your network, stay in your scope, and collect the right data before you touch a single “corrective.” 

We dig into why...

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Read the article here on Showupfitness.com: https://www.showupfitness.com/blogs/blog/chronic-tendon-pain-why-load-beats-rest-and-what-shockwave-actually-does

That nagging Achilles that “felt better with rest” and then flared the second you returned to training isn’t bad luck, and it usually isn’t an inflammation problem you can ice away. Chronic tendon pain is often a capacity problem, which means the fix is not doing less forever, it’s rebuilding tolerance with the right load, the right timeline, and the right rules.

We read a...

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A sales sheet won’t save a shaky consult, but a confident coach can. We’re live at Equinox running a real-time role-play with West, right after a hard chest session, to show what personal training sales actually looks like when the client is excited, hesitant, and ready to bolt with “I’ll think about it.” If you’ve ever fumbled the pricing, overexplained packages, or felt weird about “closing,” you’ll hear exactly where the momentum drops and how to get it back without turni...

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Hands on learning workshop with SUF x Life Time Fitness partnership. How to train a client who has low back pain? The best hands on learning workshop / seminars for personal trainers. Show Up Fitness Low Body seminar

Low back pain is everywhere, and the worst part is how quickly it turns into fear: fear of bending, fear of lifting, fear of the next flare up, fear of what an MRI might “find.” We’re teaching from Franklin near Nashville with a room f...

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Incline bench press has a way of making strong lifters feel brand new under the bar. If you’ve ever wondered why your flat bench numbers don’t carry over, we walk through the real mechanics that make incline pressing so challenging and so valuable for upper chest strength and hypertrophy. 

We break it down into five clear drivers: anatomy (the clavicular head of the pectoralis major has less “real estate” to contribute), torque (more distance and tougher angles), leg drive (harder to...

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Location: Austin C4 / Nutrabolt. Time 8-4

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/navigating-low-back-pain-in-training-with-katie-dabrowski-and-q-willey-tickets-1996909407794

CODE: SHOWUPFITNESS $50 off

Doc Q IG: Coach_Q_Physio & Doc Katie: Ktdabrowski

Back pain is one of the fastest ways to make a confident lifter feel fragile and it’s also one of the easiest places for bad information to hijack a training plan. We sit down with physical therapists Doc Q and Doc Katie to talk about what actually feels “scary” in both p...

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Show Up Fitness hands on learning seminar at Life Time in Franklin Tennessee. If you want to become a successful personal trainer, find personal training certifications and specializations like SUF STM to make you an elite personal trainer. Next personal training seminar Tampa September 25/26.

That deep “right there” ache in your low back can make you feel stuck, especially when stretching and foam rolling do nothing. We walk you through a practical way to determine when the quadratus lumborum (QL) might be i...

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Blaming hormones is comforting because it gives us a villain and a shortcut. We go the other direction and build the real foundation: calories in versus calories out, plus the three forces that quietly drive the whole system, stress, sleep, and daily movement. From cortisol to insulin to thyroid hormones, we explain what these signals actually do, where they come from, and why “too much” and “too little” are both problems. No fear mongering, no miracle cocktails, just physiology you can use.

We a...

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Passing a personal trainer certification feels like you’ve earned the keys to the gym, until a real client shows up with knee pain, shoulder history, and questions you can’t answer with a multiple-choice memory dump. We talk honestly about whether NASM is worth it, why so many “gold standard” certifications still leave trainers with shaky programming skills, and how the industry sets beginners up to confuse a piece of paper with professional competence. 

We also pull a Reddit-style case study int...

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Your client doesn’t need to feel wrecked to get ready for the trail. We walk through a real program design for a 68-year-old retired client who trains three days per week and does Pilates, with a primary goal of lower body strength and endurance for an upcoming hiking vacation and a secondary goal of longevity, mobility, and overall health. 

We start with how to think like a coach from minute one: warm-ups that respect an older adult’s response to volum...

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Become a successful nutrition coach making 30k+ annually: https://www.showupfitness.com/products/suf-nutrition-course

Most people think “nutrition coaching” means macros and a food list. We don’t. We talk through what it looks like when a trainer treats nutrition like a real service with clear boundaries, a structured assessment, and an actual registered dietitian on the team. The difference is immediate: clients stop getting vague advice during rest periods and start getting a process they can follow, measure, and trust.

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A 98-year-old walks into your gym. Do you panic and reach for a stability ball, or do you coach what actually keeps them independent?

We take you inside a real coaching moment from our Show Up Fitness class and lay out how we think about program design for older adults and senior fitness. The big shift is simple but powerful: stop collecting exercises and start coaching movement patterns. We talk through what we look for the moment a client arrives, how...

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Knee pain that lingers at a low hum can be maddening, especially for runners who feel “mostly fine” until mileage adds up. We walk through a simple, trainer friendly screen for terminal knee extension (TKE) that takes minutes and often exposes a tiny side to side gap you can’t afford to ignore. Two to five degrees sounds small, but it can change how the knee loads with every step, rep, and landing.

From there, we lay out a clean decision tree...

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Shoulder discomfort can be maddening because it often shows up during perfectly normal training. We take a different route: we start with quick safety screens to rule out red flags, then we hunt for the real limiter that keeps stealing motion from the shoulder. A surprising amount of “shoulder pain” is a thoracic spine problem in disguise, and once you see it, your assessments and your programming get a lot clearer.

We walk through a clean, repeatable thoracic rotation screen and the...

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AI is turning everyday work into a shortcut button, and that’s exactly why we’re asking a risky question: is AI making us dumb, or is it exposing who never built real skill in the first place? We break this down through the Dunning-Kruger effect and a wild true story that shows what happens when confidence beats competence. The point isn’t to fear AI, it’s to stop using it like a mask for weak fundamentals. 

We get specific about wha...

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Calf pain that hits one mile into a run feels like betrayal, but it’s often your body giving you useful data. We dig into what running really demands from your lower leg, why the soleus and gastrocnemius take such a beating, and how a sudden spike in volume, frequency, or intensity can push tissue past its current capacity. If you have ever blamed “tight calves” or “bad knees,” we offer a clearer lens: build the foundation first, then earn the mileage. 

We star...

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Want to become a SUCCESSFUL personal trainer? SUF-CPT is the FASTEST growing personal training certification in the world!

Want to ask us a question?  Email [email protected] with the subject line PODCAST QUESTION to get your question answered live on the show!

Website: https://www.showupfitness.com/
Become a Successful Personal Trainer Book Vol. 2 (Amazon): https://a.co/d/1aoRnqA
NASM / ACE / ISSA study guide: https://www.showupfitness.com

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You’ve heard “eat more fiber,” but almost nobody explains it in a way clients actually remember or apply. We keep it simple and useful: soluble fiber acts like a sponge, and insoluble fiber works like a broom. That one shift makes nutrition coaching easier, whether you’re helping a client manage hunger, improve gut health, or make sense of cholesterol labs without getting lost in jargon.

We walk through what soluble fiber does best, including slowing digestion, blunting blood sugar spikes...

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Three different ads. Three different certifications. All calling themselves the “gold standard.” That’s where we start, because if everyone can claim the top spot, the phrase stops being a standard and turns into a slogan. We break down what most entry-level personal training certifications actually require, and why “read a book, pass a multiple choice test” is a shaky foundation for coaching real humans safely.

We get specific about what the job demands in the real world: movement assessment, exercise selection...

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A sudden shoulder pop during a heavy lift can mess with your head fast. We sit down with Dr. Coleman to map out what a smart, trainer-friendly response actually looks like when you or your client has acute shoulder pain and still wants to train safely.

We talk about where a coach’s scope begins and ends, why “never train anyone with pain” is unrealistic in the real world, and how to separate DOMS from true tissue irritation. Dr. Coleman shares a simp...

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The hardest part of becoming a great personal trainer usually isn’t programming, it’s walking up to strangers and starting the awkward conversation anyway. Tyson Robertson sits down with Sean Hyson, a newly minted Show Up Fitness Level One trainer who just started coaching at Lifetime Fitness in Austin, Texas, to talk through what the first two months really look like inside a premium big-box gym.

We get specific about client acquisition and building a book of business: how the conc...

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Most personal trainer certifications teach you what to memorize. We care about what you can coach. We lay out how Show Up Fitness is structured in July 2026, from Level 1 foundations to Level 2 specializations, plus the Freedom Pass built around mentorship and lifetime access. If you’re tired of guessing whether you’re “ready” to train real people, this breakdown gives you a clear roadmap with live calls, direct feedback, and standards that actually mean something. 

We walk through the weekly live call sche...

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A single “cheat meal” can quietly erase a full week of progress and it usually happens in plain sight. We start with a deceptively simple question: how many calories are really in a burger with bacon and sauce, a loaded baked potato, and a big beer? Then we unpack why traditional food logs often fail, why photo tracking changes everything, and how coaches can spot the difference between honest effort and inaccurate reporting without turning nutrition into a guilt trip.

From ther...