One out of many career paths for most sports and exercise science (or coaching science) graduates is fitness instructor or trainer. Be it for elite high-performance sports athletes or healthy-lifestyle training for the sedentary populations out there. But the digital era seems to wipe-out bit by bit the need of on-the-ground real life fitness trainer.
The society starts to become highly independent, more educated with abundant of resources at hand. Automation in all parts of life has becomes a norm (many households now do have their own machinery for everything at home), with freely available digital knowledge resources streams directly to everyone via mobile phone, tablets and laptops. The tools combine with the know-how knowledge helps current society become highly independent. It is now the era of “Do It Yourself-DIY”.
And with this “DIY” trend, fitness industry starts to move into online based training and monitoring. An individual can become fitness instructor for their own self in just a few clicks, and even able to monitor the progress and get the needed feedback to rectify weaknesses in the current fitness training plan at any time. At the bottom of this, only one or two qualified trainers with apps developers are needed to up and running the whole system. And for many people now, from starts till the end they seem to be able to do it on their own, without the need to meet in person and follow a session of fitness training with actual fitness trainer in real world.
Thus, does the world still need a fitness trainer? Can sports and exercise science graduates still planning to support their life till retirement with the career of fitness trainer? Or the degree is just as a passport to venture into other career path which just need any kind of degree as indicator of ability to learn new knowledge?
With that questions, this is where all of the above starts to fit into the path of NEGATIVITY.
Let’s looks the other way around. One trainer, one user-friendly automated systems able to serves hundreds of clients or athletes worldwide. More clients to be served, more income able to be generated. It is good for business. It is entrepreneurship. POSITIVELY, automated and digitized world nowadays actually provides more opportunities, more possibilities for each and every one to fulfill their true potential based on their needs and wants.
The questions on whether we fitness trainers (including myself) and all other future graduates in this area still have a future or not is dependable on ourselves. The number of populations in this country or in any other parts of the world is still huge. The ratio of qualified trainers to the number of possible clients/athletes is still very big. And mind you, training people is just one part of the job. Engineering world has been predicted to be one of the industries that will be significantly affected by the internet of thing, automated of life future to come. And yet, many within the industry surviving well. No big deal. Utilizes whatever at hand to create opportunities and slash out threats.
As a conclusion, the end is not near for sports and exercise science graduates. You are what you believe. We are what we want our self to be. The mind dictates, the body fulfill. The industry is still well alive and kicking hard. Opportunities are always there...