Personal Trainers with an ASD?

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Is anyone else here, or has anyone else here, thought of personal training as a career or hobby? I'm 7 months into my certification program with the exam coming up this summer. I'd like to find someone else with a type of spectrum disorder who has gone this route or at least thought of it. My biggest concern is the personal training part of the personal training job. The need to know knowledge I've got down. I had an interest in fitness and a decent knowledge of the body before starting, so my thought on the job went something like this : if I ramble on enough about what I know it will show my competence of being a trainer and will make up for my lack of people skills. I've had "trial clients", neighbors, and it's been very clear that any length of information spew is just blocked out and not wanted. I figured anyone signing up for training would like to know all they can but that's not the case. Anxiety has been rough for me lately trying to get prepared to handle the clients. There are entire chapters of training dedicated to how important your people skills are in developing a good program and the trust needed. I'd like to find another spectrum diagnosed trainer to see how they manage with the daily phone calls asking for advice and scheduling sessions, and also just dealing with clients in general. This is the only job I have qualifications for and one of the only jobs I've been able to see myself enjoy doing. My issue is that I can't imagine dealing with 2-3 clients a day for 5-6 days a week, along with phone calls, to make the income I need to support my truck and house payments as well as equipment, food, absurdly expensive supplements, ect. At the moment my phone has been off all of 2014 because I don't like phone calls and too many people call just to talk! How would you guys deal with this or could you at all?

While I love lifting (and I'm quite good at it, if I may say so), being around people 24/7 would be extremely exhausting to me. Furthermore, my exercise routine is not for everybody; unless you have a strict diet, it will leave most people sore for a long time afterwards.

Thanks for the comment Kurgan. My first "client" I tried to put through the same program that I do. He wasn't able to do any of the exercises even with just body weight and said he felt like he really disappointed me! That was 6 months ago and I have a much better idea of what I'm doing now and how to ease people into it. There is actually an online personal training option but to me that sounds just as bad or worse. I think I would rather deal with seeing a person once a day than talking to someone across the country 4 times a day over the phone to guide them through their grocery store trips, stretching, workouts, and questions. If they ask a quarter of the questions that I do I'm done for!

On an off-topic but related topic I'm trying to get my nerves together for my first bodybuilding competition that's also this summer! It's 10 days before my exam and I still haven't found a "posing" coach. Last year I put it off because I just couldn't find it in me to deal with the coaching more so than the competition itself. I'm more determined to make it happen this year and would love to have won an important competition before hitting my 20s. It took 45 minutes to figure out how to post and resize a picture the right way but I've got one up now. Kind of disappointed with it and not sure how appropriate it is for an autism website so I'm already debating on taking it down. We'll see.

I don't have any experiences, but I am in the same boat as you. I am not even certified yet, but I plan on being soon. I really don't know how things are goign to work out especially considerign I don't even have a car or driver's license. Also, I'm still a few months away to getting in shape myself. I hope everything works out for you.

I did this qualification 15 years ago and never used it for various reasons.

My advice to you would be to be a personal trainer working for a gym rather than independent as then you wont have to do so much work in terms of phone calls, promotion/advertising, tax. The people I knew who did this had their clients arranged by the gym and were paid a wage by the gym rather than getting clients themselves and paying a fee to the gym.

good luck, I hope it works out.


(btw Leil Lowndes books are very good for teaching social skills)