Legal Considerations When Starting Your Own Personal Training Business

Posted 08 November 2023

Blog tags: Fitness

Becoming a personal trainer is an exciting step for anyone, especially when it comes to starting your own personal training business; but it’s important to ensure you’re fully protected when setting up.

This can be something we often overlook as we feel accidents or situations won’t happen to us, however, it’s important to ensure you’re clued up and have all the right processes in place. That’s why we’ve worked alongside Camilla Johnson, Legal Editor at Rocket Lawyer to give you some tips on legal considerations.

Rocket Lawyer provides individuals and businesses with online legal services, making it simple to create legal documents to ensure you, your family and your business are protected, and can also put people in touch with lawyers should they need additional help.

Camilla provided us with these tips for you to look into when protecting yourself when setting up as a personal trainer.

Setting Up As a Sole Trader

When you’re setting up your personal training business, you’re likely to begin as a sole trader, where you’ll work for yourself. But there are a number of different things you need to keep in mind when setting up as a sole trader, such as where and how people will contact you, which will be the backbone of your business. This is along with ensuring the money side of things is covered with the likes of HMRC as you have to deal with all of this yourself when working self-employed.

“As a sole trader, you need to have somewhere customers can contact you, which will be the address that appears on business letters and contracts. You have to register for self-assessment with the HMRC and submit a tax return every year. You also have to pay Income Tax on any profit, National Insurance and VAT if you make more than the threshold.” – Camilla Johnson

Ensure You Get Liability Insurance

Accidents can happen, and although we may not think they’ll happen to us, we never know what the future entails. You need to ensure you’re covered should anything occur, whether it’s an injury or an allegation against yourself, you leave yourself open to some major problems if you aren’t covered correctly.

“Personal trainers should consider taking out public liability insurance to cover the cost of defending their business if someone is injured and professional indemnity insurance to cover costs if someone makes an allegation of professional negligence.” – Camilla Johnson

Consider Other Legal Documents

Taking out public liability insurance and ensuring you’re covered when it comes to trading is one thing, but when you set up your personal training business there are many other aspects that’ll need covering. For these reasons, there are multiple forms of different legal documents you need to consider.

“Terms and conditions of service, or a services agreement, which will detail all the conditions of training. These include the amount of payment and how it is to be paid, a description of the services and what happens if a customer cancels. A liability waiver which states that your client agrees to participate in exercise testing and training, they are over 18 (or you have to get the signature of a parent/guardian), they understand the risks associated and their consent is given freely and voluntarily. A medical history checklist to check your client is fit and healthy.” – Camilla Johnson

All of these documents should then be signed and dated by each of your clients, to ensure you’re covered on a number of different levels whilst operating your business. Therefore it’s advisable to contact the right people to see if there are any further documents that cover anything else you may not have considered.

Are There Any Other Documents You May Require?

The other documents in question may be something you wouldn’t even consider having a document for. The ones mentioned before will have you covered whilst operating from your place of work, but there are other places you may opt to train your clients to provide a more diverse service, especially during the summer, which could throw some curve balls.

“Be aware that if you intend to train clients outside, some parks require personal trainers to take out a licence for use of the park.” – Camilla Johnson

These various legal considerations from Camilla will give you excellent footing when it comes to ensuring you know how to protect yourself when setting up as a personal trainer. With everything on the legal side in place correctly, you’ll be able to kick-start your business and look ahead, as you begin the road to self-employed fulfilment.

Find out about the courses that will help you become a qualified personal trainer on our website.