Lots of cons. Literally, con-artists. That's all this place is from top to bottom. The trainers may get hired as trainers, but the longer they work there the more and more they are transformed into slick high-pressure salesmen. While Life Time runs ads for trainers that list a bachelors degree as a prerequisite, they hire anyone and everyone as trainers, as long as the person has a certification from anywhere, literally ANY certification. The deciding factor is "is this person likely to be able to sell?"
Compensation. Here's how Life Time does it for new hires. First you give them a week or two to give you 12 "club experiences" where you go for free (free to you, and also free of pay to you for your time) and experience classes, evaluations, tests, etc., that the place offers. OK, that is fine and good. Then at the end of the month the send you to the regional training center, one of their gyms, for a full week of classroom training. It's mostly about selling, but it's dressed up pretty well so it doesn't initially feel so "salesey". But it's about persuading members to buy expensive personal training, bottom line. You are supposedly paid for this, but I'll get to that in a bit. Once you pass the test, which is a "branded training session" in which you give a member a trial training session in order to convince them to buy from you, then you are assigned back to your home club. To start working for a loan Lifetime provides. What? you say?
Lifetime Trainers are paid 100% commission. Lifetime also requires you to work a 9 hour shift every day, with a schedule fully laid out hour-by-hour by your supervisor, dictating what you will do. Laws do not allow a gym to work someone without paying them, so how, you ask, does Life Time only pay 100% commission? It's called "the draw." Lifetime LOANS you your hourly pay. So if you make $9 per hour and work 40 hours the first week, but don't have any clients or sales yet, you are now $360.00 in debt to Lifetime. Do this for a month and you'll find yourself $1,440 in debt. Once you earn some money, Life Time then "normalizes" your pay and either rounds it up to $360 for you, loaning you even more every week, or it rounds it DOWN to $360, taking back part of what you owe Life Time for working for them.
I looked at the two dozen or so other trainer's total monthly revenue and it appears that at the Life Time I was at, the average monthly revenue is around $5000. Trainers get AT BEST about 50% of this, so around $2500. Divide that by 4 weeks in a month, and the average at my club was $500 a week. If you are in a situation where you pay very low taxes, you might end up with $400 or so. Life Time then removes the extra $50 from your check as repayment. My Training Department Head said he knew of trainers, one at THIS CLUB, "that got so far in the hole initially, a year later his/her checks are still at that minimum rate."
So what do you do? When I started my Assistant Department Head followed me into the break room and as I went to clock in stopped me and said "What are you doing?" I said, "clocking in, I'm going to work, right?" She said, "We don't do that here. Don't clock in unless you have a client to train that is paying." This is Life Time Fitness for you.
At the end of the month, if you haven't hit the target revenue number that your ADH has set for you, you are expected to work your days off and try to sell, sell, sell to members. Problem is, the ADH pushed the number higher and higher as incentive, so almost NO ONE hits their numbers. Last month, two people out of two dozen hit their numbers. Everyone worked their weekend for free.
The ADHs sell all of the "cherry" pre-screened hot prospects themselves. When someone joins the gym, the salesmen on the first floor will sell them pretty hard. Some indicate they want training right then and all that's required for the trainer who meets with these people is basically finalize the details, very little selling involved. I noticed that the two well-established ADHs had a LOT of sales, five figures each month and as I paid attention it became obvious that this is what they do. Rather than pass these prime customers on to their team members, they hoard them to themselves for all of the commissions. And they keep the highest per hour paying clients to train themselves to collect the most lucrative servicing fees as well. They send their team out on the floor to prospect with members working out, tell them to do supplement booths, make phone calls, offer free training sessions. And while we are preoccupied annoying members, they clean up on all the easy money.
This is the WORST company I have ever worked for of ANY KIND in my whole life. The big shiny building and fancy tests and equipment is all camouflage to suck people in, both as members and as unsuspecting trainers. They did their claws into you, get you deep in debt to them, and constantly tell you that big money and a rewarding career is right around the corner "if you just keep working the system." It's a load of crap. The most immoral trainers who survived their way to the top and run the big group classes do make good money. Everyone else makes chump change. What is chump change? How about you work there for 4 years and you average $12 per hour?
