We were lucky to catch up with Tara De Leon recently and have shared our conversation below.

Tara, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear the backstory of how you established your own practice.

The fitness industry is a ton of fun, And there is no place I would rather be, however it is a ton of work. The hours can be long, the starting pay can be bad, employers can take advantage of the fact that most of the people working in fitness are young and don’t realize that the conditions they are working in aren’t particularly fair. After working all sorts of different fitness jobs- personal trainer, group fitness instructor, college professor, college strength coach, sports performance coach, to name a few. I finally realized that I needed to build a brand for myself and craft a professional reputation.

Even though I am an employee at a gym, being a personal trainer is so much like running your own business. The gym doesn’t hand you a full client book. You have to hustle and sell and provide excellent service. You are solely responsible for your own success. Once I realized that, I stopped showing up to work waiting for clients to come my way, and started looking for opportunities to put myself out there. As an introvert, I hate doing this, but it has to be done. I joined several networking groups. I started submitting articles for industry publications. I started speaking at fitness conferences. I became more active on social media so that when someone asks for a personal trainer recommendation, I am usually the first person people think of. Taking all of these little, simple steps has been crucial to my success, along with delivering a top notch product, of course!

One key take-away from building a sterling reputation was that I needed to charge my worth. I am not an 18 year old dude bro who has a passion for picking things up and then putting them down. I am a lifelong student of exercise science, anatomy and physiology and I need to be charging for that knowledge. I think a lot of new trainers are worried about charging too much for personal training. Free workouts are available all over the internet, after all! But what they don’t realize is that people need more than just a workout. They need a professional to give guidance, education, to check their form, to sub out an exercise when something doesn’t feel quite right, to motivate, inspire, to give permission and for someone to listen to them and care about them. That’s what they’re paying for, so don’t undervalue yourself.

Tara, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Hi! My name is Tara De Leon and I’m a personal trainer. I help people feel badass and confident by teaching them to lift heavy weights. I decided to become a personal trainer way back in 2003. I was in college and took a class that inspired me and set me on this path. I became a personal trainer and then went into collegiate strength and conditioning, The pay was brutal and being a woman made it especially challenging. (Not because the athletes didn’t respect me, but because the people doing the hiring still thought that a woman couldn’t possibly be successful in a profession that was based on teaching athletes how to be strong and awesome.) So I became a college professor of health, fitness and exercise studies and then decided to come back to my roots as a personal trainer.

I currently work as the Personal Training Director at Edgewater Fitness and I love what I do! I get to help people find their health and feel good every day. I help them improve their quality of life and learn to tune out the diet culture noise that is all around us. I have been in the fitness industry for 20 years and the last five have been at this gym. I love what I do so much (I mean, who wouldn’t want to wear tennis shoes and leggings every day, right?) that I have started helping other trainers excel in their careers. This industry has 80-90% of people who start working as a trainer quit in their first year. This is terrible for everyone, including the clients, so I now speak at conferences to help teach trainers how to be more successful.

Part of my specialty as a personal trainer is a program I call Fertility Fit. I have PCOS and struggled for 5 years to get pregnant. I finally did and have a healthy 3 year old son, who is both the love of my life and the reason I’m exhausted. During this journey I studied everything I could get my hands on to help me get pregnant and eventually realized that fitness could be totally helpful. So I launched my program with me as the experimental group and with the help of fertility treatments, I got pregnant and had a healthy pregnancy. Now I work with women who are trying to get pregnant to help prep their body for pregnancy and beyond.

I had my son during Covid, so my prenatal and postpartum care was very much not what it should have been. Support and resources were limited, but we did the best we could, often putting myself last. On the morning of Maverick’s first birthday, I had been running around getting things ready for his party. I looked down in the shower and realized I couldn’t even remember the last time I shaved my legs. I thought to myself, “girl, your child is a year old, you have got to get it together!” So I decided to write a book! It’s called “Hot Mess to Hot Mom: Transformational Tools for thriving after childbirth and beyond!” This book is going to be exactly what I needed back then and will hopefully be an epic resource for new moms, and honestly, for most women. It isn’t out yet, but should release in April 2024.

I still work with many other types of clients. Men and women, young or aging, with all different goals. It doesn’t matter to me, I love the variety and helping as many people as possible. I’ll always have a soft spot for women with fertility issues, but I think people are fascinating and I love learning from everyone. To help me help more people, I have expanded my offerings to include online personal training and I have clients all over the world.

I also have my own podcast. One of my clients is a dietician and intuitive eating counselor and asked if I would want to create a podcast with her, and in true Tara fashion, I jumped in with both feet. We added a mental health therapist to the mix and wellness rebranded was born. We talk about ditching diet culture, hustle culture and what is actually self care- and what isn’t. We have over 50 episodes and are in the top 2% of all podcasts worldwide!

When it comes to fitness, I love helping others and thrive on watching others achieve their goals!

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

There’s a saying in fitness: “success is doing a great job and making sure everyone knows about it.” I had been doing a great job for years, decades even. But I was too humble. I didn’t like tooting my own horn and I still struggle with this. However, I realized that when I started even just being a bit more open about what I was doing in my career, more opportunities came my way. I also discovered that the phrasing of how you “make sure everyone knows about it” is crucial. Nobody wants to hear a trainer say “oh, because of me, my client lost xx pounds” or “I helped my client hit a PR on her deadlift.” But hearing a trainer say something like “I am so proud of all the hard work my client has been putting in! Because we have been deadlifting so frequently, she can now easily pick up her grandchild and is the best Grammie ever!” So be sure to not hide yourself.

I also found that it is helpful to start writing. Contributing to industry journals has been a great career enhancer for me. I started speaking at conferences or presenting at conventions. As much as most of us hate using social media for our business, using Facebook groups has been essential for my success. Most areas have a moms group (or five) and community groups. I joined those groups and typically they will let you post an advertisement on the 1st of the month. Doing that helped get my name out there and now when people ask for personal trainer recommendations, I am always tagged multiple times. Even if the original poster doesn’t reach out, a few other people do. Then it’s my job to give them an awesome enough experience so that next month when someone asks for a recommendation, or if I post my ad on the 1st of the month, they shout me out then too.

Crafting this reputation in my area has been essential to my success. With a great reputation comes great opportunities!

Training and knowledge matter of course, but beyond that what do you think matters most in terms of succeeding in your field?

Other than knowledge, being a people person is so crucial! I am an introvert and I can be shy. I love people, but I crave that alone time and being around people all day can be draining. But, I recognized a long time ago that in order to be successful as a personal trainer (or probably in any customer service or sales position) I must put on my friendly, happy face, and interact with everyone. It was so so hard for me to do that in the beginning. I thought that nobody would want to talk to me or have their workout interrupted so that I could say hi. I would set little goals for myself, like “go say hi to five people in the next 10 minutes and then you can go to your office for a minute.” It was challenging, but eventually I met so many people that it didn’t feel like I was imposing on them, I was just greeting friends at that point. Then people would introduce me to people they knew and it wasn’t such a struggle. It feels much better and authentic to me now. Becoming “the mayor of my gym” has been extremely helpful in my career and it isn’t anything that school or certifications could have prepared me for.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @Tara_De_Leon_Fitness
• Facebook: @TaraDeLeonFitness
• Other: Podcast: Wellness Rebranded https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wellness-rebranded-intuitive-eating-diet-culture-food/id1651744916

Image Credits
Maureen Porto Studios